Journey into the Heart: A Tale of Pioneering Doctors and Their Race to Transform Cardiovascular Medicine

Journey into the Heart: A Tale of Pioneering Doctors and Their Race to Transform Cardiovascular Medicine

Traces the breakthroughs in cardiovascular medicine throughout the past half century that have enabled life-saving techniques, describing the rise and fall of Nobel Prize-nominee Andreas Gruentzig, a key player in the development of angioplasty technology. If veteran science writer Monagan is out to prove that all medical drama doesn't take place in emergency rooms or hospital stairwells, he has done it. As he recounts the accomplishments of the twentieth century's innovators in cardiovascular medicine, he profiles a handful of players who stand out as personally and professionally remarkable, none more so than charismatic East German refugee Andreas Gruentzig, whose vision and improbable kitchen-table experiments attracted colleagues' ridicule, but whose invention, cardiovascular angioplasty, left him laughing all the way to the bank. His may have been and still may be the most dramatic breakthrough of his day, inspiring as it did a multibillion-dollar medical-device industry and eliminating the risk of open-heart surgery for many, but he stood on the shoulders of others, either predecessors or contemporaries grasping for and achieving the same outcome, triumph over heart disease. Today, thanks to Gruentzig and the likes of Werner Forssmann, Mason Sones, and Charles Dotter, millions are not only cheating death but enjoying longer, better lives. Donna Chavez Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved David Monagan is a leading science writer who has covered advances in cardiovascular medicine for more than 25 years. His journalism has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Psychology Today, Discover Magazine , and Forbes . An esteemed pioneer in his field, David O. Williams, M.D., is the Director of Interventional Cardiology and the Cardiac Catheterization Laboratories at Rhode Island Hospital and Professor of Medicine at Brown University. Used Book in Good Condition