The Man Who Touched His Own Heart: True Tales of Science, Surgery, and Mystery

Dunn, Rob

ISBN 10: 0316225797 / ISBN 13: 9780316225793

Published by Little Brown and Company, 2015

About this Item

Pages are clean and are not marred by notes or folds of any kind. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less.

Seller Inventory # G0316225797I2N00

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Man Who Touched His Own Heart: True Tales of Science, Surgery, and Mystery
• Publisher: Little Brown and Company
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0316225797
• ISBN 13: 9780316225793
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
• Weight: 1.39 pounds

About this title

Synopsis

The secret history of our most vital organ: the human heart.

The Man Who Touched His Own Heart tells the raucous, gory, mesmerizing story of the heart, from the first "explorers" who dug up cadavers and plumbed their hearts' chambers, through the first heart surgeries -- which had to be completed in three minutes before death arrived -- to heart transplants and the latest medical efforts to prolong our hearts' lives, almost defying nature in the process.

Thought of as the seat of our soul, then as a mysteriously animated object, the heart is still more a mystery than it is understood. Why do most animals only get one billion beats? (And how did modern humans get to over two billion, effectively letting us live out two lives?) Why are sufferers of gingivitis more likely to have heart attacks? Why do we often undergo expensive procedures when cheaper ones are just as effective? What do Da Vinci, Mary Shelley, and contemporary Egyptian archaeologists have in common? And what does it really feel like to touch your own heart, or to have someone else's beating inside your chest? Rob Dunn's fascinating history of our hearts brings us deep inside the science, history, and stories of the four chambers we depend on most.

About the Author

Rob Dunn is a professor in the Department of Applied Ecology at North Carolina State University and in the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of The Man Who Touched His Own Heart, The Wild Life of Our Bodies, and Every Living Thing, and his magazine work is published widely, including in National Geographic, Natural History, New Scientist, Scientific American, and Smithsonian. He has a PhD from the University of Connecticut and was a Fulbright Fellow. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.