Customer Reviews

Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery

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I was very excited to read Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery because I worked with Dr. Stoney at St. Thomas hospital as a cardiothoracic fellow. I enjoyed my rotation with him not only for what he taught me about surgery, but also for the good stories he would tell while we were operating. In his book, he has blended his talent for a good tale with interviews of nearly every pivotal character in the fascinating sequence of events that led to the development of cardiac surgery. I was struck by the humble beginnings of the physicians interviewed, and inspired by their dedication, tireless work ethic, and inquisitive thinking. By and large, they were self-effacing men who found themselves on the wavefront of an exciting surgical breakthrough.

The book was detailed enough to be interesting to physician or surgeon readers, but clearly written to be understood by readers without medical background. As many of those with first hand experience of the beginnings of cardiac surgery are lost to age and infirmity, Dr. Stoney's work is a timely compilation of a compelling historical adventure.

Dr. Stoney is one of the finest men I have met in my surgical career. Even though the format of Pioneers is a series of interviews of other surgeons, his honesty, integrity, and affable nature are evident throughout the book. I highly recommend to all readers.

I expected this book to be a rather dry and technical account of a medical sub-specialty's history. But in fact it is a readable, entertaining history geared not just to specialists, but to the general reader, containing many inspiring life stories of the "greatest generation" of doctors. I think this book would be very interesting to young doctors who are in training today, whether they plan to be cardiac surgeons or not..

The book begins with a short history of cardiac surgery. This chapter might be useful to students of the history of medicine who don't have time to read every word of the rest of the book, and it is useful to orient the reader to the chapters that follow. There is also a timeline in the front of the book that begins in 1896 with the first successful suture of a stab wound to the heart and ends in 2001 with the first implantable artificial heart.

The rest of the book is divided into chapters, each chapter being the life story of a doctor, told in the first person by the doctor himself. (The stories were based on interviews that the author conducted with the doctors.) Most of these men (and they are all men) were born in the first quarter of the twentieth century, many in small rural towns. Virtually all of them served in World War II, and many learned a great deal about surgery and medicine during the war. These doctors came back from the war and created the new specialty of cardiac surgery.

Much of the book revolves around the achievements of Dr. Alfred Blalock, who died before he could be interviewed for the book. Dr. Blalock did the first blue baby operation, and several of the doctors profiled in this book worked at one time with Dr. Blalock. Some were present in the room when the historic blue baby operation was performed.

Each life story is accompanied by a photograph of the doctor and a very useful bibliography of further reading by and about that doctor's research and achievements. This book could thus serve as a jumping-off point for more in-depth scholarly research into the history of cardiac surgery.

The stories are quite readable and engaging. Some of them are even a bit humorous; for example, it is fun to read Dr. Denton Cooley's account of what it was like to work with Dr. Blalock, who he says was "a whiner." It's interesting to imagine the grand old man of cardiac surgery, Denton Cooley, as a young resident subject to the whims and whining of his mentor Dr. Blalock.

It's also amazing to read about the work ethic of these men. At Johns Hopkins, surgical residents working under Dr. Blalock literally lived at the hospital, sleeping and eating when they could find the time, and usually functioning on little sleep. One doctor talked about being so tired that he fell asleep walking down the hall carrying a urine sample, and woke up only when he crashed into a wall and dropped the sample. One can be thankful that residencies are no longer so grueling, but most of the men who trained this way seem to think that it was a good system, and they didn't particularly resent it.

During the period covered in this book--roughly the nineteen forties through the seventies--cardiac surgery was dominated by white men. None of the doctors profiled in this book are women or African-Americans, although the "short history of cardiac surgery" at the beginning of the book contains the stories of Dr. Helen Taussig and Vivien Thomas, a woman and an African-American man respectively, who played essential roles in the development of the blue baby operation and thus in the development of cardiac surgery as a medical specialty. It is gratifying to reflect on the changes in medicine since then. Many more women and minorities are practicing medicine now. The world of Dr. Blalock and his colleagues seems quite distant and strange, and that is yet another reason that young doctors in training now might find this book interesting. The reader can see not only how the science and technology of medicine has grown and changed, but how medicine has changed sociologically.