By Roger Hajjar

The golden age of innovation in cardiac surgery was marked by unprecedented medical risks, a high level of academic competition and the determination of key personalities who dared to test the boundaries of healing the human heart. With the sixtieth anniversary of the first open heart surgery under hypothermia upon us, the book Open Heart provides a chronological map of the last 70 years in cardiac surgery, with an emphasis on the field’s leading surgeons and their quests to cure diseases that were, at the time, considered incurable.

Through firsthand interviews with the field’s pioneers, the story of cardiac surgery is told from an immediate and personal point of view. This adds an intriguing dimension to what would otherwise be a history of medical successes. The writer of Open Heart, David Cooper, was a surgical trainee during the time when breakthroughs in cardiac surgery were taking place, and he knew many of the pioneers first hand. Cooper’s detailing of the rivalries, risks and dramas that peppered the rise of cardiac surgery allow the reader to be privy to the deeper tumults and personalities that fueled an uncommonly fruitful time in medicine. Although the details make a compelling story in most cases, at times Cooper gets lost in a game of ‘he said, she said’ and therefore muddles the reader’s overall understanding of key achievements.

It is interesting to consider the role of rivalry as a motivator in scientific research, and Open Heart, without necessarily intending to, illuminates the crucial role of competition as a catalyst in solving surgical challenges and specific disease states. The back stories the author reveals about the development of surgical correction for certain congenital heart diseases and the initial attempts at relieving mitral stenosis (narrowing of the orifice of the mitral valve of the heart) exemplify how racing to the ticking of a competitor’s clock may be frustrating but efficient.

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Roger Hajjar is a cardiologist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.