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

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. Rob Dunn, evolutionary biologist and author of 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.