Please note this event has passed.
Join us at The Bakken Museum for a book club unlike any other. We will spend four Wednesday evenings diving into Sandeep Jauhar’s Heart: A History. Engage with concepts discussed in the literature through rare books and artifacts presented by The Bakken Museum’s curators.
A paperback copy of the book is included in the cost of registration and is available to pick up at The Bakken Museum. We will discuss the Prologue and Part 1 (through page 48) during the first meeting on Wednesday, April 5.
DATES: Four Wednesdays, April 5, 12, 19, 26
TIME: 4-5:30 p.m.
LOCATION: The Bakken Museum
COST: $40 Per Person, $35 for Bakken Members
To receive the Bakken Member discount, select sign in or create an account by choosing Sign In on the registration page. Learn about becoming a Bakken Member.
ABOUT THE BOOK
For centuries, the human heart seemed beyond our understanding: an inscrutable shuddering mass that was somehow the driver of emotion and the seat of the soul. As the cardiologist and bestselling author Sandeep Jauhar shows in Heart: A History, it was only recently that we demolished age-old taboos and devised the transformative procedures that have changed the way we live.
Deftly alternating between key historical episodes and his own work, Jauhar tells the colorful and little-known story of the doctors who risked their careers and the patients who risked their lives to know and heal our most vital organ. He introduces us to Daniel Hale Williams, the African American doctor who performed the world’s first open heart surgery in Gilded Age Chicago. We meet C. Walton Lillehei, who connected a patient’s circulatory system to a healthy donor’s, paving the way for the heart-lung machine. And we encounter Wilson Greatbatch, who saved millions by inventing the pacemaker—by accident. Jauhar deftly braids these tales of discovery, hubris, and sorrow with moving accounts of his family’s history of heart ailments and the patients he’s treated over many years. He also confronts the limits of medical technology, arguing that future progress will depend more on how we choose to live than on the devices we invent. Affecting, engaging, and beautifully written, Heart: A History takes the full measure of the only organ that can move itself. Learn more.