Narrator: As a cardiologist and a first responder at Ground Zero on 9/11, Dr. Sandeep Jauhar was no stranger to the fragility of life. Yet, nothing prepared him for his own brush with mortality. Years after the attacks, suffering from shortness of breath, he underwent a CT scan. The scan was meant to check his lungs, but the report came back with an unnerving, incidental finding: "Coronary artery calcifications are noted." These were markers of plaque in the arteries of his heart. Suddenly, the spam emails he’d always ignored—"Make sure Dad is not... a ticking time bomb"—felt terrifyingly personal. A more advanced scan confirmed his fears, revealing significant blockages. Staring at the images in a dark room, Jauhar, a doctor who treated dying hearts for a living, felt he was getting a glimpse of how he was probably going to die.

This personal crisis launched him on a journey to understand the organ he thought he knew so well. In his book, Heart: A History, Jauhar unravels the story of the human heart, not just as a biological pump, but as a vessel of metaphor, a marvel of engineering, and a profound mystery that continues to connect our physical and emotional lives in ways we are only beginning to comprehend.

Narrator: For millennia, the heart was understood not through science, but through metaphor. It was the seat of the soul, courage, and love. This ancient view clashes with the modern, mechanical one, yet the line between them is blurrier than we think. Jauhar illustrates this with the story of his own paternal grandfather in 1953 India. After being bitten by a snake, his grandfather felt fine, looking forward to taking his son to a college interview. But when neighbors brought the dead cobra into the house for him to see, he turned pale, whispered, "How can I survive this?" and collapsed. The doctor’s diagnosis was not snake venom, but a massive heart attack, likely triggered by pure fright. His emotional heart had broken his physical one.

This phenomenon, once dismissed as folklore, is now a recognized medical condition: takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or "broken-heart syndrome." It’s a stunning, real-world example of how extreme emotional stress—from grief, fear, or even shock—can physically stun the heart muscle, causing it to weaken and fail. The book shows that the metaphorical and the biological are not separate entities. The enduring belief that emotions reside in the heart is so powerful that when Barney Clark received the first permanent artificial heart in 1982, his wife’s first, tearful question to the surgeons was not about his recovery, but, "Will he still be able to love me?"

Narrator: For centuries, the heart was considered untouchable. The Roman physician Galen declared it the only organ that could not withstand injury, and this belief held for nearly two thousand years. To cut into the heart was seen as surgical madness. But in 1893, this dogma began to crumble. In Chicago, a young man named James Cornish was stabbed in the chest during a saloon brawl and brought to Provident Hospital. The surgeon on duty, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, made a decision that was nothing short of audacious. He opened Cornish’s chest, found the wound in the pericardium—the sac around the heart—and sutured it shut. Cornish survived, and Williams’s operation became a landmark achievement, proving the heart was not beyond repair.

This was just the beginning. The true revolution came with the invention of the heart-lung machine, a device that could take over the heart’s function, allowing surgeons to stop it, open it, and perform intricate repairs. The book details the decades-long, painstaking work of Dr. John Gibbon, who, after witnessing a patient die from a lung clot, dedicated his life to building this machine. His success in the 1950s transformed cardiology from a field of diagnosis and despair into one of action and hope, turning the once-sacred heart into a complex but ultimately repairable machine.

Narrator: Beyond its function as a pump, the heart is also an electrical dynamo, generating its own impulses to beat in a steady rhythm. But sometimes, this electrical system goes haywire. A rogue signal can create a chaotic, quivering state known as ventricular fibrillation, where the heart stops pumping blood, leading to sudden death. For a long time, this was an untreatable event. The book recounts the tragic story of George Mines, a young physiologist in the early 20th century who theorized about a "vulnerable period" in the heart's cycle where a shock could trigger this chaos. Tragically, he proved his theory correct by experimenting on himself and dying in his lab at the age of 28.

It took another brilliant and driven mind, haunted by personal loss, to tame this electrical ghost. In the 1960s, cardiologist Michel Mirowski watched his friend and mentor die from ventricular fibrillation. The experience ignited a relentless quest to create a device that could be implanted in the body to automatically detect and shock the heart back into a normal rhythm. Facing immense skepticism from the medical community, Mirowski, along with a small team, persevered. In 1980, the first implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) was successfully placed in a human. Mirowski’s invention has since saved hundreds of thousands of lives, turning a fatal event into a manageable condition.

Narrator: The invention of the ICD was a triumph of medical engineering, but it also revealed a deeper, more complex mystery about the heart. The device that grants life can also become a source of profound psychological trauma. Jauhar introduces us to Lorraine Flood, a woman whose life was saved by her defibrillator, but who came to live in constant terror of it. The shocks, she described, were not a "little something" as doctors had told her, but felt like a donkey kicking her in the chest with full force. She developed a Pavlovian fear of places where she’d been shocked, like her shower, and began to pray every morning, "Please, no shocks today."

Her story reveals the vicious cycle at the core of the mind-heart connection. The fear of a shock can itself trigger arrhythmias, which in turn trigger more shocks, creating a feedback loop of anxiety and pain. This brings Jauhar’s exploration full circle. After centuries of separating the heart’s metaphorical and mechanical functions, modern medicine is being forced to confront their powerful interaction. The book shows that the state of the brain directly affects the heart, and the state of the heart, in turn, affects the brain. Treating one without considering the other is no longer enough.

Narrator: Heart: A History masterfully demonstrates that our relationship with the heart has always been a story of dueling perspectives: the heart of emotion versus the heart of mechanics. The book's most critical takeaway is that this is a false dichotomy. The emotional heart and the physical heart are one and the same, inextricably linked in a delicate dance of physiology and psychology. From an ancestor dying of fright to a modern patient traumatized by a life-saving device, the evidence is clear that our feelings, stresses, and social connections are not peripheral to our health—they are central to it.

The book leaves us with a profound challenge. As medical technology reaches the limits of what it can do to fix the heart as a machine, perhaps the next great frontier in cardiology lies not in a new device or procedure, but in rediscovering the heart’s ancient, emotional life. It forces us to ask: Are we caring for our own hearts not just with diet and exercise, but with the attention, compassion, and connection they truly need to thrive?