Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Morris, Thomas Neil Gareth
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.thomas-morris.uk/
CITY: London
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LOC Authorities:
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| 670 | __ |a The matter of the heart, 2018: |b ECIP t.p. (Thomas Morris) data view (TV producer and freelance journalist) |
| 670 | __ |a Email received from publisher, October 6, 2017 |b (author’s full name is Thomas Neil Gareth Morris) |
| 670 | __ |a The matter of the heart, 2018: |b t.p. (Thomas Morris) jkt. flap (worked for the BBC for 17 years making programs for Radio 4 and Radio 3; freelance journalist; lives in London) |
PERSONAL
Male.
ADDRESS
CAREER
British Broadcasting Corp., radio producer, c. 1998-2015; freelance journalist, 2015–.
AWARDS:Jerwood Award, Royal Society of Literature and Herwood Foundation, 2015, for The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, from Cricketer to Financial Times to Lancet.
SIDELIGHTS
Thomas Morris spent nearly twenty years as a radio producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). From approximately 2010 to 2015 he produced the talk show In Our Time, which explores a wide range of cultural, philosophical, historical, and scientific topics. Morris had a special interest in technology and science, including medicine. When he left the show in 2015 to begin a new career as a writer, he took his interest in medicine along with him. He spent long hours at the Wellcome Library in London, immersed in dusty archives of medical journals. He emerged with The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations.
Reviewers were quick to point out that Morris has written a much more expansive and entertaining volume than one might infer from the title. He discusses the visionaries and risk-takers whose discoveries made the operations possible, reaching as far back as 1628, when British physician William Harvey realized that the human heart is actually a living pump. Morris also honors the desperate patients who were brave enough to lend their ailing bodies to experiments that all too often killed them, and he acknowledges the role that hapless laboratory animals played in the effort to save human lives. “Much of it makes grisly reading,” observed Gavin Francis in the New Statesman, as the author describes “the many thousands of animals … sacrificed to the development of modern cardiac surgery.”
The primary milestones in this weighty volume include a repair procedure to save the life of an oxygen-starved, so-called “blue baby” as early as 1944. Morris describes the battlefield removal of a bullet from the heart of a soldier in World War II. He highlights the invention of the pacemaker and the heart-lung machine, the development of artificial and mechanical heart valves, coronary artery bypass surgery, cardiac catheterization and stent placement, radiofrequency ablation, and much more.
The lifeblood of these accounts is enriched by the abundance of anecdotes and biographical vignettes. Morris writes of the surgeon who noticed the resemblance of heart valves to a woman’s girdle. He tells of the citizen scientist who deduced, in 1774, that if the heart is a pump that operates by electrical activity within the body, then a failed heart might be restarted by an external electrical shock from what we know today as a defibrillator. He reveals that the developer of the pacemaker was an engineer who would have preferred to be developing a process for pasteurizing beer. “The stories come quickly,” reported Francis in the New Statesman, “fluent, wry, admiring.” Readers learn that Albert Einstein lived for five years with an aneurism wrapped in cellophane to contain it. The cardiopulmonary bypass was imagined by Robert Hooke three centuries before technological innovation made it possible. Although he focuses on “eleven operations,” Morris also discusses the dozens of innovations that paved the way for them, such as the development of the anti-clotting drug heparin.
Morris writes of the superstars of medicine, like Christiaan Barnard, the South African surgeon credited with the first successful human heart transplant. He profiles Lebanese-American surgeon Michael DeBakey, whose many achievements in medicine included his invention of the roller-pump in 1932 that would later enable open-heart surgery and his support of the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) units that saved the lives of American soldiers during the Korean War. Morris identifies the pioneers with the supreme self-confidence and perseverance to surmount enormous obstacles, from a litany of heartbreaking failures to public and moral condemnation to financial ruin, including a few whose motives were more prideful than altruistic. He also names some of the lesser stars whose contributions were vital to the advancement of cardiac surgery, but who remained anonymous until now.
In the last chapter, Morris looks toward the future by exploring research in progress now. He writes of robotic surgery and the potential for drone delivery of time-sensitive replacement organs. He discusses the development of cardiac cells as ink for 3D printers that could someday produce viable artificial hearts and the breeding of genetically modified pigs for hearts that will not be rejected by the human immune system.
Morris also won the hearts of critics. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly noted that Morris “covers a dazzling and dizzying array of procedures and hints at tantalizing prospects for future surprises.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor summarized: “This is a book of learned asides and extensive trivia, but it’s always enfolded in a well-developed narrative with no end of heroes.” Spectator contributor Adrian Woolfson described The Matter of the Heart as “a thoughtful, engaging and rigorous account” that “offers an insight into the nature of scientific discovery, the mindsets of the characters driving it and the ever-present role of luck.” Although Francis acknowledged that, at 400-plus pages, the book “will be too encyclopaedic for some,” the author “has made something unique: a history less of people than of procedures, but lively, enthusiastic and brimming with detail.” Erin Blakemore reported in the Washington Post: “The Matter of the Heart is more than a litany of medical advances–it’s the story of the gritty, bloody and deadly experiences that underlie scientific progress.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, January 1, 2018, Tony Miksanek, Tony , review of The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations, p. 28.
Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 2017, review of The Matter of the Heart.
New Statesman, June 9, 2017, Gavin Francis, review of The Matter of the Heart, p. 42.
Publishers Weekly, November 27, 2017, review of The Matter of the Heart, p. 52.
Spectator, June 17, 2017, Adrian Woolfson, review of The Matter of the Heart, p. 35.
Washington Post, January 16, 2018, Erin Blakemore, review of The Matter of the Heart.
ONLINE
Thomas Morris Website, http://www.thomas-morris-uk (May 12, 2018).
About this blog
I’m a writer based in London. I worked as a radio producer for the BBC for 17 years, making programmes including Front Row, The Film Programme, Open Book and Night Waves – and spent my last five years at Radio 4 as producer of Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time. In early 2015 I left the BBC to write full-time. My journalism has appeared in publications including The Lancet, The Times, the Financial Times and The Cricketer.
I began writing this blog while writing my first book The Matter of the Heart, a popular history of heart surgery, which was published by Bodley Head in June 2017. The book traces the evolution of the discipline from its origins in the late nineteenth century to the present day, and looks at some of the most exciting recent developments in the field. In November 2015 I received an RSL Jerwood Award, presented by the Royal Society of Literature and the Jerwood Foundation to a writer engaged on their first major commissioned work of non-fiction.
Researching that book entailed many hours spent reading early medical journals. These publications are full of extraordinary and often scarcely believable stories, which though irrelevant to the book seemed too good to waste. In my spare time I’ve collected some of the most quirky, bizarre or surprising cases I’ve encountered, all drawn from the pre-twentieth century medical literature. Posts from this blog have appeared on sites including Listverse.com and BBC Future. If you’d like to feature my content or commission me to write something, please contact me here.
Copyright: All effort has been taken to ensure that any text or images reproduced on this site are out of copyright or properly attributed. If you believe that I have unwittingly infringed copyright anywhere please contact me and I will promptly remove the offending item.
Take heart
Adrian Woolfson
Spectator. 334.9851 (June 17, 2017): p35.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations
by Thomas Morris
Bodley Head, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 401
In this magnificent book, Thomas Morris provides us with<< a thoughtful, engaging and rigorous account>> of how cardiac surgeons through history have sought to undo the ravages wrought on the heart and its associated major blood vessels by abnormal genes, imperfect development, bacterial infections such as rheumatic fever, venereal diseases, unhealthy lifestyles and a host of other factors. He also <
It was, indeed, a simple mistake made in 1947 by a young researcher called Arthur Voorhees that led to a chance observation which resulted in the development of the first artificial grafts to replace damaged blood vessels. Having in error placed a silk stitch into the one of the chambers of the heart, he noticed that it became covered with normal heart tissue. This emboldened him to sew a silk handkerchief into a tube and use it to replace a dog's aorta. The makeshift artery functioned for just one hour, but when a year later he was sent a sample of a tough fabric used for the construction of parachutes, he was able to fashion a more robust prototype.
This pioneering work was picked up by the cardiac surgeon Michael DeBakey, who, using his wife's sewing machine, stitched together the first polyester Dacron graft, with which he successfully replaced a patient's diseased lower aorta.
Like the pioneering US air force test pilots of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, Morris's pantheon of surgeons took tremendous risks; not with their lives but their consciences, livelihoods and reputations. Often faced with the vitriolic disapproval of their colleagues, and overshadowed by a catastrophic collection of their own failures, the discoverers of the armatorium of cardiovascular surgical techniques showed remarkable intransigence. Fortunately this bloodymindedness frequently paid off. The results are a triumph both of the human imagination, emotional resilience and supreme self-confidence.
Consistent with their reputation at the time of the first heart transplants as a glamorous club of medical elites, some of the giants of cardiac surgical history weren't driven by altruism so much as by professional rivalry and gargantuan self-belief.
Morris offers a whirlwind tour of the history of cardiovascular surgery viewed through a series of breakthrough operations: from heart valve transplants and the repair of congenital heart defects, to the treatment of coronary heart disease with angioplasty, correction of arrhythmias with cardiac ablation, aortic dissection repair, insertion of pacemakers and the crowning pinnacle of their achievements, heart transplantation, using a machine that mimics the operation of the heart and lungs. It is peppered with vibrant anecdotes as well as biographical accounts of the individuals who made these important contributions.
We learn how the discovery was made that the heart is not just a simple pump, but rather a pumping device controlled by electrical activity; and of the remarkable finding that it may be brought back to life through the external application of electricity, a procedure known today as cardiac defibrillation. The latter resulted, in part, from the work of a certain Mr Squires, a resourceful amateur scientist who on 16 July 1774 appeared at the site where his three-year-old neighbour had fallen from a window onto the street. She having been pronounced dead, he took it upon himself to connect her chest to an electrostatic generator and found that he had managed to bring her back to life.
Seemingly obscure biographical details give pointers to the sources of some of these key discoveries. The surgeon Charles Bailey sold ladies' underwear to fund his way through medical school, and was struck by the similarity between girdles and the mitral valves of the heart. Suspenders offered firm but flexible support to the stockings; much like the chordae tendineae, tough strings of tissue that anchor the valve leaflets to muscles on the inner wall of the heart. These insights led him to develop a new method for treating mitral stenosis, a condition in which this heart valve is thickened and obstructs the flow of blood.
It is unnerving that an organ as vital as the heart can fail in so many different ways; human hearts, although often functioning seamlessly for multiple decades, may all too easily be broken. This is certainly not a book for hypochondriacs. It reminds us, however, that we are not the perfect products of optimal creation.
But as a result of the historic work of the larger-than-life giants of cardiovascular surgery, the repertoire of surgical interventions they invented, and the discovery of drugs such as heparin that prevent blood from clotting, damaged hearts may now be routinely repaired.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Woolfson, Adrian. "Take heart." Spectator, 17 June 2017, p. 35. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A524739439/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=11e2e5df. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A524739439
Pump action: the heart-stopping history of cardiac surgery
Gavin Francis
New Statesman. 146.5370 (June 9, 2017): p42+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
The Matter of the Heart
Thomas Morris
Bodley Head, 432pp. 20 [pounds sterling]
In 1628 William Harvey, the king's physician, published De motu cordis, proving that the heart was not the seat of the soul, but a pump. "The animal's heart is the basis of its life, its chief member, the sun of its microcosm," he wrote in the book's dedication; "on the heart all its activity depends, from the heart all its liveliness and strength arise." Harvey was a skilled and dauntless anatomist (he dissected his own sister and father), unafraid to challenge orthodoxy.
In 1641 he was sent by Charles I to see an 18-year-old nobleman, the eldest son of Viscount Montgomery, rumoured to have a persistent wound through which the lungs could be seen. When Harvey looked into the boy's chest he was astonished to see not the lungs, but the heart: "the apex of the heart! covered over with a layer of fungous flesh". He poked in "three of my fingers and my thumb", becoming the first person on record to handle a living human heart. He promptly took the boy to see the king. "And his most excellent Majesty, as well as myself, acknowledged that the heart was without the sense of touch; for the youth never knew when we touched his heart ..." As a medical student watching cardiac surgeons at work, I had a glimpse of Harvey's wonder. That the heart, the source of "all ... liveliness and strength", could be exposed, stopped, manipulated, replumbed and restarted seems among the most astounding of modern medicine's marvels.
Thomas Morris has written not a history of medical ideas about the heart, but a history of heart surgery. He nods to Aristotle, to Pliny, even to the French Renaissance surgeon Ambroise Pare, but it is with Harvey and his inquisitive sovereign that The Matter of the Heart really begins. "Here was clear evidence that the organ could be handled without danger," Morris observes, "yet strangely this knowledge had already faded from view two centuries later."
Occasionally through the 18th and 19th centuries, individuals survived stab wounds to the heart. Surgeons in the city of Rome became adept at speed-suturing heart muscle after dagger wounds (owing, Morris writes, quoting a contemporary, to "the terrible frequency with which the dagger is resorted to in this country in the quarrels of the lower orders"). During the Second World War Dwight Harken, a US surgeon based at a military hospital in Gloucestershire, perfected the technique of removing shrapnel and bullets from the heart, performing 134 operations on soldiers without a single death.
In an early chapter Morris discusses how surgeons have approached cardiac malformations. The heart forms in the first days of embryonic life from two tubes that coalesce and then coil themselves into a steadily thickening knot. When the process falters the result can be a heart that mingles bluish, deoxygenated blood from the body's circulation with red, oxygenated blood from the lungs. This makes for an inefficient pump, which is exhausting for the child; untreated, it can also lead to heart failure and death. The author tells the absorbing story of Alfred Blalock, Helen Taussig (one of the few women in this story) and Vivien Thomas, who, collaborating at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, developed the first procedure to give "blue babies" a better mix of oxygenated blood. He also writes of Robert E Gross, who in Boston in 1938 pioneered a procedure by which surgeons tie off a "patent ductus arteriosus". (If the heart knots itself into position, a patent ductus can be imagined as a thread left untied.)
<
To operate on the heart, it is necessary to terminate its beating for a while, but to do this, ways had to be found to support the circulation. The 17th-century polymath Robert Hooke was first to suggest that such a "cardiopulmonary bypass" might be possible, and in the 1950s it became a reality. Before bypass machines were refined, children undergoing surgery sometimes had their hearts plumbed into their mother's or father's circulation, the parent's heart beating for both throughout the procedure. This didn't catch on, being "the only procedure with a potential mortality of 200 per cent".
The Matter of the Heart is being published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Christiaan Barnard's infamous first transplantation of the human heart. <
Cardiac transplantation takes up just one chapter among 11. Scores of innovations have found their way into this book. It explains the origins of artificial valves, both of pig tissue and of metal; the invention and development of pacemakers (powered by batteries and by plutonium), as well as the origins of bypass grafting, aneurysm coiling and coronary stenting. Morris seems anxious not to leave anything out, and the result <
When I was in medical school, I was as stunned as William Harvey to see an exposed beating heart: "that, in a man alive and well, he might, without detriment to the individual, observe the movement of the heart". Now Morris tells me there's a Perspex box called the Organ Care System, which keeps the heart warm, perfused and pumping artificial blood for up to eight hours in transit. The final chapter of The Matter of the Heart explores innovations yet to come: farms breeding genetically modified pigs, their hearts rendered acceptable to the human immune system, or 3D printers that use cardiac cells for ink. In the end matter, the author thanks his partner for putting up with years of his "boring surgical anecdotes". But "anecdote" doesn't do them justice, and I would like to reassure Morris and the many readers who will enjoy this book: these stories are anything but boring.
Gavin Francis's book on human transformation, "The Shapeshifters", will be published next spring by Profile
Caption: "I'm sorry, he's curating his Fitbit data just now. Could he get back to you?"
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Francis, Gavin. "Pump action: the heart-stopping history of cardiac surgery." New Statesman, 9 June 2017, p. 42+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498945577/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c5b4b8f9. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A498945577
Book describes how 'impossible men' dared to explore an off-limits part of the human body
Erin Blakemore
The Washington Post. (Jan. 16, 2018): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Erin Blakemore
'The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations'
by Thomas Morris
In an age of bypasses, stents and artificial valves, it's hard to believe that the beating heart was once unexplored territory. Yet until the late 19th century, it was considered off-limits - hard to reach and subject to superstition and fear.
Even in the 20th century, it would take decades - and plenty of courage and creativity - for heart surgery to become common.
In "The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations." reporter and former BBC producer Thomas Morris explains why. He tells the story of 11 procedures that changed cardiac surgery forever and the tales of the surgeons who dared to do them.
Morris takes readers on a tour of operating theaters, such as the metal shack in which Dwight Harken, a U.S. Army surgeon posted in Britain, removed bullets and shrapnel from 134 soldiers' beating hearts without a single fatality in 1945. There's the Swedish hospital where, in 1958, Rune Elmqvist implanted the first pacemaker, and the South African operating room where Christiaan Barnard performed the first successful human-to-human heart transplant.
The stars of Morris' story are what he calls "impossible men." (Women were largely excluded from cardiology until the late 20th century.) Without the outsize egos and powerful convictions of those pioneering cardiac surgeons, he suggests, we'd still consider the heart off-limits.
He doesn't forget the other side of the story, either: The patients, nurses and researchers who supported and enabled those tremendous leaps of faith.
Because of that rich cast of characters, <<"The Matter of the Heart" is more than a litany of medical advances - it's the story of the gritty, bloody and deadly experiences that underlie scientific progress.>>
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Blakemore, Erin. "Book describes how 'impossible men' dared to explore an off-limits part of the human body." Washington Post, 16 Jan. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A523263202/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=20659d2c. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A523263202
The Matter of the Heart: A History of the
Heart in Eleven Operations
Tony Miksanek
Booklist.
114.9-10 (Jan. 1, 2018): p28.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations.
By Thomas Morris.
Jan. 2018.368p. illus. St. Martin's/Thomas Dunne, $26.99 (9781250117168); e-book (9781250117175).
617.09.
More than one million open-heart operations are done annually across the world. About 250,000 Americans
receive a cardiac pacemaker every year. But the "heroes" in the stories of such spectacular success and
ubiquity of cardiac procedures are not just the bold, relentless, and sometimes egotistical surgeons and
cardiologists but also the many patients who initially agreed to the essentially experimental operations and
the countless laboratory animals that were sacrificed. Some of the groundbreaking developments chronicled
in this book include techniques to correct congenital heart abnormalities, defibrillators, pacemakers, the
creation of the heart-lung machine that provides temporary artificial circulation, bioprosthetic and
mechanical heart valves, aortic aneurysm repair, cardiac catheterization with angioplasty and stent
placement, coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery, the first heart transplant in 1967, radiofrequency
ablation to treat arrhythmias, and artificial hearts. Some of the characters are legendary: Christian Barnard,
Denton Cooley, Michael DeBakey, Robert Jarvik. Expanding treatment options and the allure of being "the
first" drove many of these medical pioneers. For their patients, however, it was almost always a choice born
of desperation. A fascinating history.--Tony Miksanek
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Miksanek, Tony. "The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations." Booklist, 1 Jan.
2018, p. 28. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525185523/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e5eb79db. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525185523
4/23/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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The Matter of the Heart: A History of the
Heart in Eleven Operations
Publishers Weekly.
264.48 (Nov. 27, 2017): p52.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in
Eleven Operations
Thomas Morris. St. Martin's/Dunne, $26.99
(432p) ISBN 978-1-250-11716-8
Morris, a British journalist and former TV producer, dissects 11 landmark heart operations in this extensive
and well-constructed history of cardiac surgery. Throughout, he pays tribute to doctors with "talent and
imagination, and a determination to do better for their patients." Morris opens with an anecdote from a
study that asked whether surgeons were psychopaths, finding them scoring high on "Machiavellian
egocentricity." "We're all psychopaths," one unnamed surgeon laughingly tells the author. But Morris finds
much more than ego and showmanship as he surveys the field, encountering false starts, dead ends,
interpersonal rivalries, and deception. Among the remarkable achievements Morris relates are the means to
repair deadly congenital heart deformities; the invention of pacemakers, defibrillators, the heart-lung
machine (which made open-heart surgery possible), and artificial-heart devices; the creation of heart bypass
surgery, heart transplantation, and methods of stenting; and the development of radiofrequency ablation to
cure arrhythmias. Covering more than a century of advancement, he notes that the breakthroughs were
usually ones "nobody saw coming." Morris's expert guided tour of cardiac surgery and its quirky, brilliant
innovators<< covers a dazzling and dizzying array of procedures and hints at tantalizing prospects for future
surprises.>> (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations." Publishers Weekly, 27 Nov. 2017,
p. 52. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517575699/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5ae9e30a. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517575699
4/23/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Morris, Thomas: THE MATTER OF
THE HEART
Kirkus Reviews.
(Nov. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Morris, Thomas THE MATTER OF THE HEART Dunne/St. Martin's (Adult Nonfiction) $26.99 1, 16
ISBN: 978-1-250-11716-8
Morris looks at some of the great moments in cardiology and our understanding of how the heart muscle
works.
World War I was nobody's idea of fun, but the horrific wounds produced by shrapnel, machine guns, gas,
and other lethal agents gave doctors plenty of opportunities to study novel cases of suffering. In the case of
cardiac surgery, writes the author, doctors reviewing the literature of the French battlefields discovered that
23 of 26 patients survived operations. That number, which would be impressive even by modern-day
standards, was the result of innovations such as X-rays, whose discoverer "found that they could be used to
visualize the internal structures of the human body" and which doctors found could be used to locate
bullets, metal shards, and other foreign bodies. From this, heart-related surgery advanced rapidly. Morris'
case studies, 11 major ones in all, range across significant achievements such as the understanding of why
"blue babies" were born and the resulting effort to close off defective blood vessels (the hero of which
suffered from a staggering visual impairment that was not medically treated until long after he retired from
medicine); the development of heparin, the drug that made heart surgery possible in the first place but
whose discoverer "died in obscurity" (until now, at any rate); and the development of the pacemaker by an
engineer who, left to his own wishes, would have worked on ways to pasteurize beer instead. <
technical problems to overcome.
Just the thing for aspiring heart surgeons, who may one day soon be 3-D printing new hearts that will be
"dispatched in drones to wherever they are needed."
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Morris, Thomas: THE MATTER OF THE HEART." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A512028680/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7dbcdacf.
Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A512028680