Sandeep Jauhar

Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Sandeep Jauhar, M.D., Ph.D., is the director of the Heart Failure Program at Long Island Jewish Medical Center. He is the author of Heart, Doctored, and Intern and writes regularly for the New York Times. He earned his Ph.D. in experimental physics at U.C. Berkeley before going on to study medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. He lives with his wife and their son and daughter on Long Island.

MFOB FEATURED BOOK: Heart: A History (Coming September 18, 2018)

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.

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