Cardiac surgeons are rock stars of the medical world. They're able to save patients given up for dead, literally grasping life and death in the palm of their hand. British surgeon and artificial heart pioneer Stephen Westaby's Open Heart is a thrilling memoir of some of his most challenging cases--both extraordinary successes and tragic failures. He passionately advocates for advances in technology that will extend the lives of many patients, short of a heart transplant.
Each case is more astonishing than the next. He describes high-risk surgery for an aortic stenosis that threatened to cost a pregnant woman both her life and that of her unborn child. He also recounts how pure chance allowed him to save a heart attack victim in cardiogenic shock from certain death. But for all the compassion Westaby demonstrates for desperate adults in the end stage of heart failure or struggling infants in surgery for complex congenital anomalies, he understands the need to maintain the "psychology of detachment" that enables him to keep a cool head and a steady hand in the operating theater.
Westaby's prose is clipped and direct, as if he dictated these reminiscences with the adrenaline rush of a challenging surgery still pulsing through him. As he approaches age 70, the physically and emotionally demanding surgical career that took him "everywhere from Tehran to Toronto" has ended, not because of any loss of nerve, but instead by impairment from overuse of his ability to grasp surgical instruments. In his long surgical tenure, he's left behind an impressive legacy, one that transcends the gratitude of the patients whose lives were saved by his talent. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance revieweropen