"Born in 1966 with a congenital heart defect known as the Tetralogy of Fallot, Gabriel Brownstein entered the world at a unique moment in the history of heart disease. He received a life-saving surgery at five years old, but surviving with his condition meant riding wave after wave of innovation to keep his heart beating. The Open Heart Club is both a memoir of a life on the edge of mortality and a history of the remarkable people who have made such...

The Invention of Surgery explains this dramatic progress and highlights the personalities of the discipline's most dynamic historical figures. It links together the lives of the pioneering scientists who first understood what causes disease, how organs become infected or cancerous, and how surgery could powerfully intercede in people's lives, and then shows how the rise of surgery intersected with many of the greatest medical breakthroughs of the...

"Surgeon Arnold Van de Laar uses his own experience and expertise to tell this engrossing history of surgery through 28 famous operations - from Louis XIV to JFK, and from Einstein to Houdini. From the story of the desperate man from seventeenth-century Amsterdam who grimly cut a stone out of his own bladder to Bob Marley's deadly toe, Under the Knife offers all kinds of fascinating and unforgettable insights into medicine and history via the operating...