King of Hearts: The True Story of the Maverick Who Pioneered Open Heart Surgery
- Book Review,
by G. Wayne Miller
Amazon.com
The surgeon-as-rock-star mystique seems like it must have come straight out of Hollywood, but the myth had to begin more concretely. A good candidate is Minnesota's Dr. Walt Lillehei, the hard-working, hard-playing father of open-heart surgery, whose life is told in garish color in King of Hearts by journalist G. Wayne Miller. From his early brilliance, recovery from deadly lymphatic cancer, and dramatic repair of seemingly hopeless heart cases to the disintegration of his career at its peak thanks to an army of personal enemies and conviction on tax evasion counts, his story is consistently surprising and engaging. Fast cars, hard drinking, and plenty of women filled his time when he wasn't turning lives around with a few strokes of his scalpel, and the reader will find the surgeon's actions almost unbelievable--rarely endearing, but occasionally saintly. Combining this melodramatic biography with the fascinating story of the struggle for open-heart surgery, considered impossible little more than a generation ago, Miller makes a compelling case that the daring scientist was simply another side of the arrogant, absent-minded playboy. No ordinary biography, King of Hearts is breathless reading--you'll find yourself surfacing every few chapters to remind yourself its nonfiction. --Rob Lightner
From Publishers Weekly
Open-heart surgery is now almost routine in the United States, but just a few decades ago the idea of repairing cardiac defects by cutting into a living human heart was almost unthinkable. Yet thanks to the efforts of a talented few who refused to believe it couldn't be done, open-heart surgery became a reality in the 1950s. Chief among its pioneers was the intense and flamboyant Minnesota surgeon Dr. C. Walton Lillehei, whose story Miller tells here in thriller style. Miller, a staff writer for the Providence Journal, re-creates the anxieties and excitement of an era poised on the brink of astonishing technological advances but stymied by a disease that killed more than 625,000 Americans annually. Lillehei was convinced that open-heart surgery was the answer--but how to divert blood from the heart and still keep the patient alive? Lillehei's first attempts, in 1954, used a complex and risky donor-patient blood exchange. Several of his first patients died; behind his back, nurses began calling him "murderer." By 1955, however, Lillehei and his colleague Richard DeWall perfected a simplified heart-lung machine made with beer hose and plastic tubing ("a high school science fair project was more complex," Miller observes) that finally allowed Lillehei to achieve his dream of "bringing advanced open-heart surgery to the masses." Lillehei's innovations revolutionized cardiac surgery; many believed he would win a Nobel prize. Instead, the surgeon was disgraced when he was found guilty of tax fraud in 1973. Miller's fast-paced and scrupulously researched account reveals both the exhilaration and the tragedy of Lillehei's story. Agent, Kay McCaulay, Pimlico Agency. (Feb.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This is a powerful account of the development of surgical techniques for repairing the human heart, operations long thought impossible. Miller, an award-winning writer for the Providence Journal, focuses on C. Walton Lillehei of the University of Minnesota, a driven and iconoclastic surgeon determined to provide hope for children whose congenital heart defects doomed them to disability and early death. The wrenching stories of these children, the sacrifices of their parents, and researchers' incredible experimental efforts to divert blood from damaged hearts using dog hearts or the living bodies of donors make for riveting reading. Lillehei's heart-lung machine and other innovations that followed make possible the almost one million coronary bypass and open-heart surgeries now performed each year. Highly recommended for all readers, particularly those who owe their lives to Lillehei's path-breaking research.-Kathleen Arsenault, Univ. of South Florida at St. Petersburg Lib. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Boston Globe, May 12, 2000
"Miller skillfully describes the years of research that finally led Lillehei to his first cross-circulation operation on a human... a sturdy telling.''
From Booklist
Miller calls himself "one lucky writer," and anyone who picks up his informative and enjoyable biography of pioneering heart surgeon C. Walton Lillehei can become one lucky reader. Lillehei was one of the best and one of the worst personalities in an aggressive field of medicine. His desire to become the best heart surgeon around led him directly or indirectly from trial-and-error beginnings to cross circulation (the only operation that had the possibility of 200 percent mortality) to heart-lung machines to pacemakers and creative approaches to the surgery itself. Despite Lillehei's eminence, this is no hagiography of him. Were he still alive, he would recognize and regret as well as be pleased with how Miller portrays him. What's more, in the course of presenting his main subject, Miller also vividly depicts Lillehei's mentor and ardent supporter Owen Wangensteen, chief surgeon in the University of Minnesota's excellent cardiac program. Well documented and intriguingly annotated, this book deserves its place in a wide variety of libraries. William Beatty
From Kirkus Reviews
An unflinching, blood-and-guts look at the science and despair of modern open-heart surgery, framed by a biography of a giant in the field, Dr. C. Walton Lillehei. Surgeons may grumble when Providence Journal reporter Miller (The Work of Human Hands, 1992, etc.) singles out Lillehei, the charismatic showboat who died of pneumonia in July 1999, as the 20th century's most important cardiologist. But Lillehei's laboratory research, his co-development of the pacemaker and an inexpensive heart-lung machine, and his damn-the-torpedoes persistence when so many of his patients (the majority of them children born with defective hearts) died have changed what began as the medical equivalent of a shot in the dark into a relatively safe surgical practice that has extended the lives of millions. The son of a dentist of Norwegian ancestry, Lillehei, a rugged overachiever, flunked high school chemistry but still entered the University of Minnesota at age 16 and graduated tenth in his medical school class. A hard-drinking, bed-hopping spendthrift who hated paperwork, Lillehei served in a WWII MASH unit in Africa and Europe, then assisted in the research lab of his mentor, Dr. Owen Wangensteen at the University Hospital, where Lillehei himself went under Wangensteen's knife for lymph cancer. After recovering, Lillehei did cardiac research on dogs, developing surgical techniques for what were considered inoperable heart defects at a time when cardiology was so primitive that some surgeons thought poking their fingers blindly through blocked valves would do the trick. Beginning with his first open heart operation in 1954, Lillehei became America's most famous heart surgeon, only to retire in ignominy in 1973 after he was convicted of income tax evasion. With the medical profession under financial and ethical siege, Miller's breathless suspenseful reminder of the life-and-death-but-mostly-death drama of medical research, as well as the pathological risk-takers that drive it forward, could not have come at a more opportune time. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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