6. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 101, 88.
Chapter 11
1. On Eustachi and Fallopia, see Porter, The Greatest Benefit, 182–183. For a longer description of Colombo and the clitoris, see David Stringer and Inés Becker, “Colombo and the Clitoris,” European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Reproductive Biology 151, no. 2 (August 2010): 130–133. On anatomy before Vesalius, see Wright, William Harvey, 36. On Vesalius, including the sentence quoted, see Porter, The Greatest Benefit, 177–180.
2. C. D. O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 1514–1564 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964): medical students, 40; plague dead, 59; “observing the body,” 64 (originally Fabrica [1543]).
3. “There is no truth,” in O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 99.
4. “Greatly driven to wonder,” in Porter, The Greatest Benefit, 180; “In considering the structure of the heart,” in Wright, William Harvey, 39.
5. “between the ventricles of the heart,” in Wright, William Harvey, 110.
6. “display the glory” and “teachers, tailors,” in Wright, William Harvey, 61; description of Fabricus’s dissections from Wright, William Harvey, 65–68.
7. My discussion of Harvey is drawn largely from Wright, William Harvey, and Porter, The Greatest Benefit.
8. “I do not believe,” in Wright, William Harvey, 151; “Daily experience,” in Wright, William Harvey, 152. For more on Harvey and Aristotelian thoughts, see Thomas Fuchs, The Mechanization of the Heart: Harvey and Descartes (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2001).
9. Jefferson quoted in Porter, The Greatest Benefit, 303; Dr. Howard Markel, “Dec. 14, 1799: The Excruciating Final Hours of President George Washington,” PBS/Newshour, December 14, 2014, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/dec-14-1799-excruciating-final-hours-president-george-washington. Again, centuries of history are compressed here. More sophisticated contemporary historians would argue that Vesalius did not “invent” autopsy, as Porter says, and the complex relations between Vesalius, Colombo, Fabricus, and Harvey have all been simplified.
Chapter 12
1. Dr. Sylvia P. Griffiths invited me to see Dr. Jamil Aboulhosn and Dr. Marlon Rosenbaum present cases at Columbia Presbyterian. It was exciting for a patient to see how vigorously two top physicians could disagree over the specifics of a complex case. Aboulhosn’s remarks of April 20, 2017, are quoted from my notes, and he confirmed them.
2. I interviewed Mark Roeder and Danielle Hile in the Philadelphia offices of the Adult Congenital Heart Association on September 11, 2018.
3. I met Dr. Ali Zaidi and Bridgette Ratliff at the ACHA regional conference at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx on October 21, 2017. When Bridgette appeared after the procession of cardiologists, she wore a leather jacket, she danced, and she laughed. I spoke to her afterward and met her daughter Rachel.
4. I interviewed Bridgette on the phone and in person, and I visited her at work on February 7, 2018; we also had several email exchanges. I interviewed Dr. Zaidi in his office in Montefiore on February 9, 2018, and the story I tell combines what was told to me by doctor and patient.
Chapter 13
1. Marlon Rosenbaum and I have been discussing these issues for years now, over several visits to his office and in conversations about this book, and I have done my best to tell the story both as it appeared to me twenty years ago and as it appears to me now, through my best understanding of his perspective.
Chapter 14
1. Broadly, the Steno material depends on four books: (1) Troels Kardel and Paul Maquet, eds., Nicolaus Steno: Biography and Original Papers of a Seventeenth Century Scientist (New York: Springer, 2013) (this is a translation of Gustav Scherz’s German biography, Neils Stensen, and a compilation of Steno’s thirty-four known scientific papers); (2) Alan Cutler, The Seashell on the Mountaintop (New York: Dutton, 2003); (3) Raffaello Cioni, Neils Stensen, Scientist Bishop (New York: P. J. Kennedy and Sons, 1962); and (4) Matthew Cobb, Generation (London: Bloomsbury, 2006).
2. “When I was very small,” in Cioni, Neils Stensen, 21.
3. Entry into Copenhagen University, in Kardel and Maquet, Nicolaus Steno, 41; “I fear that,” in Kardel and Maquet, Nicolaus Steno, 56.
4. Quotes from Chaos in Kardel and Maquet, Nicolaus Steno, 55–57.
5. Description of Amsterdam owes a lot to Cobb, Generation; “I felt the point of my knife,” in Kardel and Maquet, Nicolaus Steno, 65.
6. “I seem to have discovered,” in Cioni, Neils Stensen, 33; Cutler, The Seashell, 37.
7. “penis of a whale,” in Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Vintage, 1997); dates of anatomy performances in Kardel and Maquet, Nicolaus Steno, 70; description of Dutch bars in Cobb, Generation, 41–42.
8. “He was of fine appearance,” in Cioni, Neils Stensen, 26; Dutch antisodomy laws, from Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches; see also Brian Fone, Homophobia: A History (New York: Picador, 2001). I believe that my hypothesis about Steno’s sexuality is original; that is, no one I read stated it outright.
Chapter 16
1. “Imagine Steno”: as the word “imagine” implies, I’ve taken some liberties here, mostly in condensing facts. In 1663, Steno did perform a dissection-cum-lecture of a human brain, and Baruch Spinoza did come to see him. Sylvius, Thévenot, Swammerdam, and de Graaf all attended Steno’s performances, but it’s not clear that they were all present on the same day. The lecture I quote from here, The Discourse on the Anatomy of the Brain, was given in Paris two years later; see Kardel and Maquet, Nicolaus Steno, 508–523. In condensing it I have altered the translator’s syntax.
2. The dialogue with Spinoza is invented, but it’s true that Spinoza invited Steno to his home in Rijksberg, that Steno went, and that Steno walked most everywhere he traveled. It seems likely that Steno and Spinoza conversed about Descartes. I didn’t feel I could fake the conversation between two geniuses, and there is no record of exactly how Steno felt upon leaving Spinoza; however, he did go home and begin to investigate the heart of a deer, and in doing so felt he was in his empiricism destroying the godless rationalism of Descartes and Spinoza. My imagined image of Spinoza himself is largely derived from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s gorgeous Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (New York: Nextbook, 2008).
3. “the first fibers,” in Kardel and Maquet, Nicolaus Steno, 94; “not that seat,” in Kardel and Maquet, Nicolaus Steno, 110; “I knocked down,” in Kardel and Maquet, Nicolaus Steno, 99.
4. Tuileries, in Kardel and Maquet, Nicolaus Steno, 119; “To say it straight,” in Kardel and Maquet, Nicolaus Steno, 132.
5. Steno, Dissection of an Embryo Monster for Parisians, in Kardel and Maquet, Nicolaus Steno, 537–539.
6. “After all is finished,” in Edward Dolnick, The Seeds of Life (New York: Basic Books, 2017).
7. Again, my entry into Steno’s dreams is entirely hypothetical; “the thought came into my mind,” in Cioni, Neils Stensen, 70.
8. I do not know if Steno was in fact shown Galileo’s instruments, but the Medicis did keep them; see Eric Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).
9. “How the present state,” in Cutler, The Seashell, 115.
10. Cobb, Generation, 97–99.
11. Liebniz, in Kardel and Maquet, Nicolaus Steno, 226.
12. Cutler, The Seashell, 164–165.
13. Lacan, quoted in Zadie Smith, “Man vs. Corpse,” New York Review of Books, December 5, 2013.
Chapter 17
1. Letter from Dr. Michael Freed, August 17, 1995.
Chapter 18
1. I met Alan Sabal at a bar in a gathering of adult congenital heart patients in New York in May 2017, and I interviewed him in person near his home soon thereafter; we’ve spoken at several ACHA events and gatherings.
2. Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Viking, 1984), 289.
3. On Magendie, see W. Bruce Frye, “A History of Cardiac Arrhythmias,” in John A. Kastor, MD, Arrhythmias (London: W.B. Saunders, 1994); for transplants and nerves, see Charles Siebert, A Man After His Own Heart (New York: Crown, 2004), 185.
4. I had the pleasure of talking to Dr. Abraham Rudolph over the phone in June 2018; we had several long subsequent email exchanges. I am grateful to Dr. Wayne Tworetsky for providing me with access to videos of several interviews and speeches Dr. Rudolph gave at Boston Children’s Hospital.
5. Moore, “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” 227.
6. The Henry James quote comes from the story “The Middle Years.”
PART TWO
Chapter 19
1. Maude Abbott material derives largely from two biographies: H. E. MacDermot, Maude Abbott: A Memoir (New York: Macmillan, 1941), and Douglas Waugh, MD, Maudie of McGill: Dr. Maude Abbott and the Foundation of Heart Surgery (Toronto: Hannah, 1992).
2. The train ride is obviously another one of my flights of the imagination, but everything about Maude Abbott’s body—the dress with food stains, the mass of work, the absentmindedness, the way she walked—is based on descriptions of Abbott, largely in MacDermot, Maude Abbott, and Waugh, Maudie of McGill.
3. Her father’s murder trial is detailed closely in Waugh, Maudie of McGill; MacDermot skirts the story entirely.
4. The journal entries are from MacDermot, Maude Abbott, 10; Waugh seems to have been unable to locate these papers.
5. “very enthusiastic,” in Waugh, Maudie of McGill, 28.
6. “People say,” in David Oshinsky, Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital (New York: Doubleday, 2016), 150; information on Hopkins is from Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry (New York: Basic, 1982), 117; Osler quotes are from Porter, The Greatest Benefit, 526, 347.
7. “Can you think,” in MacDermot, Maude Abbott, 42.
8. “If you do for me,” in MacDermot, Maude Abbott, 67.
9. Waugh, Maudie of McGill, 56.
10. Robert Willis, trans., The Works of William Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania 1989), 47.
11. “A surgeon who tries,” in Forrester, The Heart Healers, 30. Thomas Morris, in The Matter of the Heart, doubts that Billroth actually said it.
12. “Surgery of the heart,” in Forrester, The Heart Healers, 30; Osler quote in Porter, The Greatest Benefit, 580; Romero information from Alejandro Aris, MD, PhD, “Francisco Romero, the First Heart Surgeon,” Annals of Thoracic Surgery 64, no. 3 (September 1997): 870–871.
13. For the description of Daniel Hale Williams, I am indebted to Rob Dunn, The Man Who Touched His Own Heart (Boston: Little Brown, 2015), 10–14.
14. For Rehn, I am indebted chiefly to Forrester, The Heart Healers.
15. For the material on Eintoven, I’m indebted to John Burnett, “The Origins of the Electrocardiograph as Clinical Instrument,” in The Emergence of Modern Cardiology, ed. W. F. Bynum, Christopher Lawrence, and Vivian Nutton (London: Welcome, 1985).
16. “the doctors focused,” in Christopher Lawrence, “Moderns and Ancients: The ‘New Cardiology’ in Britain, 1880–1930,” in Bynum, Lawrence, and Nutton, The Emergence of Modern Cardiology.
17. Porter, The Greatest Benefit, 582.
18. Sir William Osler, The Principals and Practice of Medicine (New York: Appleton, 1920), 824; “I shall never forget him,” in Waugh, Maudie of McGill, 59; “I knew you would,” in MacDermot, Maude Abbott, 78; “the mood at McGill,” in Waugh, Maudie of McGill, 84.
19. Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (New York: Vintage, 2015), 18. Abbott’s “Women in Medicine” lecture is available online through the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in Medicine, Harvard University.
20. Data on women in medicine is from Starr, The Social Transformation, 117; Abbott’s letter and Adami’s response are from MacDermot, Maude Abbott, 127.
21. Atlas of Congenital Cardiac Disease (Toronto: McGill University Press, 2006), facsimile of 1936 edition.
Chapter 21
1. Oddly, most books about Helen Taussig are geared toward younger readers. I’m particularly indebted to Baldwin, To Heal the Heart of a Child.
2. Again I have indulged my tendency toward dramatization, but all facts and figures come from Helen B. Taussig and Faith L. Meserve, “Rhythmic Contractions in Isolated Strips of Mammalian Ventricle,” American Journal of Physiology 72, no. 1 (1925): 89–98, and Baldwin, To Heal the Heart of a Child, 26–27.
3. “Who is going,” in Baldwin, To Heal the Heart of a Child, 23.
4. Information on William Taussig is from Baldwin, To Heal the Heart of a Child, and from William Hyde and Howard L. Conrad, eds., Encyclopedia of the History of St. Louis: A Compendium of History and Biography for Ready Reference (New York: The Southern History Company, 1899).
5. Information on Frank Taussig is from Baldwin, To Heal the Heart of a Child, and Joseph Schumpeter, Ten Great Economists from Marx to Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 191–221.
6. “a sound lesson,” in Baldwin, To Heal the Heart of a Child, 14.
7. There’s some discrepancy among the sources about whether Taussig lost her spot because of her GPA or because of an exam, but so few exams are graded to tenths of a point that I’ve assumed it’s GPA, and Geri Lynn Goodman, in her 1983 Yale dissertation on Taussig, A Gentle Heart, reports that it was the GPA.
8. The correspondence between Park and Taussig is from William N. Evans, “Helen Brooke Taussig and Edwards Albert Park: The Early Years (1927–1930),” Cardiology in the Young 20, no. 4 (2010): 387–395.
9. For Thomas Lewis and the history of British cardiology in the early twentieth century, see Lawrence, “Moderns and Ancients.”
10. “Cardiac Causes and the Care of Cardiac Children,” Board of Education, City of New York, Harold W. McCormick director, committee appointed 1936, quoting from pp. 21 and 31: “Rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease represent a public health problem of the greatest magnitude which must be attacked from many different angles.… The problem of heart disease in children is primarily that of rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease. 95% of all heart diseases in children are the result of rheumatic fever.”
11. I’m grateful to the New York Academy of Medicine for providing me the program of the 1931 fortnight.
12. I’m grateful to Drs. Freed, Gersony, and Griffiths for help with understanding Taussig’s progress; for more on the relationship between Abbott and Taussig, see William N. Evans, “The Relationship Between Maude Abbott and Helen Taussig: Connecting the Historical Dots,” in Cardiology in the Young 18, no. 6 (December 2008): 557–564.
13. For statistics about PDA, see “Patent Foramen Ovale (PFO),” American Heart Association, http://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/congenital-heart-defects/about-congenital-heart-defects/patent-foramen-ovale-pfo.
14. I interviewed Dr. Eugenia Doyle in her home on June 30, 2018.
Chapter 22
1. I met Chris Halverson first at the Adult Congenital Heart Association convention in Orlando on June 1, 2017, then conducted several phone interviews thereafter and visited his church on January 14, 2018. He was kind enough to share with me some of his autobiographical writing, which I quote.
2. “I feel the pressure” and “I tried to move my hands,” from Halverson’s story “Thinking and Feeling.”
3. “Cocooned,” from “Thinking and Feeling.”
4. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 234.
Chapter 23
1. The material on Lorraine Sweeney and Robert Gross comes largely from Lindsay Murray, “‘A Thrill of Extreme Magnety’: Robert E. Gross and the Beginnings of Cardiac Surgery” (PhD diss. Harvard Medical School, 2015); Francis D. Moore and Judah Folkman, Robert Edward Gross, 1905–1988: A Biographical Memoir (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences,
1995); and Forrester, The Heart Healers.
2. “Music came on,” in Murray, “A Thrill of Extreme Magnety,” 18.
3. “At the time of admission,” in Robert E. Gross and John P. Hubbard, “Surgical Ligation of a Patient with Ductus Arteriosus,” Journal of American Medical Association 112, no. 8 (February 25, 1939): 730.
4. “If God wants her,” in Murray, “A Thrill of Extreme Magnety,” 19.
5. For a biography of Carrel, read W. Sterling Edwards, Alexis Carrel: Visionary Surgeon (Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1974).
6. Alexis Carrel, Man the Unknown (New York: Harper, 1939) (page numbers here from online reprint by archive.org): “The democratic principle,” 141; “the extinction,” 2; “never have the European races,” 2; “number of misfits,” 2.
7. Bing quoted in Allen B. Weisse, Heart to Heart: The Twentieth Century Battle Against Cardiac Disease, An Oral History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2002), 60.
8. Harold Foss, “The Surgeon and His Nurse Anesthetist,” Bulletin of the National Association of Nurse Anesthetists 5, no. 3 (August 1937): 351.
9. From Murray, “A Thrill of Extreme Magnety.”
10. All quotes are from Gross and Hubbard, “Surgical Ligation of a Patient.”
11. Baldwin, To Heal the Heart of a Child, 52, except “Madame, I close ductuses,” which is quoted in Weisse, Heart to Heart, 43, in Weisse’s interview with Taussig’s protégée Mary Allen Engle.
12. Vivien Thomas, Partners of the Heart (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1985). The question of exactly who deserves credit for the idea of the shunt is blurred—some sources will say it is Blalock and others Thomas. My sense is that Taussig outlined a specific plan to Gross and was rejected out of hand. Her language with Blalock was much more open, and it seems to me likely that she altered her approach to allow more intellectual space for the surgeon and his technician to invent the particulars of the operation. For a scholarly description of the Blalock-Taussig-Thomas collaboration, see William N. Evans, “The Blalock-Taussig Shunt: The Social History of an Eponym,” Cardiology in the Young 19 (2009): 119–128.
The Open Heart Club Page 34
