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Every Second Counts: The Race to Transplant the First Human Heart D. McRae New York, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2006, 356pages, $25.95
All these years later I can still see it clearly. It was an unforgettable sight. We had taken the old heart and we needed to move damn fast to fill that huge hole with a new heart. No wonder they were frightened of us then. No wonder they thought we were out of our minds.
Adrian Kantrowitz
Every year, approximately 2,500 heart transplantations are performed in the United States. Heart transplantations are such an accepted procedure in cardiology that it is not unusual to find a transplant patient having a stress test performed in the nuclear medicine department. It is well known that the first heart transplantation was performed in South Africa by Dr. Christiaan Barnard at Groote Schuur Hospital in 1967-2 years before astronauts first landed on the moon. Donald McRae's Every second Counts: The Race to Transplant the First Human Heart retells the riveting tale of 4 surgeons, each trying to become the first to transplant a human heart.
Adapting a journalistic style of writing, the author describes the dramatic story of the race to become the first team to perform a surgical heart transplantation between one human and another. The protagonists were 3 surgical research teams in the United States, headed...