Cardiac Cowboys: The Heroic Invention of Heart Surgery

Cardiac Cowboys is the dramatic story of five deeply flawed geniuses who together—and in competition with each other—invented open-heart surgery against all conventional medical wisdom and saved millions of lives.

A decade after World War II, there was still no such thing as open-heart surgery, and yet half a million Americans were dying from heart disease every year. One in a hundred children would suffer and die from congenital heart disease as well, and doctors did little other than predi...