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Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart
- Narrated by: Lydia Mackay
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
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Publisher's summary
It wasn’t supposed to be this hard. If America could send a man to the moon, shouldn’t the best surgeons in the world be able to build an artificial heart? In Ticker, Texas Monthly executive editor and two-time National Magazine Award winner Mimi Swartz shows just how complex and difficult it can be to replicate one of nature’s greatest creations.
Part investigative journalism, part medical mystery, Ticker is a dazzling story of modern innovation, recounting 50 years of false starts, abysmal failures, and miraculous triumphs, as experienced by one the world’s foremost heart surgeons, O.H. “Bud” Frazier, who has given his life to saving the un-savable.
His journey takes him from a small town in west Texas to one of the country’s most prestigious medical institutions, The Texas Heart Institute, from the halls of Congress to the animal laboratories where calves are fitted with new heart designs. The roadblocks to success - medical setbacks, technological shortcomings, government regulations - are immense. Still, Bud and his associates persist, finding inspiration in the unlikeliest of places. A field beside the Nile irrigated by an Archimedes screw. A hardware store in Brisbane, Australia. A seedy bar on the wrong side of Houston.
Until post WWII, heart surgery did not exist. Ticker provides a riveting history of the pioneers who gave their all to the courageous process of cutting into the only organ humans cannot live without. Heart surgeons Michael DeBakey and Denton Cooley, whose feud dominated the dramatic beginnings of heart surgery. Christian Barnaard, who changed the world overnight by performing the first heart transplant. Inventor Robert Jarvik, whose artificial heart made patient Barney Clark a worldwide symbol of both the brilliant promise of technology and the devastating evils of experimentation run amuck.
Rich in supporting players, Ticker introduces us to Bud’s brilliant colleagues in his quixotic quest to develop an artificial heart: Billy Cohn, the heart surgeon and inventor who devotes his spare time to the pursuit of magic and music; Daniel Timms, the Brisbane biomedical engineer whose design of a lightweight, pulseless heart with but a single moving part offers a new way forward. And, as government money dries up, the unlikeliest of backers, Houston’s furniture king, Mattress Mack.
In a sweeping narrative of one man’s obsession, Swartz raises some of the hardest questions of the human condition. What are the tradeoffs of medical progress? What is the cost, in suffering and resources, of offering patients a few more months, or years of life? Must science do harm to do good? Ticker takes us on an unforgettable journey into the power and mystery of the human heart.
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- A History
- By: Sandeep Jauhar
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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For centuries, the human heart seemed beyond our understanding: an inscrutable shuddering mass that was somehow the driver of emotion and the seat of the soul. As cardiologist and best-selling author Sandeep Jauhar tells in The Heart, it was only recently that we demolished age-old taboos and devised the transformative procedures that changed the way we live. Deftly alternating between historical episodes and his own work, Jauhar tells the colorful and little known story of the doctors who risked their careers and the patients who risked their lives to know and heal our most vital organ.
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Fascinating Insight
- By Ironcharles on 10-27-18
By: Sandeep Jauhar
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One Doctor
- Close Calls, Cold Cases, and the Mysteries of Medicine
- By: Brendan Reilly
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 15 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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An epic story told by a unique voice in American medicine, One Doctor describes life-changing experiences in the career of a distinguished physician. In riveting first-person prose, Dr. Brendan Reilly takes us to the front lines of medicine today.
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Simply Brilliant
- By Jan on 06-20-14
By: Brendan Reilly
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When Breath Becomes Air
- By: Paul Kalanithi, Abraham Verghese - foreword
- Narrated by: Sunil Malhotra, Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 5 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated.
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Phenomenal book!
- By A. Potter on 01-16-16
By: Paul Kalanithi, and others
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Healing Hearts
- A Memoir of a Female Heart Surgeon
- By: Kathy Magliato
- Narrated by: Renée Raudman
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Dr. Kathy Magliato is one of fewer than a dozen female heart surgeons practicing in the world today. She is also a member of an even more exclusive group - those surgeons who perform heart transplants. Healing Hearts is the story of the making of a surgeon who also calls herself a wife and mother.
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Healing Hearts
- By Jean on 01-14-12
By: Kathy Magliato
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God's Hotel
- A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine
- By: Victoria Sweet
- Narrated by: Victoria Sweet
- Length: 13 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hôtel-Dieu (God's hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves - "anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times" and needed extended medical care - ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed for 20 years. Laguna Honda, lower-tech but human-paced, gave Sweet the opportunity to practice a kind of attentive medicine that has almost vanished.
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Great read
- By kayla solomon on 04-08-17
By: Victoria Sweet
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Shocked
- Adventures in Bringing Back the Recently Dead
- By: David Casarett M.D.
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 7 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Not too long ago, there was no coming back from death. But now, with revolutionary medical advances, death has become just another serious complication. As a young medical student, Dr. David Casarett was inspired by the story of a two-year-old girl named Michelle Funk. Michelle fell into a creek and was underwater for over an hour. When she was found she wasn't breathing, and her pupils were fixed and dilated. That drowning should have been fatal. But after three hours of persistent work, a team of doctors and nurses was able to bring her back.
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Dead vs. Sincerely Dead
- By Gillian on 06-24-16
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The Heart Healers
- The Misfits, Mavericks, and Rebels Who Created the Greatest Medical Breakthrough of Our Lives
- By: James Forrester MD
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 15 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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At one time heart disease was a death sentence. By the middle of the 20th century, it was killing millions, and, as with the Black Death centuries before, physicians stood helpless. Visionaries, though, had begun to make strides earlier. On September 7, 1895, Ludwig Rehn successfully sutured the heart of a living man with a knife wound to the chest for the first time.
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Great review of the landmark achievements in Cardiology.
- By Trauma NP on 12-14-15
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Knocking on Heaven's Door
- The Path to a Better Way of Death
- By: Katy Butler
- Narrated by: Katy Butler
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Like so many of us, award-winning writer Katy Butler always assumed her aging parents would experience healthy, active retirements before dying peacefully at home. Then her father suffered a stroke that left him incapable of easily finishing a sentence or showering without assistance. Her mother was thrust into full-time caregiving, and Katy became one of the 24 million Americans who help care for aging parents. In an effort to correct a minor and non - life threatening heart arrhythmia, doctors outfitted her father with a pacemaker.
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A better way to narrate a book about death?
- By MAUREEN on 10-21-13
By: Katy Butler
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Confessions of a Surgeon
- The Good, the Bad, and the Complicated...Life Behind the O.R. Doors
- By: Paul A. Ruggieri MD
- Narrated by: Eric Martin
- Length: 8 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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As an active surgeon and former department chairman, Dr. Paul A. Ruggieri has seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of his profession. In Confessions of a Surgeon, he pushes open the doors of the OR and reveals the inscrutable place where lives are improved, saved, and sometimes lost. He shares the successes, failures, remarkable advances, and camaraderie that make it exciting.
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Enjoyed the anecdotes!
- By suzanne on 07-31-17
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Inferno
- A Doctor's Ebola Story
- By: Steven Hatch MD
- Narrated by: Steven Hatch MD
- Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Dr. Steven Hatch first came to Liberia in November 2013 to work at a hospital in Monrovia. Six months later, several of the physicians Dr. Hatch had mentored and served with were dead or barely clinging to life, and Ebola had become a world health emergency. Hundreds of victims perished each week; whole families were destroyed in a matter of days; so many died so quickly that the culturally taboo practice of cremation had to be instituted to dispose of the bodies.
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Good story, spoiled by politics.
- By Roman Vogel on 07-22-17
By: Steven Hatch MD
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Changing the Way We Die
- Compassionate End-of-Life Care and the Hospice Movement
- By: Sheila Himmel, Fran Smith
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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There’s a quiet revolution happening in the way we die. More than 1.5 million Americans a year die in hospice care - nearly 44 percent of all deaths - and a vast industry has sprung up to meet the growing demand. Once viewed as a New Age indulgence, hospice is now a $14 billion business and one of the most successful segments in health care. Changing the Way We Die, by award-winning journalists Fran Smith and Sheila Himmel, is the first book to take a broad, penetrating look at the hospice landscape.
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Sadly, not very engaging.
- By Debra S. Long on 06-16-18
By: Sheila Himmel, and others
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The Family Gene
- A Mission to Turn My Deadly Inheritance into a Hopeful Future
- By: Joselin Linder
- Narrated by: Khristine Hvam
- Length: 7 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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When Joselin Linder was in her 20s, her legs started to swell. She thought little of it until her health problems started to compound in ways that baffled her doctors. Diagnosed with extreme liver blockage and dangerous levels of lymph fluid, Joselin turned to the most similar case she could think of - her father's.
By: Joselin Linder
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The Second Opinion
- By: Michael Palmer
- Narrated by: Franette Liebow
- Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Here, Michael Palmer has created a cat-and-mouse game where one woman must confront a conspiracy of doctors to uncover an evil practice that touches every single person who ever has a medical test. With unforgettable characters and twists and betrayals that come from the most unlikely places, The Second Opinion will keep you guessing...and looking over your shoulder.
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great story line; unnecessary love affair
- By Anonymous User on 05-26-09
By: Michael Palmer
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Splendid Solution
- Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio
- By: Jeffrey Kluger
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 13 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Salk became a cultural hero and icon for a whole generation. Now, at the fiftieth anniversary of the first national vaccination program, and as humanity is tantalizingly close to eradicating polio worldwide, comes this unforgettable chronicle. Salk's work was an unparalleled achievement, and it makes for a magnificent listen.
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Excellent book
- By Tim on 08-10-06
By: Jeffrey Kluger
What listeners say about Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Gotta Tellya
- 09-07-18
Didn’t hate it, didn’t like it.
Overall this audio book is just OK. I gleaned some interesting info re the history of the effort to create a practical version of an artificial heart. I wasn’t pleased that said info was dumbed down for public consumption. Nor did I care for the author’s reliance on cheesy similes and metaphors. Worse were the comments made re various physycians’ and other characters’ sex appeal, which might be relevant in a gossip column but didn’t seem appropriate in this context. Last but not least was the narrator, whose smooth style is better suited to sleep aide commercials and not so much to a book on a fascinating, serious medical device.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Susan
- 01-30-21
Loved the story
My son-in-law had a Heart transplant. I became interested in everything he went through and what may be ahead. In 20 years, I hope his new heart is still working. If it isn’t, maybe a mechanical heart will be, the go to option.
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- Anonymous User
- 11-15-21
A well told history of American (Texas) ingenuity.
A remarkable account of the advancement in the field of heart medicine, surgery and research.
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- Campion Quinn, MD
- 08-26-18
People Magazine Version of Medical history
There is very little discussion of the artificial hearts themselves, but a lot of discussion about the personalities of the men who made them. There is no attempt to look at the development of the artificial heart outside of the Texas Heart Institute.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Michael Snyder
- 01-27-22
Good Book
very interesting, learned a lot. Good story and very interesting. Easy to follow but you do have to pay attention. Complicated subject matter.
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- Sheila
- 01-30-19
Very inspirational!
Beautifully written, clever account of ultra-severe heart disease treatment by the miraculous team at the Texas heart institute!
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- Jeannene stricklin
- 01-31-19
Love the book!
From the story it’s self to getting to acquainted with DeBakery and Cooley,this is a heck of a story!
You will read it then read it again and again!
Do not miss this one
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- Kfal
- 08-13-18
Wow!!
I don’t usually write reviews, but this is simply the best audiobook I’ve listened to in a very long time. Usually a fiction reader/ listener, I thought I would give this book a try based on reviews and I’m so glad I did. Fascinating, well narrated and written in a great story telling manner.
I’ll admit that what drew me to this is the fact that I work in surgery and find these topics interesting and engaging, but I honestly believe anyone would find this book a great listen. Who among us has not been touched by heart disease in some way? 5 stars all around.
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2 people found this helpful
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- S. Friedman
- 11-19-18
A Chatty Tale of Medical History
The author sets forth some interesting ideas as to what have been the developments with regard to heart replacement via transplant or mechanical heart. However, the book suffers from poor editing and a too careless style. Sounds like it was cut and pasted from a series of articles that appeared elsewhere.
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- Fashion Police
- 01-03-19
Tickerific!
The author captures your heart with Ticker, a chronology of the worldwide race to invent the ultimate artificial heart. The book details the intense rivalry among celebrated heart surgeons, healthcare teams, institutions and the politics and money surrounding the creation of these life saving medical devices. Intriguing, over the top characters and, literally, heart stopping storytelling make this a MUST "LISTEN" READ.
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