Machines in Our Hearts PDF

Rating: Author: Kirk Jeffrey ISBN : Product Detai New from Format: PDF

Download medical books file now PRETITLE Machines in Our Hearts POSTTITLE from 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror linkToday hundreds of thousands of Americans carry pacemakers and implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) within their bodies. These battery-powered machines -- small computers, in fact -- deliver electricity to the heart to correct dangerous disorders of the heartbeat. But few doctors, patients, or scholars know the history of these devices or how "heart-rhythm management" evolved into a multi-billion-dollar manufacturing and service industry. Machines in Our Hearts tells the story of these two implantable medical devices. Kirk Jeffrey, a historian of science and technology, traces the development of knowledge about the human heartbeat and follows surgeons, cardiologists, and engineers as they invent and test a variety of electronic devices. Numerous small manufacturing firms jumped into pacemaker production but eventually fell by the wayside, leaving only three American companies in the business today. Jeffrey profiles pioneering heart surgeons, inventors from the realms of engineering and medical research, and business leaders who built heart-rhythm management into an industry with thousands of employees and annual revenues in the hundreds of millions. As Jeffrey shows, the pacemaker (first implanted in 1958) and the ICD (1980) embody a paradox of high-tech health care: these technologies are effective and reliable but add billions to the nation's medical bill because of the huge growth in the number of patients who depend on implanted devices to manage their heartbeats.Direct download links available for PRETITLE Machines in Our Hearts POSTTITLE

• Product Details
• Table of Contents
• Reviews

• File Size: 1777 KB
• Print Length: 384 pages
• Publisher: JHUP; 1 edition (April 1, 2003)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B004PGNBVU
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray:
  Not Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,468,508 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Machines in Our Hearts PDF

This is a thorough, well-written history not only of the pacemaker and internalized defibrillator, but of the cultural implications of the devices. Most of the emphasis is on the pacemaker -- the first fully implantable and miniaturized form of life support. Jeffrey examines how the pacemaker began as a rarely-used lifesaving device and morphed, with the coming of Medicare, into a massively deployed standard of care for elderly people whose heart rhythm systems were wearing out with age.
This is a book for people interested in detailed medical and technological history rather than a general interest book. For specialized readers, I recommend it highly. It contains great story of technology unfolding, including the men behind the inventions, like Medtronics founder and inventor Earl Bakken,
who used a metronome circuit design from Popular Electronics to cobble together the first portable (but not implantable) pacemaker in 1958. Jeffrey's account is fascinating, but not rah-rah -- he looks at the complex social, political and cultural context in which the devices arose. It was a great background source for a book I'm currently writing, and for an article I wrote for the New York Times magazine in June 2010 called "What Broke My Father's Heart," a family medical memoir examining the moral choices created by devices like the pacemaker near the end of life.

By Katy Butler

Machines In Our Hearts is an excellent history of the pacemaker and defibrillator. These devices are one of the best examples of the application of technology to medicine. Jeffrey tells the exciting story of their development. I highly recommend it.

By Bradley J. Roth