Reddit mentions of The Heart Healers: The Misfits, Mavericks, and Rebels Who Created the Greatest Medical Breakthrough of Our Lives

This is crazy, but reading a story in Heart Healers gives it some context. In the 1940s/50s, rheumatic heart disease and mitral valve disease was common, and lethal, with no cure. A surgeon started trying to operate on these patients by putting a purse string suture in the left atria, cutting it, and then ramming a finger through the mitral valve to open it up. He killed 4 patients in a row, and was about to be run out of Philadelphia. He even once got a patient's primary care physician to declare a patient legally dead so he wouldn't be held responsible when his surgical attempt likely killed the patient- didn't work, everyone was still furious. He finally scheduled two patients in the same day at different hospitals, on the grounds that if he killed the morning patient, the other hospital wouldn't hear about it in time to stop him from operating. He did kill the morning patient, but the 30 something year old woman in the afternoon became the first survivor of mitral valve finger commisurotomy, and Dr. Charles Bailey went down in history as the world's first cardiac surgeon.

This act was quite reckless, and insane. But it had a purpose- it wasn't accupunture or some other snake oil meant to treat hysteria. We do what we do today because of similarly reckless acts that hurt a lot of patients, but ultimately benefited billions more.

The Heart Healers - great book about the history of cardiology
[Link.] (https://www.amazon.com/Heart-Healers-Mavericks-Greatest-Breakthrough/dp/1250058392/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1505426456&sr=8-1&keywords=heart+healers)