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Published Jan 2010
272 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
An inspiring, surprising, and deeply informative memoir of the high-stakes life of a female heart surgeon.
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. Dr. Magliato takes us into her highly demanding, physically intense, male-dominated world and shows us how she masterfully works to save patients lives every day.
In her memoir we come to know many of those patients whose lives Dr. Magliato has touched: a baby born with a hole in her heart, a ninety-four-year-old woman with heart failure, and a thirty-five year old movie producer who saves her own life by recognizing the symptoms of a heart attack. Along the way, Dr. Magliato sheds light on the rarely recognized symptoms of heart attack and cardiovascular disease—the #1 killer of women in America—and the specific measures that can be taken to prevent it.
By taking us deep into her life and those of her patients, Dr. Magliato acquaints us with the day to day realities of her life and work. We see her frantically juggle a full and happy family life as the wife of a liver transplant surgeon (they each have bedside tables cluttered with pagers and cell-phones) and mother of two young boys. We also see the toll that being a female pioneer can take, as well as the rewards of such demanding work.
"Starred Review. In her amazing memoir, Magliato belies the myth of surgeons as distant, cocky, robotic—and male. Look for sobering statistics on women and heart disease, and an inspiring example of living and loving life to the fullest." - Publishers Weekly
"Fast-paced, smooth writing that never bores." - Booklist.com
"Magliato is a courageous, successful doctor with admirable goals and an impressive résumé. Bold and educative." - Kirkus Reviews
More information
Browse an excerpt
An interview with Kathy Magliato
Reading guide
This information about Healing Hearts: A Memoir of a Female Heart Surgeon was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Kathy E. Magliato, MD, is currently the director of women’s cardiac services at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California, and an attending cardiothoracic surgeon at Torrance Memorial Medical Center in Torrance, California, where she is developing a women’s heart center to address the cardiac needs of female patients. She lives in Pacific Palisades with her husband and their two children.
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