With humor, compassion, and wisdom, Howard Carter recounts the semester he spent watching first-year medical students in a human anatomy lab. From the tentative early incisions of the back, the symbolic weight of extracting the heart, and by the end, the curious mappings of the brain, we embark on a path that is at once frightening, awesome, and finally redemptive.

"The book should be required reading for every clinician, medical student, social worker, and therapist who cares for injured patients, and especially for those who care for burned patients. It also should be made widely available in bookstores for anyone who has empathy for the ill and infirm or curiosity about burns."--Journal of the American Medical Association Although medical advances have remarkably increased the survival rate of the severely burned, such patients still encounter physical and psychological pain and disability, disfigurement, and social rejection. Rising from...

Reflections on the cultural and biomedical understandings of the human heart

"Humans from ancient times have interpreted the heart in many ways: as the home of the soul, the seat of love, the place of wisdom and justice, the symbol of our vitality. No other human organ has had as many meanings attached to it." --from the Introduction

Our Human Hearts is a nonfiction exploration of the meanings of the human heart as interpreted by two traditions: medical science, which has made possible dramatic cardiac surgery and sophisticated drug treatments, and the much...