Dr. Rachel Clarke’s ‘finest book yet’ blends the ‘arresting and the informative’.

(Image credit: Hachette UK)

Dr. Rachel Clarke traces the history of transplants right back to the very first organ donation

“In 2017, a nine-year-old girl from Devon was involved in a car crash that left her with a catastrophic brain injury,” said Fiona Sturges in The Guardian. Knowing the person Keira was – someone who’d go “out of her way to rescue insects in distress” – her family immediately asked if she could donate her organs. Meanwhile, another nine- year-old lay on a hospital bed in Cheshire, “painfully thin and being kept alive with a mechanical heart pump”. Max’s heart had become “dangerously enlarged” after he’d developed acute cardiomyopathy; he and his family knew that only a transplant could save his life.

“In ‘The Story of a Heart’, Dr Rachel Clarke writes about the feat of modern medicine that allowed Keira to give life to Max by donating her heart.” Her book is many things: “a tender account of two families linked by tragic circumstances”; the race-against-time tale of the “transfer of a human organ from one body to another”; a history of the surgical innovations that made this possible.

Read the full article in The Week here.