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  • Artificial Hearts: The Allure and Ambivalence of a Controversial Medical Technology by Shelley McKellar
  • J.T.H. Connor
Artificial Hearts: The Allure and Ambivalence of a Controversial Medical Technology Shelley McKellar Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018, 376 p., $54.95

Life, love, power, beds, bodies, blood, broken hearts, feuds, jealousy, elation, disappointment, drama, and death – all certainly the stuff of Harlequin romance novels, but also, apparently, narrative elements of the development of artificial heart technology beginning in 1960s America. Artificial Hearts, Shelley McKellar's second major monograph about surgery in twentieth-century North America, is an account of a particular technological device, but equally it is about a moment in American medicine and American culture, with both cleaving to an unbridled sense of optimism, if not hubris. Just as the United States committed to exploring outer space by putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, so too did it envisage conquering the inner space of the human body through the successful use of a fully functional total artificial heart (TAH).

While the US achieved the former goal, assessing its success with the latter is much messier and more equivocal – hence the [End Page 214] subtitle to McKellar's book. It is hard to disagree with the sentiment of Harvard historian and physician David S. Jones, quoted on the book jacket, that this is a "definitive history … [that] will become a standard part of seminars in the history of medicine." Indeed, one could expand the academic readership for the book to include historians of technology, historians of the 1960s and later, philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, museologists, and American studies scholars, as the quest to perfect the TAH is as much a lens through which to view American attitudes and values in this era as the Apollo space program, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, or even, to my mind, high-powered muscle cars. Reflecting on those times, I cannot help but recall those lines from Democracy by the late Leonard Cohen regarding the prevailing America ethos: "The cradle of the best and of the worst / It's here they got the range / And the machinery for change / And it's here they got the spiritual thirst."

Artificial Hearts was inspired by McKellar's interest in "things" such as medical artifacts and her penchant for "exploring history through objects" (ix). It also, however, resulted from an invitation to join the Project Bionics Working Group, a collaboration of the American Society for Artificial Internal Organs, the National Library of Medicine, and the National Museum of American History (Smithsonian Institution). This opportunity afforded McKellar unprecedented access to private, public, institutional, and commercial collections of bench experimental, prototype, and manufactured artificial hearts to study, compare, and evaluate historically. As a member of the historical working group, McKellar was also able to seek out, collect, and consult an amazingly rich range of archival, personal, and published documents and other media. And, just as important, Project Bionics allowed access to an aging cohort of men (the story of this medical device is gendered in several respects) – physicians, surgeons, inventors, and entrepreneurs – who were instrumental in the development, championing, and actual human implantation of artificial hearts. Owing to this wealth of historical evidence, in the form of both material culture and more traditional sources, Artificial Hearts takes its place alongside, and in many respects surpasses, standard history of medical technology monographs that are similarly "thing-based," such as those on cochlear implants, IUDs, radiology, ultrasonography, electrocardiography, renal dialysis, implantable and other orthopaedic prosthetics, the iron lung, the cardiac pacemaker, and the neonate incubator. [End Page 215]

Artificial Hearts is not just about things, however; people, whether physicians, patients, or politicians, are the real lifeblood of McKellar's account. Dramatis personae such as Michael DeBakey, Denton Cooley, Willem Kolff, Robert Jarvik, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Dick Cheney take leading roles, but often for untoward reasons. For example, Texas cardiac supersurgeons Cooley and DeBakey were once colleagues and collaborators until the former stole the latter's prototype TAH and implanted it unannounced in a patient. This action resulted in Cooley's formal professional censure, as well as a lawsuit (albeit an unsuccessful...

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