The Heart Club

Surgery on the heart was explicitly ruled out by the medical teaching of the 1940s. A team of London doctors and scientists led by Russell Brock were determined to challenge and reverse that dogma. Together, they would help to change the history of heart surgery and the chances of survival for future patients. Brock, who had cared for the injured in London throughout the war, was poised to operate on the heart. The outstanding American surgeon Dwight Harken had trained under Brock at the Brompton. They later spent time together at a US army hospital, set in a cluster of huts in the English countryside in anticipation of the 1944 D-day landings. Brock watched Harken remove bullets and shrapnel from soldiers' hearts and heard him speak at a 1945 meeting of British surgeons. Harken told them about operations on 134 soldiers, all of whom had survived. Coincidentally, wartime comrades in the allied forces medical services had built a bond between Guy's and Johns Hopkins Hospital, funded by the Clothworkers' Livery Company. This brought the surgeon Alfred Blalock to Guy's in 1947 to perform and teach a new operation for children with fatal congenital heart disease. These were familiar at the time as 'blue babies' and the operations began to save their lives. With this tangible evidence from Harken and Blalock, Brock's group - they called themselves a 'club' - set out to advance heart surgery. Their work was meticulously chronicled in a rediscovered volume of minutes which form The Heart Club by cardiothoracic surgeon Tom Treasure. Many of the doctors who were members of the club were his teachers and mentors. To complete the story, three survivors, whose lives were saved by early heart operations, tell their life stories from being blue babies of the 1940s to the present. The Heart Club is a remarkable account of the magic of medicine and the tenacity of surgical pioneers.

Tom Treasure was born in Islington, London in 1947, starting life not far from where the events of this book were taking shape. His parents had met in wartime London, brought together as part of the workforce to do emergency repairs on bomb damaged buildings and infrastructure, father as site carpenter and mother as the quartermaster at the commandeered Ivanhoe Hotel where the crew were billeted. The family left London for Cheltenham where he attended the Catholic primary school and passed the 11-plus for the Grammar School. His education was interrupted by severe asthma and he was hospitalised for six month. Seaside boarding school with the Christian Brothers was deemed the best solution. After that being a medical student at Guy's in London was a welcome escape. Many of the doctors who were members of the Club chronicled in his book were his teachers and mentors. His first resident post at Guy's was in cardiothoracic surgery which was his lifetime career from qualifying in 1970 to clinical retirement in 2007. He has been active in professional roles including serving as an elected member of council of the Royal College of Surgeons for eight years and President of the European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery. In the 1990s he took a four-month sabbatical at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. During training he spent a year each in Canterbury, Cambridge, Newcastle upon Tyne and the University of Alabama but most of his adult life has been in London. He was consultant at The Middlesex and University College Hospitals during the 1980s, at St George's in the 1990s returning to Guy's for the remainder of his career.