“Increasingly, cardiology is a visual field, so recognizing tracings, recognizing images, and knowing how to use MRIs is a challenge and a skill that needs to be practiced.” – Dr. Eugene Braunwald
Back in 1949, WB Saunders published the seminal textbook in the field cardiology, written by a single individual, Dr. Charles Friedberg, who had been one of my teachers. When Dr. Friedberg died tragically in an automobile accident, the people at Saunders invited me to finish his book, which Dr. Friedberg was about halfway through writing. I believe it was his third edition. By that time, I had written two editions of another medicine textbook so I knew something about textbook writing. So they asked me to look at what Friedberg had done, and I looked at it very carefully and I said “I’m sorry; I don’t think I can fill this man’s shoes.” I also had just moved to Boston on July 1, 1972 to take a position at Harvard. I told the people at Saunders that in order to do it right, I would need to write it during a sabbatical, which I’d be able to take seven years from then, in 1979. I said I wouldn’t blame them if they decided not to accept because cardiology is such an important field and you can’t be without a textbook of cardiology for such a long period. The top level administration at Saunders was very generous they said “Let’s go.” So, from July 1, 1979 to June 30, 1980, I stayed at home and worked and I finished Braunwald’s Heart Disease on the last day of the year. It was a grueling task. So that I wouldn’t be tempted to do other things, I didn’t shave. I had a long scraggly beard that I wouldn’t go out in public with. I even skipped the American Heart Association meetings. That’s basically how it started. The first edition was a resounding success. Within three months, there was a second printing, and then a third printing and it’s been a wonderful experience since then.
I started college in New York right after the end of World War II, which had a profound impact on our society in a similar same way that the information explosion is having an impact now. The impact at that time was engineering. Engineering was going to be the future of the world. So I joined the crowd and went to Brooklyn Technical High School, an elite public high school. Once I started there, I was very excited about engineering concepts, but I found it was rather impersonal. I wanted somehow to combine science with people and obviously there’s nothing that does that more than medicine. I eventually went into cardiology because cardiology has more engineering in it than any other medical specialty. In cardiology, I deal with pumps, which is like mechanical engineering. But I also deal with electricity, so there’s a bit of electrical engineering, too. With cardiology, I was able to combine these two strong interests.
When I first started working on this, I thought that cardiology textbooks were too disjointed. So, rather than dividing this book into bite-size chunks, I wrote the book as a series of monographs. Each chapter was long, heavily illustrated, and heavily referenced. I wrote about half of the book myself. I did that on purpose so that I could be in touch with every piece of it, even though I didn’t write it all. I knew what was in each adjacent chapter, so that I could avoid repetition, which is difficult to do in a multi-authored textbook. It’s unfair to get a customer to buy the same material twice in the same book, so I kept very close tabs on it.
I’ve been concentrating recently on what this project will become in the future. We have been experimenting with updates and we’ve been experimenting with companions. The companion, Braunwald’s Heart Disease Review and Assessment, is important because if the main book is to be used in studying for boards, then people have to try their hand at it. The editor of the companion book, Leonard Lilly, is a wonderful teacher who was a resident of mine. He’s a superb clinician, who has an intuitive feeling of what people need to know and how it can be expressed. Increasingly, cardiology is a visual field, so recognizing tracings, recognizing images, and knowing how to use MRIs is a challenge and a skill that needs to be practiced.
Eugene Braunwald, MD is considered the leading name in cardiology and his research has expanded knowledge and understanding in the areas of congestive heart failure, coronary artery disease, and valvular heart disease. He has authored more than 1400 medical articles and his textbook, Braunwald’s Heart Disease, is cited worldwide and recognized as the best book on the subject.
Dr. Braunwald has received numerous honors and awards including the Distinguished Scientist Award of the American College of Cardiology, Research Achievement, and Herrick Awards of the American Heart Association, the Gold Medal of the European Society of Cardiology and is the recipient of nineteen honorary degrees from distinguished universities throughout the world. Dr. Braunwald was the first cardiologist elected to the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. The living Nobel Prize winners in medicine voted Dr. Braunwald as “the person who has contributed the most to cardiology in recent years”.
Related Authors: Robert O. Bonow, MD; Douglas L. Mann, MD, FACC; Douglas P. Zipes, MD; Peter Libby, MD
