240 Beats per Minute

“ This absorbing, ambitious blend of memoir, science, and friendship, traces in two voices the journey of Bernard Witholt, an eminent Dutch biologist with a diseased heart and his lifelong friend, cardiologist Roger Mills. Witholt brings a scientist’s curiosity into how the heart works to his problems, while Mills’ interspersed, accessible reflections on his friend’s journal entries are fascinating, compassionate, and clear. This book is a gift to health care professionals treating heart patients, to patients facing their own conditions, and to readers open to a story about resilience in the face of challenge, about the mechanisms of an “unruly” heart, about the power of friendship even after death, and about the dignity of a life well-lived.”—JAN WORTH-NELSON, Editor, East Village Magazine, poet, author, and lecturer emerita, University of Michigan, Flint

“ Kudos to Drs. Witholt and Mills for bringing to light one of the most important issues in contemporary medicine: the psychological impact of sophisticated medical treatments. This book is a must-read for those of us who practice high tech medicine and for our patients who spend their (remaining) lives on the cutting edge.”—PETER KOWEY, MD, FACC, FAHA, FHRS, Emeritus Chair,  Cardiology, Lankenau Heart Institute, William Wikoff Smith Chair, Cardiovascular Research, Lankenau Institute of Medical Research,  Professor of Medicine and Pharmacology, Jefferson Medical College

About the Author:

Bernard Witholt was born in Holland shortly after the Nazi invasion in 1941. After the end of WWII, the family moved to Brazil, living in both Sao Paulo and Rio. In 1959, they immigrated to the United States and settled in Pennsylvania. With the support of his high school guidance counselor, Bernard gained a full scholarship to Amherst College. He graduated in 1964, then earned his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University followed by post-doctoral work at the University of California San Diego. He spent his professional life in Europe, first as a faculty member at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and then from 1992 until his retirement at ETH Zurich, a world-class research university with ties to more than twenty Nobel prizewinners.  Bernard died in 2015.

 

About the Editor:

Roger Mills, MD graduated from Amherst College and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. After his medical internship and residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, he completed his training in cardiology at Harvard’s Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. His thirty-year clinical career included medical directorship of the heart transplant program at the University of Florida, where he was a professor of medicine, and a subsequent appointment as a staff cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic. He has served on the Editorial Board for the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, the American Journal of Cardiology, and Clinical Cardiology. In addition to his extensive medical publications, Roger is also the author of Nesiritide. The Rise and Fall of Scios, The Foreword Indies 2016 Bronze Medal winner for science.