John Stone (2) (1936–2008)

"In the Country of Hearts, Journeys in the Art of Medicine" by Dr. John Stone is a collection of stories of people with illnesses being brought back to health and happiness by extraordinary doctors discovering new ways to heal sick people. If that were all it was, it would be a collection of stories that would make you feel good for a short time and then disappear from your memory. These stories endure because of that something extra that John Stone adds to these stories. He says in his introduction that each of us is born with two hearts. "One is the literal heart, the fist- sized pumping one that looms like a ghost on the chest X ray. The other heart is a metaphorical one, one that pumps no blood at all........ I encountered it early on-everyone does-long before I studied cardiology."

The blue baby is the first story in the book. John Stone tells of Jeremy who is almost two year’s old coming before him at the Emory clinic. Jeremy's condition is called tetralogy of Fallot, the most common cause of the so-called blue baby. The cause is a narrowing of an artery to the lungs and a defect, a hole, in the wall that divides the right and left ventricles. Stone gives a lucid account of flying from Georgia to the Mayo Clinic twenty-five years ago with a small child in worst condition than Jeremy and needing the surgery that he could not get in Georgia. The surgery at the Mayo Clinic was successful and he fully recovered. A paragraph later and Jeremy is in the surgery room with Emory surgeons as they bypass his heart and repair the dime sized defect with a patch made of Dacron sewn into the surrounding heart muscle. Jeremy's temperature is raised and his heart begins to beat again. For a few moments you are in the operating room as the surgeons work on Jeremy and Dr. Stone watches over your shoulder and gives you a running commentary. Three weeks later Stone sees Jeremy at the clinic where he is eating well and breathing easy. In five short pages we have witnessed two miracles and can not wait for more. These stories are page turners in a way no Tom Clancy thriller could ever be.
John Stone's writing reminds me of another physician scientist, Dr. Lewis Thomas, who wrote "The Lives of a Cell" and "The Medusa and the Snail", essays on nature and the human condition. Where Lewis Thomas described the medical advances of his time and compared them with the geniuses of the world's elite, John Stone describes the medical advances of this day and compares them with the poetic language of the common man's heart. He has the talent to write in words about the deepest desire of the human heart to love others and to love helping others by making them well. He understands that this is more about changing people's thoughts than about changing their chemical illnesses.… (more)