Harris B. Shumacker, Jr. 476 pages. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press; 1992. $57.50.

Is this the history of cardiac surgery or a history of cardiac surgery? The answers depend on what you think should constitute such a history.

On the one hand, this book is a careful, detailed, and encyclopedic description of events. The author's implicit theoretical supposition is that to understand the history of cardiac surgery, the writings and speeches of cardiac surgeons should be used to create a list of discoveries and discoverers. To some, these assumptions will seem both obvious and unproblematic. For readers who wish to find in their history primarily events, dates, people, and projects, this book—clearly a labor of love by a prominent cardiac surgeon—will be a complete and compelling account.

On the other hand, those readers wishing a more nuanced and contextual account—a group that includes most historians of medicine—will find this book to be more an annotated bibliography than a history. At the end of the book the author includes two paragraphs that list subjects relevant to the history of cardiac surgery that he has chosen to omit. But a deeper understanding of a history of cardiac surgery would require a more sophisticated treatment throughout the book. For example, context matters. The pioneering 1893 repair of a cardiac wound described on pages 12 to 13 was done at Provident Hospital in Chicago. The fact that the newly opened institution was the first black-controlled American hospital is surely worthy of mention. Also, literature exists on the history of cardiac surgery that is neither properly acknowledged nor incorporated into the intellectual fabric of the account. For example, the author's discussion of 1920s attempts at mitral valve surgery does not come to grips with the social and ethical issues raised in a classic article on the history of cardiac surgery: "The Clinical Moratorium: A Case Study of Mitral Valve Surgery." Perhaps this was omitted because this 1969 work is not by physicians but by two of the finest medical sociologists in the field—Judith P. Swazey and Renee C. Fox.

A full account of the history of cardiac surgery would include both surgeons and many others who were essential to the changing nature of the field, would include cardiac surgery as practiced by nonelite as well as elite surgeons, would use the literature of sociology and history as well as that of medicine, and would include the external context as well as the internal content. Whoever writes that history will probably find this book a useful source for the chronologic development of the field.