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A New Memoir by Richard A. Jonas
A life spent challenging dogma in the operating rooms where the future of congenital heart surgery was written.
From a boyhood in Adelaide, South Australia to the William E. Ladd Chair at Harvard and the founding of a new Heart Institute in Washington DC, Richard Jonas has spent a career at the frontier of surgery for children born with heart disease.
Little Hearts, Lifelong Impact is his candid, richly illustrated account of that journey — the triumphs and the tragedies, the mentors and the patients, and the hard-won lessons that no textbook ever taught.
About the Book
Dr. Jonas has authored and edited several of the most widely used textbooks in congenital cardiac surgery. But as he heard from surgeons around the world, even a “comprehensive” textbook leaves out the questions that matter most: how to build a career, how to protect a family, and how to keep your bearings in a field that deals every day with life and death.
This memoir sets out to answer them — written for surgeons and aspiring surgeons, for the families of children with congenital heart disease, and for anyone drawn to the story of how a specialty came of age.

About the Author
Dr. Jonas is Emeritus Professor of Surgery at George Washington School of Medicine and Chief Emeritus of the Heart Institute at Children’s National Hospital. Over four decades he helped pioneer landmark operations for congenital heart disease, led three of the field’s major professional societies, and built NIH-supported research programmes in Boston and Washington DC.
He is the author of over 400 peer-reviewed publications and has authored and edited several textbooks used by congenital cardiac surgeons around the world.
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