The Quest to Know the Human Heart

The Quest to Know the Human Heart is the history of the discovery of the scientists who disrupted the "status quo," often with great pushback from peers, to bring to us new discoveries, knowledge, diagnostic procedures, treatment procedures, and medications in the field of cardiology and cardiac surgery, allowing people of today to live longer and healthier lives. How we got to where we are today is an interesting story of individual human determination and human-placed road blocks, which were overcome by those determined to make progress in the field of heart disease. More people die of heart disease than any other disease. Knowing how we got to where we are today and what the major breakthroughs have been will help those with heart disease to better understand why their physicians have chosen certain diagnostic tests and treatment.

About the Author

Dr. Guss grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and majored in Ancient and Medieval European History at Yale University, graduating in 1964. He received his MD from Harvard Medical School in 1968. After training in internal medicine at Harvard at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston and serving in the Public Health Service at the National Institutes of Health, he was a cardiology fellow at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania from 1972-1974 and then had an additional cardiology fellowship in cardiac catheterization at Harvard at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, 1974-1975. Dr. Guss practiced cardiology from 1975 until January 10, 2023, in a private cardiology group but also served as Director of Cardiac Catheterization and Angioplasty and Director of Coronary CTA at Morristown Medical Center in Morristown, New Jersey, during his practice years. He also served as an officer of the medical staff and has several research papers in cardiology. In 1992 he went to Gothenburg, Sweden, to perform research at the Salgrenska Hospital on a way to prevent restenosis after angioplasty. He retired from the practice of cardiology the day after he turned eighty years old, in January 2023.