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2. Bleeding Hearts
Operating against the clock, bizarre experiments on groundhogs, and a crazed rabbi and a pigs heart… This is the story of heart surgery. Pumping 48 million gallons of blood in a lifetime, the heart is the engine room of the body; if it stops, we stop. Once the heart stops beating, we can survive for less than four minutes. So how to operate on it without killing the patient? This central conundrum made heart surgery almost unthinkable until just 50 years ago. This programme traces the race against time that heart surgeons faced as they pursued one dream – to be the first to successfully operate on the body’s most vital organ.