Professor Stephen Westaby FRCS (born 27 July 1948) is a British heart surgeon at John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, England. [1]
Westaby and his team performed Peter Houghton's heart operation in June 2000, implanting a Jarvik 7 artificial left ventricular assist device, a turbine pump. Peter Houghton (1938–2007) became the longest living person with an electrical heart pump in the world. [2] [3]
His memoir of his career as a heart surgeon, Open Heart: A Heart Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table, was published in 2017 by HarperCollins. [4] The book was shortlisted for the 2017 Costa Book Awards Biography Award [5] and won the 2017 BMA president's choice award. [6] A second memoir, The Knife's Edge: The Heart and Mind of a Cardiac Surgeon, was published by HarperCollins in 2019. [7]