On the cover of Ayesha Nathoo's new book, South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard appears captured by the lens of a bulky movie camera which looms as large as Barnard himself in the frame. Escorted by a policeman and amidst an apparent entourage, the surgeon glances back, mouth agape; the facial expression of the famously photogenic young surgeon resists easy decipherment (Is he bemused? Confused? Or merely gratified by the media storm?). Potential readers of Nathoo's revised doctoral dissertation will immediately grasp the author's message that the media is as much the object of this work as the medic. Nathoo focuses her analysis on a narrow geographic and temporal slice of the history of the heart transplant, namely Britain in the period between Barnard's ‘miracle in Cape Town’ in December 1967 and December 1969, when the extremely high mortality from the procedure prompted a moratorium on the part of transplant surgeons. As the author points out, heart transplantation was an international development, but the surgery took different forms in different nations. Britain, Nathoo argues, was home to ‘many world-class cardiac and transplant surgeons with international reputations’, and the nation possessed a ‘globally respected’ press and public broadcasting system (p. 3). The media and the medical, the author claims, cannot be decoupled from the understanding of the heart transplant in the United Kingdom. Even so, it may be useful to point out that in this brief interlude of worldwide enthusiasm for heart transplants, British surgeons performed just three heart transplants in the years 1968–9, far fewer than their surgical colleagues in the United States (73 heart transplants), Canada (15), France (10) and South Africa (7).