You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service.

This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker.

Thanks for downloading this edition of the programme.

I do hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service, with me, Stephen Sacker.

Today I've come to the Hay Literary Festival in Wales.

To meet a renowned heart surgeon whose honest, unvarnished

writing about his life and death work has given his readers new insights into the reality

of life inside the operating theatre. Samir Nashif's family came to Britain from Palestine via Lebanon. He decided he wanted to be a doctor

after a short hospital stay in Beirut, and he went on to excel in the competitive world of British

medical school. He's long been renowned as a heart surgeon in one of the UK's top cardiac

treatment centres, the Papworth Hospital near Cambridge.

He's written two books about his work fixing broken hearts, the naked surgeon and the angina monologues.

As the title suggests, he's determined to demystify the surgeon's role.

But has he ended up revealing stuff that we'd rather not know?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, please give a very warm welcome to Samir Nashif.

Samir Nashif, a very, very warm welcome to Heart Talk.

You have described the heart as a very simple mechanism. You say it is a bag made of muscle, the simplest of pumps. Is that really the way you see it?

That is where it is. Yes, but it's so much more to all of us as human beings. Poets write about it.

Novelists invest it with so much. Do you not, when you look at that heart in the operating theatre, think of it in slightly more mystical terms?

Well, the mystical thing about it is that when it stops you're dead.

So that's quite important.

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