tatooles

Heartbeats is the light-hearted memoirs of one of the pioneers in modern cardiac surgery, Constantine ＂Dino＂ Tatooles, M.D. Dino’s stories, as told to his brother James E. Tatooles, will quite literally ＂warm your heart＂ as well as provide a background to the advances in cardiac surgery made over the past fifty years.

After Medical School, Dr. Tatooles interned at the University of Chicago and received a grant from the Heart Association to open his own medical laboratory. Later, the National Heart Institute selected Dr. Tatooles as one of five doctors to study at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

＂That’s where we started to perfect a lot of the new operative procedures that are used today,＂ recounts Dr. Tatooles.

Ironically, Dr. Tatooles recently had some difficult medicine of his own to swallow when he discovered that he needed a quintuple bypass. As his brother James E. Tatooles relates in Heartbeats, a procedure that Dino helped to develop eventually saved his life.

James E. Tatooles was born in Chicago in 1933 during the waning days of the depression. Together with his brother, ＂Dino＂, Jim was raised in a diverse ethnic neighborhood on the North side of Chicago.

He holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, served a two year stint in the Army Corp of Engineers in Germany, and earned an MBA in the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern University. After fifty years of building housing developments, commercial and industrial buildings throughout Chicago, Jim moved to Florida with Didi, his wife and backbone.

Uncle Pete sparked Jim’s interest in writing at an early age, watching him scribble stories in a wide lined spiral notebook. Jim enjoys being a story teller and family history chronicler. But most of all, Jim is happiest when in the midst of his family and friends including his three children and six grandchildren.