Jill Bolte Taylor

A stroke can shatter a life. She used hers to advance science and understanding.
One night, somebody might went to bed able bodied and woke up handicapped. It happened that quickly, as it can to anyone who has a stroke. Some people are totally immobilized, and others recover completely. Jill Bolte Taylor did even better than that.

A neuroanatomist and professor at Indiana University School of Medicine, Taylor, 48, realized one day in 1996 that she was suffering a brain hemorrhage. She felt her faculties slipping away and, as a brain scientist, understood exactly what was happening to her. Over the next decade, she fought to recover her abilities and continue studying the brain through the one she knows best: her own. In 2006 she published her book, A Stroke of Insight, about her experiences and brain science as a field. Through her writings and lectures, she has done perhaps more than anyone else to explain, both to the healthy and the stricken, what a stroke is.

Those of us struggling with the residual effects of stroke certainly don't need to be reminded of what it means when the brain is damaged. Some of us must struggle with the day by day frustrations of not being able to mount a flight of stairs, pick up a piece of paper or cross the room to get a magazine. But there is comfort in better grasping what has gone wrong, and enlightenment for those around you when they grasp it too. None of us needs sympathy; what we do need is a helping hand and understanding. Someone like Taylor provides that, helping a terrible blow become far less so.

Mehmet Oz

Professor Surgeon, a Turk descendant, and an America’s favourite doctor.

Once Eric Ripert, an executive chef and ceo of Le Bernardin, NY met him, he wouldn't have any idea who Mehmet was – a fact that even then put him in a minority. Mehmet, actually is a Columbia University heart surgeon, 47, who now has a series of best selling health books and Dr. Oz TV show with Oprah Winfrey, was already a famous face. As the chef talked with Mehmet, it became clear that he was intrigued by Mehmet's work in the hospital as Mehmet was by his in the kitchen of Le Bernardin. Once on an occasion, they agreed to try out each other’s job.

For two days, Ripert went to the OR with Mehmet, followed him on his rounds and even tried operating on a pig heart. He thought He did it well but later learned that if the heart had belonged to a human, the patient would have died. Mehmet did a lot better in his world than he did in his. Mehmet immediately took charge of his kitchen, was completely at ease leading his team of 40 cooks and even took time to greet guests. But it was not when Mehmet was interacting with diners and cooks that he learned the most about Mehmet; it was when Mehmet was interacting with patients. Ripert was impressed. According to him, Mehmet is a man of extraordinary compassion and strength, remarkably suited both to caring for his own patients and to carrying a message of health to a larger world.

Perhaps when you’ve had the powerful experience of opening human hearts, you find it a little easier to open your own.

references:
Columbia University Medical Center