Showing results for "The War of the Worlds" in Physical Illness & Disease

CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta offers an accessible, data-packed answer to our biggest questions about COVID-19. As the doctor who's been holding America's hand through the crisis with compassion, clarity and well-earned wisdom, he gives you the unvarnished story behind the pandemic, including insights about the novel virus' behavior, and offers practical tools to ready ourselves for what lies ahead.

On the night of December 2nd, 1943, the Luftwaffe bombed a critical Allied port in Bari, Italy, sinking 17 ships and killing over a thousand servicemen and hundreds of civilians. Caught in the surprise air raid was the John Harvey, an American Liberty ship carrying a top-secret cargo of 2,000 mustard bombs to be used in retaliation if the Germans resorted to gas warfare. After young sailors began suddenly dying with mysterious symptoms, Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Alexander, a doctor and chemical weapons expert, was dispatched to investigate.

Few diseases are more gruesome than typhus. Transmitted by body lice, it afflicts the dispossessed - refugees, soldiers, and ghettoized peoples - causing hallucinations, terrible headaches, boiling fever, and often death. The disease plagued the German army on the Eastern Front and left the Reich desperate for a vaccine. For this they turned to the brilliant and eccentric Polish zoologist Rudolf Weigl.

Keggie Carew grew up in the gravitational field of an unorthodox father who lived on his wits and dazzling charm. As his memory begins to fail, she embarks on a quest to unravel his story and soon finds herself in a far more consuming place than she had bargained for. Tom Carew was a maverick, a left-handed stutterer, a law unto himself. As a member of an elite SOE unit, he was parachuted behind enemy lines to raise guerrilla resistance in France, then Burma, in the Second World War.

With a death toll of between 50 and 100 million people and a global reach, the Spanish flu of 1918–1920 was the greatest human disaster. And yet, in our popular conception it exists largely as a footnote to World War I. Laura Spinney recounts the story of an overlooked pandemic, tracing it from Alaska to Brazil, from Persia to Spain and from South Africa to Odessa. She shows how the pandemic was shaped by the interaction of a virus and the humans it encountered, and how this devastating natural experiment put both the ingenuity and the vulnerability of humans to the test.

Listen to this detailed and chilling account of the influenza outbreak of 1918. A terrifying virus that stretched across the globe. Even now, a century after the great flu of 1918, which left an estimated 50 to 100 million people dead worldwide, there's still no cure. This audiobook examines influenza from all sorts of angles - history, diagnosis and treatment, economics and epidemiology‚ healthcare policy, and prevention.

Karen M. Masterson, a journalist turned malaria researcher, uncovers the complete story behind this dark tale of science, medicine and war. Illuminating, riveting and surprising, The Malaria Project captures the ethical perils of seeking treatments for disease while ignoring the human condition.

Dr. Ernst Gräfenberg was among the most sought-after gynecologists in pre-World War II Germany. The creator of the first IUD, known as the Gräfenberg ring, he was posthumously credited with identifying the eponymous "Gräfenberg spot" or G-spot. He was also a Jew in Nazi Germany, and by 1938 he had been stripped of his practice, his possessions, and his freedom and was languishing in a Nazi prison.

The gripping story of a chemical weapons catastrophe, the cover-up, and how one American Army doctor’s discovery led to the development of the first drug to combat cancer, known today as chemotherapy.