Showing titles in History & Commentary

It's no secret that American health care has become too costly and politicized to help everyone. So where do you turn if you can't afford doctors, or don't trust them? In this book, Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling examines the growing universe of non-traditional treatments—including some that are really non-traditional. With costs skyrocketing and anti-science sentiment spreading, the so-called "medical freedom" movement has grown. Now it faces its greatest challenge: going mainstream.

Six decades ago, visionary doctors achieved the impossible: the humble kidney, acknowledged since ancient times to be as essential to life as the heart, became the first human organ to be successfully replaced with a machine. Yet huge dialysis corporations, ambitious doctor-entrepreneurs, and Beltway lobbyists soon turned this medical miracle into an early experiment in for-profit medicine—and one of the nation's worst healthcare catastrophes.

Doctors at War tells the stories of physicians in France working to impede the German war effort and undermine French collaborators during the Occupation from 1940 to 1945. Determined to defeat the Third Reich's incursion, one group of prominent Paris doctors founded a medical network to treat injured Resistance fighters who they then secretly transported to Allied countries to avoid forced labor in Germany. Doctors at War stands as a dramatic, character-driven account of physicians' courage and resilience in the face of evil.

Formed at Camp Breckenridge, the 95th Evac arrived in Casablanca in April 1943, with 7,000 troops, 30 doctors, and 40 nurses. Hospital at War is the story of the 95th Evac Hospital as told by Zachary Friedenberg, a young surgeon at the time, fresh out of his internship. He tells the story of how the men and women of the 95th survived the war. He describes how they solved problems and learned to treat the war-wounded in the extreme heat of North Africa and during the frigid winters of the Rhineland.

Weaving together family history, genetic discovery, and scenes from her life, Ami McKay tells the compelling, true-science story of her own family's unsettling legacy of hereditary cancer while exploring the challenges that come from carrying the mutation that not only killed many people you loved, but might also kill you.

Food and Drug Administration approval for COVID-19 vaccines and the controversial Alzheimer's drug Aduhelm made headlines, but few of us know much about how the agency does its work. Why is the FDA the ultimate United States authority on a drug's safety and efficacy? In Drugs and the FDA, Mikkael Sekeres—a leading oncologist and former chair of the FDA's cancer drug advisory committee—tells the story of how the FDA became the most trusted regulatory agency in the world.

In Lost, medical historian Shannon Withycombe weaves together women’s personal writings and doctors’ publications from the 1820s through the 1910s to investigate the transformative changes in how Americans conceptualized pregnancy, understood miscarriage, and interpreted fetal tissue over the course of the 19th century. Withycombe’s pathbreaking research reveals how Americans construed, and continue to understand, miscarriage within a context of reproductive desires, expectations, and abilities.

The great scientists Louis Pasteur (1822-1893) and Joseph Lister (1827-1912) revolutionized medical practice in the 19th century. Pasteur's discovery of the cause of fermentation formed the basis of modern germ theory while Lister developed antiseptic surgical methods based on that. The book contains a description of the theory, and accounts of their work and experiments.

Stuart Jamieson's story is the story of four decades of advances in heart surgery. Taut, elegantly crafted, and ever-attentive to the patients for whom he was the last best chance, Close to the Sun is an adventurous, riveting account based on the experience of over 40,000 heart surgeries, where everything was on the line every moment in the O.R.

Alcohol and medicine have an inextricably intertwined history, with innovations in each altering the path of the other. The story stretches back to the ancient world, when beer and wine were used to provide nutrition, hydration and act as solvents for healing botanicals. Over time, alchemists distilled elixirs designed to cure all diseases, monastic apothecaries developed mystical botanical liqueurs, travelling physicians concocted dubious intoxicating nostrums and the drinks we’re familiar with today began to take form.

To some, food allergies seem like fabricated cries for attention. For others, they pose a dangerous health threat. Food allergies are bound up with so many personal and ideological concerns that it is difficult to determine what is medical and what is myth. This book parses the political, economic, cultural, and genuine health factors of a phenomenon that now dominates our interactions with others and our understanding of ourselves.

Based on the film by acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, The Mayo Clinic: Faith, Hope, Science chronicles the history of this unique organization, from its roots as an unlikely partnership between a country doctor and a Franciscan order of nuns to its position today as a worldwide model for patient care, research, and education. The book demonstrates how the institution’s remarkable 150-year history continues to inspire the way medicine is practiced there today.

Humankind has always wrestled with the existence of suffering. For two centuries, many American ministers, physicians, and scientists believed that an omnipotent and omniscient God created the world such that people might relieve suffering through ingenuity and learning. Others responded to the new worldview introduced by the scientific revolution as a threat to the divine order. In Imagining Progress, Kristin Johnson traces the history of Americans' evolving relationship with science and religion at "one of its most dramatic places"—the bedsides of dying children.

The second-century Greek physician Galen—the most famous doctor in antiquity after Hippocrates—is a central figure in Western medicine. A talented doctor, surgeon, writer, philosopher, teacher, pharmacologist, and inventor, Galen attended the court of Marcus Aurelius, living through outbreaks of plague that devastated the Roman Empire. He also served as a physician for professional gladiators. In writings that provided the foundation of Western medicine up to the nineteenth century, Galen created a unified account of health and disease.

Notre rapport à la santé a changé. Les traitements se sont diversifiés. Face à un problème de mal-être ou de santé, nous ne savons pas toujours vers qui nous tourner ou qui consulter. Se donner toutes les chances, c'est découvrir les bienfaits des médecines conventionnelles et complémentaires, mais aussi mesurer à quel point notre propre rôle est essentiel. Natacha Calestrémé donne la parole à des médecins et des chercheurs reconnus pour leur expertise scientifique et leur connaissance des pratiques thérapeutiques, et ouvre de nouveaux horizons pour nous aider à aller mieux.

Pain is the number one reason people schedule medical appointments. Yet many people do not receive adequate relief, especially for chronic pain. Pain: The Culture and Science of Pain describes the multiple factors that contribute to the ongoing problem of unrelieved pain. There are both cultural and scientific reasons. The book discusses how various cultures and religions throughout history have downplayed the importance of relieving pain. Such biases persist today.

In November 1942, Paul Andrew Kennedy (1912-1993) boarded the St. Elena in New York Harbor and sailed for Casablanca as part of Operation Torch, the massive Allied invasion of North Africa. As a member of the US Army's 2nd Auxiliary Surgical Group, he spent the next 34 months working in North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany, in close proximity to the front lines and often under air or artillery bombardment. He was uncomfortable, struck by the sorrows of war, and homesick for his wife.

Today, 90 percent of psychiatric beds are located in jails and prisons across the United States, institutions that confine disproportionate numbers of African Americans. After more than a decade of research, the celebrated scholar and activist Mab Segrest locates the deep historical roots of this startling fact, turning her sights on a long-forgotten cauldron of racial ideology: the state mental asylum system in which psychiatry was born and whose influences extend into our troubled present.

It is time for individuals, communities, and healthcare institutions to take action and prioritize the voices and needs of black women in healthcare. By amplifying their voices, promoting diversity in clinical trials, advocating for policy changes, and empowering black women through education, we can work towards a more equitable and inclusive healthcare system.

In Herding Immunity, Stacy Mintzer Herlihy explores the compelling history of vaccines and the equally long history of vaccination opposition. By connecting the contemporary anti-vax movement with its historical roots, Herlihy integrates modern conversations and reveals the profound impact vaccines have had on our society, highlighting the urgent need for societal change to ensure equitable vaccination for all.