Showing titles in History & Commentary

Plagues, pandemics, and infectious diseases have shaped the history of the Jewish people. Of course, there were the ten biblical plagues that famously smote the Egyptians—from the rain of frogs to the deaths of the firstborn—but that is just the start of the story. In The Eleventh Plague, Brown investigates the relation between Judaism and infectious diseases throughout the ages, from premodern and early-modern plagues, to rabbinic responses to smallpox and cholera, and to the curious practice of "Black Weddings" in which two orphans are married in a cemetery.

We all know the history of science that we learned from grade school textbooks: how Galileo used his telescope to show that the earth was not the center of the universe; how Newton divined gravity from the falling apple; how Einstein unlocked the mysteries of time and space with a simple equation. This history is made up of long periods of ignorance and confusion, punctuated once an age by a brilliant thinker who puts it all together. These few tower over the ordinary masses, and in the traditional account, it is to them that we owe science in its entirety. This belief is wrong.

This book is an antidote to hype and a salve to soothe the itch for stem-cell salvation. In it, Professor John Rasko, a leading physician-scientist, and writer-historian Carl Power take us on a wild historical tour of this scandal-prone field.

Again and again, microbes have shaped our health, our genetics, our history, our culture, our politics, even our religion and ethics. This book reveals much that scientists and cultural historians have learned about the pervasive interconnections between infectious microbes and humans. It also considers what our ongoing fundamental relationship with infectious microbes might mean for the future of the human species.

Part memoir, part illuminating treatise on why science is looking to the past for the future of medicine, Unlocking the Ancient Secrets to Healing chronicles the personal tribulations and professional discoveries behind the remarkable realization of Gail Lynn’s dream.

Una historia de las catástrofes deslumbrante, original y repleta de ideas para el futuro que pone en perspectiva el ya conocido como annus horribilis.

In the 1970s, Dr. Alan Scott sought to selectively weaken eye muscles to treat strabismus (when one or both eyes are misaligned) without surgery. After failed attempts with other agents, Scott developed a method to stabilize the bacteria that causes botulism, culminating in a drug that eventually became known as Botox.

Over the past two decades, we have started talking more about common mental health conditions like depression and anxiety. But complex conditions like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and psychosis have been left behind, as have many of the people who live with these conditions or who care for them. Part memoir, part deep-dive investigation, The One Thing We've Never Spoken About is filled with rage at how our nation's public discourse, emergency services and healthcare systems continue to fail so many people.

Just Care is Akemi Nishida’s thoughtful examination of care injustice and social justice enabled through care. The current neoliberal political economy has turned care into a business opportunity for the healthcare industrial complex and a mechanism of social oppression and control. Nishida analyzes the challenges people negotiate whether they are situated as caregivers, receivers, or both. Also illuminated is how people with disabilities come together to assemble community care collectives and bed activism (resistance and visions emerging from the space of bed) to reimagine care as a key element for social change.

This riveting audiobook takes the listener around the globe and through the centuries to discover how different cultures have sought to combat and treat physical pain. With colorful stories and sometimes frightening anecdotes, Dr. Thomas Dormandy describes a checkered progression of breakthroughs, haphazard experiments, ignorant attitudes, and surprising developments in human efforts to control pain.

The End of the Beginning is a remarkable history of cancer treatment and the evolution of our understanding of its dynamic interplay with the immune system. Through Michael Kinch’s personal experience as a cancer researcher at Washington University and the head of the oncology program at a leading biotechnology company, we witness the incredible accumulation of breakthrough science and its rapid translation into life-saving technologies that have begun to dramatically increase the quality and quantity of life for cancer patients.

The good, the bad, and the ugly of the winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine are explored in these entertaining biographies of the world’s most highly recognized scientists. From unapologetic Nazis to dedicated humanitarians who carried out prize-winning research while being resistance fighters or peace activists, these engaging true stories reveal the depths of both the human strength and depravity of the people who forged medical progress in the 20th century.

Arthur Conan Doyle was a GP before he became a writer. He uses his medical knowledge widely in the Sherlock Holmes stories. He bases the deductive skills of his hero detective on the diagnostic techniques a GP uses with a patient. He even gives Sherlock a GP sidekick. This all contributes to the enduring popularity of the Sherlock Holmes stories, over 130 years after the first story was published.

In this first history of the military ambulance, historian John S. Haller Jr. documents the development of medical technologies for treating and transporting wounded soldiers on the battlefield. More than a history of medical evacuation systems and vehicles, this exhaustively researched and richly illustrated volume tells a fascinating story, giving listeners a unique perspective of the changing nature of warfare in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Antebellum New Orleans sat at the heart of America's slave and cotton kingdoms. It was also where yellow fever epidemics killed as many as 150,000 people during the nineteenth century. With little understanding of mosquito-borne viruses, a person's only protection against the scourge was to "get acclimated" by surviving the disease. Repeated epidemics bolstered New Orleans's strict racial hierarchy by introducing another hierarchy, what Kathryn Olivarius terms "immunocapital." Whereas immunity conferred privilege on whites, it relegated enslaved people to the most grueling labor.

For the crime of falling sick without wealth, Americans today face lawsuits, wage garnishment, home foreclosure, and jail time. Yet who really profits from aggressive medical debt collection? Your Money or Your Life reveals how medical debt collection became a multi-billion-dollar industry and how everyday Americans are made to pay the price. Emergency physician and historian Luke Messac weaves patient stories into a history of law, finance, and medicine to show how debt and debt collection are destroying the foundational trust between doctors and patients at the heart of American healthcare.

On savait que le cerveau était l'entité la plus complexe de l'univers connu. Mais les nouvelles découvertes démontrent que ses possibilités sont bien plus étonnantes qu'on ne le croyait. Non seulement il est totalement élastique - même âgé, handicapé, voire amputé, il peut se reconstruire, apprendre, inventer -, mais aussi totalement social - un cerveau n'existe qu'en résonance avec d'autres : nous sommes neuronalement constitués pour entrer en empathie.

Several years ago, Patrick J. Kennedy shared the story of his personal and family challenges with mental illness and addiction—and the nation’s—in his bestselling memoir, A Common Struggle. Now, he and his Common Struggle coauthor, award-winning healthcare journalist Stephen Fried, have crafted this powerful new book sharing the untold stories of others—a special group who agreed to talk about their illnesses, treatments, and struggles for the first time.

For centuries, doctors have struggled to define mental illness - how do you diagnose it, how do you treat it, how do you even know what it is? In search of an answer, in the 1970s a Stanford psychologist named David Rosenhan and seven other people - sane, normal, well-adjusted members of society - went undercover into asylums around America to test the legitimacy of psychiatry's labels. Rosenhan's watershed study broke open the field of psychiatry, closing down institutions and changing mental health diagnosis forever.

African American Slave Medicine offers a critical examination of how African American slaves' medical needs were addressed during the years before and surrounding the Civil War. Drawing upon ex-slave interviews conducted during the 1930s and 1940s by the Works Project Administration (WPA), Dr. Herbert C. Covey inventories many of the herbal, plant, and non-plant remedies used by African American folk practitioners during slavery.