Showing titles in History & Commentary

In the late 1600s, a distinguished English polymath, Robert Hooke, and an eccentric Dutch cloth merchant, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, look down their handmade microscopes. What they see introduces a radical concept that sweeps through biology and medicine, touching virtually every aspect of the two sciences and altering both forever. It is the fact that complex living organisms are assemblages of tiny self-contained, self-regulating units. Our organs, our physiology, our selves—hearts, blood, brains—are built from these compartments. Hooke christens them 'cells'.

Leading transplant surgeon Dr. Joshua Mezrich creates life from loss, moving organs from one body to another. In this intimate, profoundly moving work, he examines more than one hundred years of remarkable medical breakthroughs, connecting this fascinating history with the stories of his own patients. Gripping and evocative, How Death Becomes Life takes us inside the operating room and presents the stark dilemmas that transplant surgeons must face daily.

Taking a thematic rather than strictly chronological approach, W. F. Bynum, explores the key turning points in the history of Western medicine - such as the first surgical procedures, the advent of hospitals, the introduction of anesthesia, X-Rays, vaccinations, and many other innovations, as well as the rise of experimental medicine. The book also explores Western medicine's encounters with Chinese and Indian medicine, as well as nontraditional treatments such as homeopathy, chiropractic, and other alternative medicines.

Through the moving stories of real people, neurologist Suzanne O'Sullivan explores the complex world of modern diagnosis, comparing the impact of a medical label to the pain of not knowing. With scientific authority and compassionate storytelling, she opens up new possibilities for how we might approach our health and our suffering.

When Rachel Somerstein had an unplanned C-section with her first child, the experience was anything but the “routine” operation her doctor described. A series of errors by her clinicians led to a real-life nightmare: surgery without anesthesia. The ensuing mental and physical complications left her traumatized and desperate for answers about how things could have gone so wrong. In the United States, one in three babies is born via C-section, a rate that has grown exponentially over the past fifty years.

The story of nursing is complicated. It is woven into war, plague, religion, the economy, and our individual lives in myriad ways. In Taking Care, journalist Sarah DiGregorio chronicles the lives of nurses past and tells the stories of those today—caregivers at the vital intersection of health care and community who are actively changing the world, often invisibly.

In this astonishing book, Mark Woolhouse recounts the history of the COVID-19 pandemic through the eyes of a scientist at the very centre of the action. He explores the failures and successes of the United Kingdom’s, and the world’s, response to the virus, shows how he briefed both the British and Scottish governments on the scale of the fight ahead and candidly describes the challenges scientists faced when working with politicians.

In 1995, a scandal erupted when the New York Times revealed that the Smithsonian possessed a century’s worth of nude “posture” photos of college students. In this riveting history, Beth Linker tells why these photos were only a small part of the incredible story of twentieth-century America’s largely forgotten posture panic—a decades-long episode in which it was widely accepted as scientific fact that Americans were suffering from an epidemic of bad posture, with potentially catastrophic health consequences.

In this unique history, you will discover how ill health has been with us for as long as humans have existed, as has the drive to treat and understand it. Over the course of centuries, the ways in which doctors have engaged with sickness has changed drastically, and so too have the tools at their disposal.

David Oshinsky, whose last book, Polio: An American Story, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, chronicles the history of America's oldest hospital and in so doing also charts the rise of New York to the nation's preeminent city, the path of American medicine from butchery and quackery to a professional and scientific endeavor, and the growth of a civic institution.

In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white "ladies". Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities.

Poppy tears, opium, heroin, fentanyl: humankind has been in thrall to the ‘Milk of Paradise’ for millennia. The latex of papaver somniferum is a bringer of sleep, of pleasurable lethargy, of relief from pain - and hugely addictive. A commodity without rival, it is renewable, easy to extract, transport and refine, and subject to an insatiable global demand. No other substance in the world is as simple to produce or as profitable. It is the basis of a gargantuan industry built upon a shady underworld, but ultimately it is a farm-gate material that lives many lives ....

Still Not Safe is the story of the rise of the patient - safety movement - and how an "epidemic" of medical errors was derived from a reality that didn't support such a characterization. Physician Robert Wears and organizational theorist Kathleen Sutcliffe trace the origins of patient safety to the emergence of market trends that challenged the place of doctors in the larger medical ecosystem.

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 Out Cold, science writer Phil Jaekl chronicles the underappreciated story of human innovation with cold, from Ancient Egypt, where it was used to treat skin irritations, to 18th-century London, where scientists used it in their first explorations of suspended animation. Throughout history, physicians have used cold to innovate life extension, enable distant space missions, and explore consciousness.

Singular Intimacies is the story of becoming a doctor by immersion at Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the country—and perhaps the most legendary. It is both the classic inner-city hospital and a unique amalgam of history, insanity, beauty, and intellect. When Danielle Ofri enters these 250-year-old doors as a tentative medical student, she is immediately plunged into the teeming world of urban medicine: mysterious illnesses, life-and-death decisions, patients speaking any one of a dozen languages, and overworked interns.

When Thomas Edison began wiring New York City with a direct current electricity distribution system in the 1880s, he gave humankind the magic of electric light, heat, and power; in the process, though, he inadvertently opened a Pandora's Box of unimaginable illness and death. Dirty Electricity tells the story of Dr. Samuel Milham, the scientist who first alerted the world about the frightening link between occupational exposure to electromagnetic fields and human disease.

The Immune Mystery follows doctor and researcher Anita Kåss' quest to solve the autoimmune puzzle, beginning with the premature death of her mother, who developed rheumatoid arthritis shortly after giving birth to Anita. As a child, Anita vowed to study the illness and one day find a cure. Becoming a respected doctor and researcher, Anita devoted herself to studying autoimmune disorders like rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and multiple sclerosis. A compelling blend of incredible determination and cutting-edge science, this book changes the way we think about autoimmune diseases.

In 1900, the U.S. sent three doctors to Cuba to discover how yellow fever was spread. There, they launched one of history's most controversial human studies. Compelling and terrifying, The American Plague depicts the story of yellow fever and its reign in this country - and in Africa, where even today it strikes thousands every year. With "arresting tales of heroism," it is a story as much about the nature of human beings as it is about the nature of disease.

Most stories of medical progress come with ready-made heroes. John Snow traced the origins of London's 1854 cholera outbreak to a water pump, leading to the birth of epidemiology. Florence Nightingale's contributions to the care of soldiers in the Crimean War transformed hospitals from crucibles of infection to sanctuaries of recuperation. Yet histories of individual innovators ignore many key sources of medical knowledge.