History Medicine Science

In Good Blood, best-selling writer Julian Guthrie tells the gripping tale of the race to cure a horrible affliction known as Rh disease that stalked families and caused a mother’s immune system to attack her own unborn child. The story is anchored by two very different men on two continents: Dr. John Gorman in New York, who would land on a brilliant yet contrarian idea, and the unassuming Australian whose almost magical blood - and his unyielding devotion to donating it - would save millions of lives.

A crucial component of anti-Black racism is the unconscionable disparity in health outcomes between Black and white Americans. Sickening examines this institutionalized inequality through dramatic, concrete events from the past two decades, revealing how unequal living conditions and inadequate medical care have become routine. From the spike in chronic disease after Hurricane Katrina to the lack of protection for Black residents during the Flint water crisis, author Anne Pollock takes listeners on a journey through the diversity of anti-Black racism operating in healthcare.

On November 23, 1849, in the heart of Boston, one of the city's richest men vanished. Dr. George Parkman, a Brahmin who owned much of Boston's West End, was last seen that afternoon visiting his alma mater, Harvard Medical School. Police scoured city tenements and the harbor - some leads put Parkman at sea or in Manhattan - but a Harvard janitor held a much darker suspicion: that their ruthless benefactor had never even left the Medical School building. His shocking discovery engulfed America in one of its most infamous trials.

Women physicians in 19th-century America faced a unique challenge in gaining acceptance to the medical field as it began its transformation into a professional institution. The profession had begun to increasingly insist on masculine traits as signs of competency. Not only were these traits inaccessible to women according to 19th-century gender ideology, but showing competence as a medical professional was not enough.

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.

The spark of life, fount of emotion, house of the soul - the heart lies at the centre of every facet of our existence. It’s so bound up in our deepest feelings that it can even suffer such distress from emotional trauma as to physically change shape. Practising cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar beautifully weaves his own experiences with the defining discoveries of the past to tell the story of our most vital organ. We see Daniel Hale Williams perform the first open heart surgery and Wilson Greatbatch invent the pacemaker - by accident.

Decades of data cannot be ignored: African-American adults are far more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than white adults. In a rousing indictment of the idea that notions of biological race should drive scientific inquiry, Sweetness in the Blood provides an ethnographic picture of biotechnology's framings of Type 2 diabetes risk and race and, importantly, offers a critical examination of the assumptions behind the recruitment of African American and African-descent populations for Type 2 diabetes research.

Mysterious and misunderstood, distorted by biblical imagery of disfigurement and uncleanness, Hansen's disease or leprosy has all but disappeared from America's consciousness. In Carville, Louisiana, the closed doors of the nation's last center for the treatment of leprosy open to reveal stories of sadness, separation, and even strength in the face of what was once a life-wrenching diagnosis. Drawn from interviews with living patients and extensive research in the leprosarium's archives, Carville: Remembering Leprosy in America tells the stories of former patients.

In the 16th century, when explorers travelled deep into the jungles of South America in search of gold and spices, they brought back many colourful tales of their adventures. None of these tales was more astonishing, or caused more concern, than that of the mystical properties of the substance with which the natives anointed their darts and arrows.

For most of human history, mental illness has been largely untreatable. Sufferers lived their lives - if they survived - in and out of asylums, accumulating life's wreckage around them. In 1948, all that changed when an Australian doctor and recently returned prisoner of war, working alone in a disused kitchen, set about an experimental treatment for one of the scourges of mankind - manic depression, or bipolar disorder. That doctor was John Cade and in that small kitchen he stirred up a miracle.

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.

In January 2020, leading epidemiologist Professor Mark Woolhouse learned of a new virus taking hold in China. He immediately foresaw a hard road ahead for the entire world, and emailed the Chief Medical Officer of Scotland warning that the UK should urgently begin preparations. A few days later he received a polite reply stating only that everything was under control.

A revelatory history of medicine, The Apothecary’s Wife challenges the myths of the triumph of science and instead uncovers the fascinating truth. Drawing on a vast body of archival material, Karen Bloom Gevirtz depicts the extraordinary cast of characters who brought about this transformation. She also explores domestic medicine’s values in responses to modern health crises, such as the eradication of smallpox, and what benefits we can learn from these events.

Where did Spanish flu come from, and what can the possible sites of origin tell us today? This book looks at how Spanish flu changed the focus of scientific thought from eugenics to the creation of public health, and how it unfolded across each continent.

How are illnesses diagnosed? When did the first successful organ transplant take place? Why are some pandemics so deadly? This audiobook explores big questions like these, explaining the breakthroughs and discoveries that have shaped our modern-day understanding of medicine and helped us protect and promote our health. The Medicine Book cuts through the jargon and is packed with pithy explanations of the most important milestones in medical history to untangle knotty concepts.

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.

Thinkers everywhere are conscious of two things, first, that the region of mystery has never before been so clearly defined, and secondly, that that region can be entered more easily than has hitherto been the case; it may, therefore, perhaps be induced to render up some of its secrets if investigators of all schools pursue their search with determination.

Dr. Lange graduated from medical school in 1981, right as a new plague swept across the globe. His story became intertwined with the story of HIV. At once a physician, scientist, AIDS activist, and medical diplomat, Lange studied ways to battle HIV and prevent its spread from mother to child. Fighting the injustices of poverty, Lange advocated for better access to health care for the poor and the vulnerable. The Impatient Dr. Lange is the story of one man's struggle against a global pandemic - and the tragic attack that may have slowed down the search for a cure.

A History of the World in Six Plagues is a timely examination of the role that confinement has played in fostering and hindering epidemics. In a rare blend of rigorous research and truly compelling story-telling, Dr Edna Bonhomme traces the long history of viral outbreaks under conditions of social confinement - the plantation system, colonial camps, imprisonment, quarantine, factories - and reveals how these enclosed spaces fuel epidemics.

Doctors at War is a candid account of a trauma surgical team based, for a tour of duty, at a field hospital in Helmand, Afghanistan. Mark de Rond tells of the highs and lows of surgical life in hard-hitting detail, bringing to life a morally ambiguous world in which good people face impossible choices and in which routines designed to normalize experience have the unintended effect of highlighting war’s absurdity. With stories that are at once comical and tragic, de Rond captures the surreal experience of being a doctor at war.