History Medicine Science

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, one renowned scientist, in his famous bowtie, appeared daily on major news networks such as MSNBC, NPR, the BBC, and others. Dr. Peter J. Hotez often went without sleep, working around the clock to develop a nonprofit COVID-19 vaccine and to keep the public informed. During that time, he was one of the most trusted voices on the pandemic and was even nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his selfless work. He also became one of the main targets of anti-science rhetoric that gained traction through conservative news media.

The remarkable stories of the world's most famous body parts. All too often, historical figures feel distant and abstract; more myth and legend than real flesh and blood. These stories of bodies and its parts remind us that history's most-loved, and most-hated, were real breathing creatures who inhabited organs and limbs just like us - until they're cut off that is. Medical historian Dr Suzie Edge investigates over 40 cases of how we've used, abused, dug up, displayed, experimented on, and worshipped body parts.

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.

Arising from collaboration between a doctor and a historian, Disease and History offers the general listener a wide-ranging and accessible account of the ways in which disease has left its dramatic mark on the past. It discusses the impact made by bubonic plague and other infections upon the ancient and medieval worlds; the likely role of syphilis in the careers of Henry VIII and Ivan the Terrible; the significance of smallpox for the conquest of Mexico; and the contribution of typhus to Napoleon's downfall and of hemophilia to the collapse of Tsarist rule in Russia.

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.

By investigating thousands of descriptions of epidemics reaching back before the fifth-century-BCE Plague of Athens to the distrust and violence that erupted with Ebola in 2014, Epidemics challenges a dominant hypothesis in the study of epidemics, that invariably across time and space, epidemics provoked hatred, blaming of the "other", and victimizing bearers of epidemic diseases, particularly when diseases were mysterious, without known cures or preventive measures.

Drawn from historical records and current news headlines, A Taste for Poison weaves together the tales of spurned lovers, shady scientists, medical professionals, and political assassins to show how the precise systems of the body can be impaired to lethal effect through the use of poison. From the deadly origins of the gin and tonic cocktail to the arsenic-laced wallpaper in Napoleon’s bedroom, A Taste for Poison leads listeners on a fascinating tour of the intricate, complex systems that keep us alive - or don’t.

The Nobel laureate Otto Warburg was widely regarded in his day as one of the most important biochemists of the 20th century, a man whose research was integral to humanity’s understanding of cancer. He was also among the most despised figures in Nazi Germany. As a Jewish homosexual living openly with his male partner, Warburg represented all that the Third Reich abhorred. Yet Hitler and his top advisors dreaded cancer, and protected Warburg in the hope that he could cure it.

We Band of Angelsis the story of women searching for adventure, caught up in the drama and danger of war. On the same day the Japanese Imperial Navy launched its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, it also struck American bases in the Far East, chief among them the Philippines. That raid led to the first major land battle for America in World War II and, in the end, to the largest defeat and surrender of American forces.

In The Knife Man, Wendy Moore unveils John Hunter's murky and macabre world - a world characterized by public hangings, secret expeditions to dank churchyards, and gruesome human dissections in pungent attic rooms. This is a fascinating portrait of a remarkable pioneer and his determined struggle to haul surgery out of the realms of meaningless superstitious ritual and into the dawn of modern medicine.

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. Written in plain English, 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.

On June 25, 1973, a seven-year-old girl went missing from the Montana campground where her family was vacationing. Somebody had slit open the back of their tent and snatched her from under their noses. None of them saw or heard anything. Susie Jaeger had vanished into thin air, plucked by a shadow. As days stretched into weeks, and weeks into months, Special Agent Pete Dunbar attended a workshop at FBI Headquarters in Quantico, Virgina, led by two agents who had hatched a radical new idea: What if criminals left a psychological trail that would lead us to them?

The brand-new, hilarious book from best-selling, record-breaking author Adam Kay. The olden days were pretty fun if you liked wearing chainmail or chopping people's heads off, but there was one tiny little problem back then...doctors didn't have the slightest clue about how our bodies worked. It's time to find out why Ancient Egyptians thought the brain was just a useless load of old stuffing that might as well be chucked in the bin, why teachers forced their pupils to smoke cigarettes, why hairdressers would cut off their customers' legs and why people used to get paid for farting.

In this partially autobiographical work, best-selling author Lewis Thomas offers insights on subjects as wide-ranging as gender differences, how it feels to be a patient, human vs. computer intelligence, the future of cancer research, and the longevity of the planet—interspersing all with charming anecdotes about his family, his colleagues and himself.

Cystic fibrosis was once a mysterious disease that killed infants and children. Now it could be the key to healing millions with genetic diseases of every type - from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to diabetes and sickle cell anemia. Told from the perspectives of the patients, families, physicians, scientists, and philanthropists fighting on the front lines, Breath from Salt is a remarkable story of unlikely scientific and medical firsts, of setbacks and successes, and of people who refused to give up hope....

The year is 1925. It is sixty degrees below zero. The wind sweeps tons of snow over the deep-frozen Alaskan landscape. The nearest railhead is seven hundred miles away. Airplanes cannot fly. The way to Nome is blocked by a treacherous frozen sound, an icebound port, and mountains to the west. But there is a diphtheria epidemic in Nome. The children need serum from the outside world if they are to survive. Their only hope is a few chosen Eskimo drivers and their teams of dogs.

Transcribed from the original lectures recorded at San Francisco State University in 1987, The Nature of Drugs series highlights Shulgin’s engaging lecture style peppered with illuminating anecdotes and amusing asides. Ostensibly taught as an introductory course on drugs and biochemistry, these books serve as both a historical record of Shulgin’s teaching style and the culmination of his philosophy on drugs, psychopharmacology, states of consciousness, and societal and individual freedoms pertaining to their use, both medicinal and exploratory.

The Zodiac and the Salts of Salvation is a two-part work first published in 1932 by frequent collaborators Dr. George Washington Carey (1845-1924) and Inez Eudora Perry (1871-1961). This book explores the use of certain minerals called “cell-salts” to cure disease and how one's Zodiac sign impacts their cell-salt deficiencies.

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.

At the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Joshua Mezrich creates life from loss, transplanting organs from one body to another. In this intimate, profoundly moving work, he illuminates the extraordinary field of transplantation that enables this kind of miracle to happen every day.