Medical History

Why do so many world-changing insights come from people with little or no related experience? Charles Darwin was a geologist when he proposed the theory of evolution. And it was an astronomer who finally explained what happened to the dinosaurs. Frans Johansson's The Medici Effect shows how breakthrough ideas most often occur when we bring concepts from one field into a new, unfamiliar territory, and offers examples on how we can turn the ideas we discover into path-breaking innovations.

Karl Deisseroth has spent his life pursuing truths about the human mind, both as a renowned clinical psychiatrist and as a researcher creating and developing the revolutionary field of optogenetics, which uses light to help decipher the brain’s workings. In Projections, he combines his knowledge of the brain’s inner circuitry with a deep empathy for his patients to examine what mental illness reveals about the human mind and the origin of human feelings - how the broken can illuminate the unbroken.

In Origin Story, medical historian Howard Markel recounts the two-year period (1858 to 1860) of Darwin's writing of On the Origin of Species through its spectacular success and controversy. Simultaneously, Markel delves into the mysterious health symptoms Darwin developed, combing the literature to emerge with a cogent diagnosis of a case that has long fascinated medical historians.

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.

For as long as medicine has been a practice, women's bodies have been treated like objects to be practiced on: examined and ignored, idealized and sexualized, shamed, subjugated, mutilated, and dismissed. The history of women’s healthcare is a story in which women themselves have too often been voiceless—a narrative instead written from the perspective of men who styled themselves as authorities on the female of the species, yet uninformed by women’s own voices, thoughts, fears, pain and experiences.

Galen of Pergamum (A.D. 129-ca. 216) began his remarkable career tending to wounded gladiators in provincial Asia Minor. Later in life he achieved great distinction as one of a small circle of court physicians to the family of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, at the very heart of Roman society. Susan Mattern's The Prince of Medicine offers the first authoritative biography in English of this brilliant, audacious, and profoundly influential figure.

At ten-years-old she’s injured and feels damaged beyond repair.Years pass, and she buries the incident deep. Only twenty-three, Rebekah has to make a hard choice without knowing what Dustin will do…how he will feel. Her fiancé is not with her when the Old German Baptist Brethren Annual Meeting ends. Will she meekly accept the dishonest way the conference was handled? Accept the irregularities? Accept the way nine powerful men hijacked the Church she loves? Or will she stand for the truth even if the man of her dreams says “Farewell?” Scroll up, click the buy button, and grab your ...

A tasty compendium of spices and a fascinating history and wide array of uses of the world’s favorite flavors - The Book of Spice: From Anise to Zedoary reveals the amazing history of spices both familiar and esoteric. John O’Connell’s erudite chapters combine history with insights into art, religion, medicine, science, and they’re richly seasoned with anecdotes and recipes.

With his tumultuous love life, relentless pursuit of a male heir, and drastic religious transformation, England's King Henry VIII's life sounds more like reality television than history. He was a man of fascinating contradictions. What could have caused his incredible paradoxes? Could there be a simple medical explanation for the king's descent into tyranny? Where do the answers lie? Blood will tell.

At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own. This event has a shocking ricochet effect on a group of people, mostly friends, who are directly or indirectly influenced by the incident. In this remarkable novel, Christos Tsiolkas turns his unflinching and all-seeing eye onto that which connects us all: the modern family and domestic life in the 21st century.

G. Wayne Miller has dramatically and meticulously reconstructed an amazing true story: how a group of renegade Minnesota surgeons, led by Dr. Walt Lillehei, made medical history by becoming the first doctors to operate deep inside the human heart.

Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, it never occurred to Uché Blackstock and her twin sister, Oni, that they would be anything but physicians. In the 1980s, their mother headed an organization of Black women physicians, and for years the girls watched these fiercely intelligent women in white coats tend to their patients and neighbors, host community health fairs, cure ills, and save lives.

Author Leslie Lehr wants to talk about boobs. She’s gone from size AA to DDD and everything between, from puberty to motherhood, enhancement to cancer, and beyond. And she’s not alone - these are classic life stages for women today. At turns funny and heartbreaking, A Boob’s Life explores both the joys and hazards inherent to living in a woman’s body. Lehr deftly blends her personal narrative with national history, starting in the 1960s with the women’s liberation movement and moving to the current feminist dialogue and what it means to be a woman.

Discover the fascinating intersections of history, medicine, and the human experience in "Illness and Infamy." This captivating book delves into the lives of historical figures and notorious criminals, examining how their medical conditions influenced their actions and shaped the course of history. From the impact of pandemics on world events to the personal struggles of leaders and the chilling stories of killers, each chapter reveals the complex relationships between health, power, and infamy. Explore the captivating stories of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, and ...

Hazel Sinnett is alone and half-convinced the events of the year before—the immortality, Beecham’s vial—were a figment of her imagination. She doesn’t even know if Jack is alive or dead. All she can really do now is treat patients and maintain Hawthornden Castle as it starts to decay around her. When saving a life leads to her arrest, Hazel seems doomed to rot in prison until a message intervenes: Hazel has been specifically requested to be the personal physician of Princess Charlotte, the sickly granddaughter of King George III.

Dr. Sartor wrote an inspiring first-person account of how he treated more than 1,000 patients—and by his reckoning, lost only five—which lay forgotten in a lockbox of family artifacts until it was discovered decades later by his granddaughter, Beth Obermeyer, a journalist and author of three previous books. Beth knew her grandfather through her teenage years and grew up absorbing family stories. Based upon Dr. Sartor’s memoir and her years of research, she vividly reconstructs his life from childhood in Luxembourg to medical school in Chicago, courtship and marriage.

A young woman puts on a white coat for her first day as a student doctor. So begins this powerful debut, which follows our unnamed narrator through cadaver dissection, surgical rotation, difficult births, sudden deaths, and a budding relationship with a seminarian. In the troubled world of the hospital, where the language of blood tests and organ systems so often hides the heart of the matter, she works her way from one bed to another, from a man dying of substance use and tuberculosis, to a child in pain crisis, to a young woman, fading from confusion to aphasia to death.

Larry Brilliant's life journey has led him on a purposeful path across continents and countercultural movements, marching arm in arm with the men and women who defined a generation. A man who has always been in the right place at the right time, Brilliant has engaged with some of the most prominent thought leaders, spiritual masters, heroes, and icons in the world, including Neem Karoli Baba (Maharajji), Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, Mikhail Gorbachev, Wavy Gravy, the Grateful Dead, the Dalai Lama, and Barack Obama.

Flight for Life is the heart-stopping account of one of the most gripping rescue missions in African history, told by a doctor involved in saving the lives of Nigerian workers who became victims of a tragic American chemical company explosion. Dr. Stewart and his colleague moved mountains and cut red tape to fly patients to one of the premiere burn centers in the United States.

More than four hundred abandoned suitcases filled with patients’ belongings were found when Willard Psychiatric Center closed in 1995 after 125 years of operation. They are skillfully examined here and compared to the written record to create a moving—and devastating—group portrait of twentieth-century American psychiatric care.