Medical History

Americans are in the midst of a world-historic drug binge. Opiates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, marijuana, antidepressants, antipsychotics—across the board, consumption has shot up in the twenty-first century. At the same time, the United States is home to the largest prison system in the world, justified in part by a now zombified "war" on drugs. How did we get here?

The death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1945 sent shock waves around the world. His lifelong physician swore that the president had always been a picture of health. Later, in 1970, Roosevelt's cardiologist admitted he had been suffering from uncontrolled hypertension and that his death from a cerebral hemorrhage was a cataclysmic event waiting to happen.

The "absorbing and powerful" (Wall Street Journal) story of two pioneering suffragette doctors who shattered social expectations and transformed modern medicine during World War I. In No Man's Land, Wendy Moore illuminates this turbulent moment of global war and pandemic when women were, for the first time, allowed to operate on men. Their fortitude and brilliance serve as powerful reminders of what women can achieve against all odds.

Mary Jane Seacole (1805­-1881) was a British Jamaican nurse, author, world traveler, and businesswoman renowned for her work with the soldiers of the Crimean War.

As an RAF medical officer, Aidan McCarthy served in France, survived Dunkirk, and was plunged into adventures in the Japanese-American arena comparable with those of famous war heroes. Interned by the Japanese in Java, he helped his fellow prisoners with amazing ingenuity in awful conditions. En route back to Japan in 1944, his ship was torpedoed, but he was rescued by a whaling boat and re-interned in Japan.

There is a lot of misinformation thrown around today, especially Online. Headlines tell us to do this, not that - all in the name of living longer, better, thinner, younger. In Hype, Dr. Nina Shapiro distinguishes between the falsehoods and the evidence-backed truth. In her work at Harvard and UCLA, with more than 20 years of experience in both clinical and academic medicine, she helps patients make important health decisions everyday. She’s bringing those lessons to life here with a blend of science and personal stories to discuss her new definition of “a healthy life”.

A Silent Spring for the human body, this wide-ranging, genre-crossing literary mystery interweaves the author’s quest to understand the source of her own condition with her telling of the story of the chronically ill 19th-century diarist Alice James—ultimately uncovering the many hidden health hazards of life in America.

Sandra Lindsay immigrated to the United States from Jamaica with ambitions of becoming a nurse and living the American Dream. In December 2020, she became the first person to receive the COVID-19 vaccine and was subsequently honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In First in Line Lindsay lays out her triumphs and setbacks as a single mother and working student who overcomes barriers. Her beginnings as a four-dollar-an-hour grocery store worker fortified her with the resilience to persevere over decades to become an executive at a globally recognized nationally known healthcare system.

Of the three surgeons who accompanied Custer's Seventh Cavalry on June 25, 1876, only the youngest, 28-year-old Henry Porter, survived that day's ordeal, riding through a gauntlet of Indian attackers and up the steep bluffs to Major Marcus Reno's hilltop position. But the story of Dr. Porter's wartime exploits goes far beyond the battle itself.

In November 1942, Paul Andrew Kennedy (1912-1993) boarded the St. Elena in New York Harbor and sailed for Casablanca as part of Operation Torch, the massive Allied invasion of North Africa. As a member of the US Army's 2nd Auxiliary Surgical Group, he spent the next 34 months working in North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany, in close proximity to the front lines and often under air or artillery bombardment. He was uncomfortable, struck by the sorrows of war, and homesick for his wife.

The story of two outsiders and obsessives whose collision prompted an evangelistic alliance on the furthest frontiers of underground music. Steve Davis first met Kavus Torabi - guitarist with Gong, Guapo, Cardiacs and Knifeworld - in the mid-2000s at a gig by French underground rock legends Magma. Over the next few years, this unlikely duo's shared affinity for visionary psychedelic music would become the foundation of not only a firm friendship, but also the most infectiously inclusive broadcasting style since the much-mourned death of John Peel.

The World Wars of the 20th century caused massive upheavals all over the world. Often overlooked by history are the extraordinary true-life stories of the brave women from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand who enlisted in the Allied forces in their thousands to serve as nurses behind the front lines, at great danger to themselves.

In 1999, Munjed Al Muderis was a surgical resident working in Baghdad when the military police marched into the operating theatre and ordered the team to mutilate army deserters. When the head of surgery refused, he was executed. Munjed's choices were stark - comply and breach the medical oath, refuse and face death or flee. That day, Munjed's life changed forever. He escaped to Indonesia and boarded a boat to Australia.

In Sisters of Mokama, Jyoti Thottam draws upon 20 years’ worth of research to tell this inspiring story of six intrepid Kentucky nuns, their journey to build a hospital in the poorest state in India, and the Indian nurses whose lives would never be the same.

Important and provocative, The Undead examines why even with the tools of advanced technology, what we think of as life and death, consciousness and nonconsciousness, is not exactly clear - and how this problem has been further complicated by the business of organ harvesting.

Invalid teenager Leroy Wiley Gresham left a seven-volume diary spanning the years of secession and the Civil War. He was just 12 when he began, and he died at 17, just weeks after the war ended. LeRoy’s diary offers an inside look at a fateful journey that robbed an energetic and likeable young man of his youth and life. I Am Perhaps Dying adds considerably to the medical literature by increasing our understanding of how tuberculosis attacked a young body over time, how it was treated in the middle 19th century, and the effectiveness of those treatments.

Princeton's McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence Robert P. George and USC's Graduate Director of Philosophy Christopher Tollefsen are experts in the field of bioethics. In Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, these esteemed scholars combine the latest scientific breakthroughs with the soundest tenets of philosophy to shed new light on a vital yet controversial issue of our day.

According to estimates, the healthcare AI market will grow to over $45 billion by 2026. Now is the time for everyone involved, including medical consumers and entrepreneurs, to understand and embrace the AI in healthcare revolution. AI continues to advance at breakneck speeds. Nowhere else is AI moving faster than in the health care sector, where it’s being used to improve millions of lives at every point in the healthcare system. In this book, you will take a deep dive into the remarkable strides that AI is making.

Tune in, turn on, drop out. So said Timothy Leary, global figurehead for '60s psychedelic culture and 'the most dangerous man in America' according to President Nixon. A psychologist at Harvard, Leary was forced to leave when he started to dedicate his efforts to researching LSD and other psychedelic drugs, a vocation which changed an entire generation. John Higgs' incredible biography reveals the stranger-than-fiction true story of one of the most divisive figures of the twentieth century.

Mosquito Warrior tells the engrossing story of General William C. Gorgas (1854-1920), the once-renowned pioneer in tropical disease research and public health. His fascinating life illuminates vast transformations in the United States. Carol R. Byerly's balanced and contemporary examination of Gorgas illuminates his complex legacy in medicine and public health, military history, and American ambitions at the dawn of United States global ascendency.