Wells History

Beginning with opium, the “joy plant,” which has been used for 10,000 years, Thomas Hager tells a captivating story of medicine. His subjects include the largely forgotten female pioneer who introduced smallpox inoculation to Britain, the infamous knockout drops, the first antibiotic, which saved countless lives, the first antipsychotic, which helped empty public mental hospitals, Viagra, statins, and the new frontier of monoclonal antibodies. This is a deep, wide-ranging, and wildly entertaining book.

A puzzling series of dental explosions beginning in the 19th century is just one of many strange tales that have long lain undiscovered in the pages of old medical journals. Award-winning medical historian Thomas Morris delivers one of the most remarkable, cringe-inducing collections of stories ever assembled.

Sex, The World History: Through Time, Religion, and Culture is a daring, deep historical-anthropological exploration. It is also a scathing condemnation of religion and its insistent control of sex.

Humans are born to create theories about the world - unfortunately, they're usually wrong, and keep us from understanding the world as it really is. Why do we catch colds? What causes seasons to change? And if you fire a bullet from a gun and drop one from your hand, which bullet hits the ground first? In a pinch, we almost always get these questions wrong. Worse, we regularly misconstrue fundamental qualities of the world around us.

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.

In Phantom Plague, Vidya Krishnan, traces the history of tuberculosis from the slums of 19th-century New York to modern Mumbai. In a narrative spanning century, Krishnan shows how superstition and folk remedies made way for scientific understanding of TB, such that it was controlled and cured in the West.

Oxford Case Histories in Infection and Microbiology contains over 45 well structured cases, providing comprehensive coverage of the diagnostic and management dilemmas in clinical microbiology and infectious diseases. Each case comprises of a brief patient history with relevant clinical examination findings, thus insuring the listener is aware of how to confirm a diagnosis rapidly, with reference throughout to laboratory techniques, advice on therapy, epidemiological features, and areas which can be controversial.

Many have studied it, written about it and even died for it and yet, it appears, we are mostly blind to the essence of love. Dr Liat Yakir takes us on a fascinating journey through the evolution of love in history and in modern times, showing the importance of hormones, neurons and genes that dictate who we’ll fall in love with and who we’ll reject.

In this substantially expanded edition of his earlier book The Monster at Our Door, the renowned activist and author Mike Davis looks at the COVID-19 pandemic now sweeping the world. He sets the current crisis in the context of previous viral catastrophes, notably the 1918 influenza disaster that killed at least 40 million people in three months and the avian flu of a decade and a half ago that sounded a tocsin, disastrously ignored by those in power, for today's devastating outbreak.

An urgent wake-up call about the future of emerging viruses and a gripping account of the doctors and scientists fighting to protect us, told through the story of the deadly 2013-2014 Ebola epidemic. From the number-one best-selling author of The Hot Zone, now a National Geographic original miniseries....

Measles, once seemingly defeated, is resurgent around the globe. Why, at a time when biomedical science is so advanced, do parents turn away from vaccination, endangering their own children and the health of the wider population? Using a combination of patient narrative, historical analysis, and scientific research, Dr. Adam Ratner, pediatrician and infectious disease specialist, argues that the reawakening of measles and the subsequent coronavirus pandemic are bellwethers of forgotten knowledge—indicators of decaying trust in science and an underfunded public health infrastructure.

E. Fuller Torrey's audiobook provides an inside perspective on the birth of the federal mental health program. On staff at the National Institute of Mental Health when the program was being developed and implemented, Torrey draws on his own first-hand account of the creation and launch of the program, extensive research, one-on-one interviews with people involved, and recently unearthed audiotapes of interviews with major figures involved in the legislation. As such, this book provides historical material previously unavailable to the public.

The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind is a seminal work on crowd psychology by Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931), a French social psychologist. He observes that a crowd forms when an influential idea unites a number of individuals and prompts them to act towards a common goal. In a crowd, the conscious personality of the individual is submerged and dominated by the collective mind. Furthermore, every sentiment becomes contagious to a degree that individuals readily sacrifice their personal interest to the collective.

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.

This is the first truly comprehensive book examining the life and career of the murderer who has become one of America's great supervillains. It reveals not only the true story but how the legend evolved, taking advantage of hundreds of primary sources that have never been examined before, including legal documents, letters, articles, and records that have been buried in archives for more than a century.

How can we explain the origins of the great wave of paranoid hatreds that seem inescapable in our close-knit world - from American shooters and ISIS to Donald Trump, from a rise in vengeful nationalism to racism and misogyny on social media? In Age of Anger, Pankaj Mishra answers our bewilderment by casting his gaze back to the 18th century before leading us to the present.

Empathy is in short supply. We struggle to understand people who aren’t like us, but find it easy to hate them. Studies show that we are less caring than we were even 30 years ago. In 2006, Barack Obama said that the United States was suffering from an “empathy deficit.” Since then, things seem to have only gotten worse. In this groundbreaking book, Jamil Zaki shares cutting-edge research, including experiments from his own lab, showing that empathy is not a fixed trait - something we’re born with or not - but rather a skill that can be strengthened through effort.

In 1968, Bruce Tucker, a Black man, went into Virginia’s top research hospital with a head injury, only to have his heart taken out of his body and put into the chest of a White businessman. Now, in The Organ Thieves, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Chip Jones exposes the horrifying inequality surrounding Tucker’s death and how he was used as a human guinea pig without his family’s permission or knowledge.

In the wake of World War II, the Allied forces charged 28 Japanese men with crimes against humanity. Correspondents at the Tokyo trial thought the evidence fell most heavily on 10 of the accused. In December 1948, five of these defendants were hanged, while four received sentences of life in prison. The tenth was a brilliant philosopher-patriot named Okawa Shumei. His story proved strangest of all. Among all the political and military leaders on trial, Okawa was the lone civilian.

The best-selling author of Born to Run now travels to the Mediterranean, where he discovers that the secrets of ancient Greek heroes are still alive and well on the island of Crete, and ready to be unleashed in the muscles and minds of casual athletes and aspiring heroes everywhere.