Showing titles in Medical

In the early days of the Cold War, a spirit of desperate scientific rivalry birthed a different kind of space race: not the race to outer space that we all know, but a race to master the inner space of the human body. While surgeons on either side of the Iron Curtain competed to become the first to transplant organs like the kidney and heart, a young American neurosurgeon had an even more ambitious thought: Why not transplant the brain? 

Two incredible women, an unlikely friendship and a united mission to save the lives of some of the world's poorest and most desperate women. Healing Lives reveals the untold tale of Mamitu Gashe, Dr Catherine Hamlin's protégée, and the inspiring almost 60-year friendship between the two women. In 1962, three years after Drs Catherine and Reg Hamlin arrived in Ethiopia, an illiterate peasant girl sought their aid. Mamitu Gashe was close to death and horrifically injured during childbirth after an arranged marriage in a remote mountain village. 

At the age of 53, Tony walks away from a life of journalism and into an unknown future dogged by self-doubt and financial worry. June is 48 years old then, a writer and a teacher, and over the following nine years she watches as her husband gradually changes - in interests, goals, and behavior - until Tony has a sudden fall, ending their life as they have known it.

What is the price of honor? It took 10 years for Vietnam War Nurse Diane Carlson Evans to answer that question - and the answer was a heavy one. 

As a teenager, Molly Case underwent an operation that saved her life. Nearly a decade later, she finds herself in the operating room again - this time as a trainee nurse. She learns to care for her patients, sharing not only their pain, but also life-affirming moments of hope. In doing so, she offers a compelling account of the processes that keep them alive, from respiratory examinations to surgical prep, and of the extraordinary moments of human connection that sustain both nurse and patient. 

Just after having produced the first digitally watermarked CD as a graduate student at the prestigious University of Miami School of Music in his early 20s, artist/producer Eric Alexandrakis noticed a lump on the left side of his chest. With no insurance, no ability to work steadily due to the burden of chemotherapy treatments, and no guarantee of survival...attempting to turn his creative dreams into reality seemed like a hopeless impossibility. What followed was a story of determination, inspiration, and creative innovation.  

In 2014, after being forced to quit her professional recruiting career due to excessive hospitalizations from complications of cystic fibrosis, Klyn Elsbury was confined to a wheelchair with her lung function plummeting below 40 percent. It was after a two-week hospital stay (just one of five that year) she set off on a six-week road trip across the United States to visit friends and family she wasn't sure she would live to see again. I Am ____: The Untold Story of Success is a blend of raw emotion and inspiring wisdom.

Wie arbeitet ein Hirnchirurg? Wie fühlt es sich an, in das Organ zu schneiden, mit dem Menschen denken und träumen? Wie geht man damit um, wenn das Leben eines Patienten von der eigenen Heilkunst abhängt? Und wie, wenn man scheitert? Mehr noch als in anderen Bereichen der Medizin ist es in der Hirnchirurgie so gut wie unmöglich, nie einem Patienten zu schaden, denn Operationen am Innersten des Menschen sind immer mit unkalkulierbaren Risiken verbunden. Man kann die Arbeit von Hirnchirurgen mit dem "Entschärfen einer Bombe" vergleichen.

When Miranda Ward and her husband decided they would like to have a baby, they were optimistic. They were both young, they were healthy - there was no reason not to be. Five years, three miscarriages and one ectopic pregnancy later, Miranda finds herself still dealing with the ongoing aftermath of that decision: the waiting, the doubting, the despairing, the hoping.

In Deep Water Dream, Roedde recounts stories from her long career - from working with a Cree community in developing a medical dictionary in their own language, to training community-based health workers, to delivering Amish babies in her own home. Roedde redraws the boundaries between physician and community, strengthening the capacity to care for those close by, and offers a hopeful and powerful example to the rest of the world. 

“Public health saved your life today — you just don’t know it,” is a phrase that Leana Wen likes to use. You don’t know it because good public health is invisible. It becomes visible only in its absence, when it is underfunded and ignored, a bitter truth laid bare as never before by the carnage of Covid-19. From the frontlines of public health crises, Leana Wen has led the fight against the opioid epidemic, outbreaks of infectious disease, infant mortality, and Covid-19 disinformation. 

On February 21, 1992, 22-year-old Brian Bechtold walked into a police station in Port St. Joe, Florida, and confessed that he’d shot and killed his parents in their family home in Silver Spring, Maryland. He said he’d been possessed by the devil. He was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and ruled “not criminally responsible” for the murders on grounds of insanity. But after the trial, where do the “criminally insane” go?  

When Kathleen O’Keefe-Kanavos discovered a pea-sized lump in her breast, she did what any sensible woman would do: She went to see her doctor, who assured her that she was in good health and that the lump was nothing but a fibrous tumor and posed no threat. Kathleen was not convinced, particularly in light of the fact that her mother had recently died of cancer. In a dream that night, Kathleen saw her spiritual guide/guardian angel who took her hand, placed it on her breast, and said, “You have cancer right here. Feel it? Go back to your doctor. Don’t wait for an appointment.”

Every memoir of the American Civil War provides us with another view of the catastrophe that changed the country forever. The Other Side of the War reveals the war as experienced by the thousands of women volunteered to work in hospitals and for the Sanitary Commission, the organization that advocated better practices and lobbied for increased supplies. Katharine Prescott Wormeley was one of those volunteers, an American nurse in the Civil War, as well as author, editor, and and one of America’s best-known translators of French language literary works.

Anders Bortne has a nice life in Oslo. Married to a wonderful woman, with two delightful children, his days are occupied by his creative work. Not all is well though, Anders has been sleepless for 16 years, and it is taking its toll on his life and his family. No remedy has gone untested: sleeping pills, yoga, herbs, acupuncture, hypnosis, but none has worked. What do we know about the most important hours of the day? What is the history of sleep, and how is our health affected? 

The story of one woman's struggle to care for her seriously ill husband - and a revealing look at the role unpaid family caregivers play in a society that fails to provide them with structural support.

Weaving together family history, genetic discovery, and scenes from her life, Ami McKay tells the compelling, true-science story of her own family's unsettling legacy of hereditary cancer while exploring the challenges that come from carrying the mutation that not only killed many people you loved, but might also kill you. 

In this evocative account of navigating pregnancy loss, Jessica Zucker confronts the cultural silence around miscarriages and illuminates how she built a movement from her experience, transforming trauma into human connection. Drawing from her psychological expertise and her work as the creator of the #IHadaMiscarriage campaign, I Had a Miscarriage is a heart-wrenching, thought-provoking, and validating book about navigating these liminal spaces and the vitality of truth telling.

A journey through the deepest valleys and highest peaks of parenting. When a two-month old baby falls ill, his apparently ordinary symptoms turn out to signal a rare and lethal immune deficiency. For parents Miguel Sancho and Felicia Morton, the discovery that their son, Sebastian, has chronic granulomatous disease (CGD) upends their lives and leaves the family with few options, all of them terrifying.

In the vein of The Year of Magical Thinking and Beautiful Boy, an emotionally raw and inspiring memoir that illuminates a mother’s grief over the loss of her adult child and considers the hope of soulful connections that transcend the boundary of life and death.