Showing titles in History & Commentary

A vibrant young Hispano woman, Shonnie Medina, inherits a breast-cancer mutation known as BRCA1.185delAG. It is a genetic variant characteristic of Jews. The Medinas knew they were descended from Native Americans and Spanish Catholics, but they did not know that they had Jewish ancestry as well. The mutation most likely sprang from Sephardic Jews hounded by the Spanish Inquisition. The discovery of the gene leads to a fascinating investigation of cultural history and modern genetics by Dr. Harry Ostrer and other experts on the DNA of Jewish populations.

Cosa significa essere un neurochirurgo? Come ci si sente ad avere in mano le sorti di una persona, mentre ci si apre un varco tra la materia grigia che ne genera i pensieri, i sentimenti e le emozioni? E, se qualcosa va storto, come si convive con le conseguenze? È ciò che scopriremo attraverso questo audiolibro, la confessione sincera e intensa di un famoso neurochirurgo inglese che, alla luce dell'esperienza quarantennale, rievoca le vittorie nelle battaglie combattute al fianco dei pazienti, ma anche le inevitabili sconfitte, gli errori e i fallimenti.

From yellow fever to smallpox to polio to AIDS to COVID-19, epidemics have prompted Americans to make choices and answer questions about their basic values and their laws. In five concise chapters, historian John Fabian Witt traces the legal history of epidemics, showing how infectious disease has both shaped, and been shaped by, the law.  

This program includes an epilogue and acknowledgements read by the author “A fascinating tale of poisons and poisonous deeds which both educates and entertains.” --Kathy Reichs As any reader or listener of murder mysteries can tell you, poison is one of the most enduring—and...

This work of narrative non-fiction deals with common questions and doubts people have about vaccines, using very accessible, conversational, non-technical language.

Don't take speech for granted. Kit Roberts Johnson knows what it is like to have a frozen voice. She knows what it is like for others to have their voices silenced, like children with Down Syndrome, or adults with stuttering. She became a speech therapist to help people with communication disorders and discovered over the span of her career that we have all been silenced in some way.

On June 24, 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade decision, asserting that the Constitution did not confer the right to abortion. This ruling, in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health case, was the culmination of a half-century of pro-life activism promoting the idea that fetuses are people and therefore entitled to the rights and protections that the Constitution guarantees. But it was also the product of a much longer history of archaic ideas about the relationship between pregnant people and the fetuses they carry.

An Economist Best Book of 2024 “If you are at all curious about the brain or the surgeons who operate on it, Gray Matters is a must read and Dr. Theodore Schwartz is the perfect guide, a master brain surgeon and superbly talented writer. I have not read a better biography of our shared...

Dispatches from the AIDS Pandemic is a unique firsthand account from three public health leaders of CDC's early response to AIDS. Drawing in part on interviews from the CDC's AIDS oral history project, the authors trace the evolution of AIDS from newly recognized disease to pandemic.

Plagues, pandemics, and infectious diseases have shaped the history of the Jewish people. Of course, there were the ten biblical plagues that famously smote the Egyptians—from the rain of frogs to the deaths of the firstborn—but that is just the start of the story. In The Eleventh Plague, Brown investigates the relation between Judaism and infectious diseases throughout the ages, from premodern and early-modern plagues, to rabbinic responses to smallpox and cholera, and to the curious practice of "Black Weddings" in which two orphans are married in a cemetery.

A Pulitzer Prize finalist's bizarre journalistic journey through the world of fringe medicine, filled with leeches, baking soda IVs, and, according to at least one person, zombies. It's no secret that American health care has become too costly and politicized to help everyone. So where do you...

*** 'Just brilliant. The book of the decade.' - Professor Tim Flannery, Former Australian of the Year 'An honest, powerful and riveting book that demonstrates Lachlan's courage in the face of the hardest of circumstances.' - Levison Wood, Award-winning author, explorer and photographer 'Wow. A...

One hundred years after a milestone medical discovery, Insulin: The Crooked Timber tells the story of how insulin was transformed from what one clinician called "thick brown muck" into the very first drug to be produced using genetic engineering, one which would earn the founders of the US biotech company Genentech a small fortune. Taking the listener on a fascinating journey, starting with the discovery of insulin in the 1920s through to the present day, the book reveals a story of monstrous egos, toxic career rivalries, and a few unsung heroes.

¿Por qué cuando un hombre acude con dolor torácico a urgencias se le somete inmediatamente a un electrocardiograma y cuando es una mujer quien presenta idénticos síntomas se le da un ansiolítico? ¿Por qué una mujer estresada es tachada de histérica y en cambio el hombre padece con toda probabilidad el peso de la responsabilidad? ¿Por qué a las mujeres se les exige una perfección física imposible de alcanzar y un hombre con canas y curva de la felicidad es, sencillamente, un madurito interesante? ¿Por qué las mujeres continúan siendo invisibles para la medicina?

Rebecca Skloot and her best seller, The Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks, has created a lot of interest in the immortal HeLa cells that were taken from a 31-year-old black woman called Henrietta Lacks without her family's consent at the Johns Hopkins Hospital at Baltimore in 1951. She describes the story of how Henrietta Lacks died and how her cells were sent around the world for medical research.

The average individual is far more likely to die in a car accident than from a communicable disease...yet we are still much more fearful of the epidemic. Even at our most level-headed, the thought of an epidemic can inspire terror. As Philip Alcabes persuasively argues in Dread, our anxieties about epidemics are created not so much by the germ or microbe in question - or the actual risks of contagion - but by the unknown, the undesirable, and the misunderstood.

Between August 1918 and March 1919, the Spanish influenza spread worldwide, claiming over 25 million lives. In this vivid narrative, Alfred W. Crosby recounts the course of the pandemic during the panic-stricken months of 1918 and 1919, measures its impact on American society, and probes the curious loss of national memory of this cataclysmic event. This edition includes a preface discussing the then-recent outbreaks of diseases, including the Asian flu and the SARS epidemic. 

Today, 90 percent of psychiatric beds are located in jails and prisons across the United States, institutions that confine disproportionate numbers of African Americans. After more than a decade of research, the celebrated scholar and activist Mab Segrest locates the deep historical roots of this startling fact, turning her sights on a long-forgotten cauldron of racial ideology: the state mental asylum system in which psychiatry was born and whose influences extend into our troubled present.

The riveting true story of the visionary doctor who pioneered the heart transplant—a once-controversial operation that caused a media firestorm, saved countless lives, and forced society change what it means to die. In January 1968, a surgical team at Stanford University performed one of the...

Just Care is Akemi Nishida’s thoughtful examination of care injustice and social justice enabled through care. The current neoliberal political economy has turned care into a business opportunity for the healthcare industrial complex and a mechanism of social oppression and control. Nishida analyzes the challenges people negotiate whether they are situated as caregivers, receivers, or both. Also illuminated is how people with disabilities come together to assemble community care collectives and bed activism (resistance and visions emerging from the space of bed) to reimagine care as a key element for social change.