Showing titles in History & Commentary

In this debut collection of essays, Pace tells of his years as a career paramedic—wandering through the highs and the lows, the saves and the losses, the patients he remembers, and the ones he tries to forget. In 1997, Pace began his career as an EMT because he wanted to do something exciting. He wanted to help people too. And he thought those two things—excitement and helping people—would exist hand in hand. With a little sprinkle of glory thrown in for good measure.

In arresting, but harrowing, prose, James Daschuk examines the roles that Old World diseases, climate, and, most disturbingly, Canadian politics—the politics of ethnocide—played in the deaths and subjugation of thousands of Indigenous people in the realization of Sir John A. Macdonald’s “National Dream.” It was a dream that came at great expense: the present disparity in health and economic well-being between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations, and the lingering racism and misunderstanding that permeates the national consciousness to this day.

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...

Ein einzigartiges Hörbuch, das Sie nicht gleichgültig lassen wird! Von den dunklen Anfangszeiten der Chirurgie, als noch ohne Betäubung amputiert wurde, über königliche Operationen bis zu den heutigen High-Tech-OPs – der Chirurg Arnold van de Laar beschreibt in seinem Hörbuch so packend wie allgemeinverständlich die Geschichte der Chirurgie, und gibt einen spannenden Einblick in sein Fach. In 28 Kapiteln erzählt van de Laar anhand berühmter Operationen, was genau im Operationsaal geschieht.

Nécessité biologique absolue, le sommeil est un équilibre subtil qui se met en place dans les premiers mois de la vie. Quelques tout-petits réussissent cet apprentissage sans effort, mais la plupart des parents, épuisés par de longs mois de sommeil interrompu, ont besoin d'aide. À partir des connaissances scientifiques les plus récentes sur le sommeil, les auteurs, toutes deux pédiatres, répondent aux nombreuses questions des parents.

The Cancer Problem offers the first medical, cultural, and social history of cancer in 19th-century Britain. It argues that it was in the 19th century that cancer acquired the unique emotional, symbolic, and politicized status it maintains today. Through an interrogation of the construction, deployment, and emotional consequences of the disease's incurability, this book reframes our conceptualization of the relationship between medicine and modern life and reshapes our understanding of chronic and incurable maladies, both past and present. 

Vaccine hesitancy in America didn't begin with the uproar over the mRNA vaccines for Covid-19. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw resistance to a wide variety of vaccines. In Unvaccinated Under God, Kira Ganga Kieffer shows that debates over vaccine safety and mandatory...

Adéntrese en la fascinante historia de la medicina con este audiolibro repleto de sorprendentes anécdotas y los pasajes de la historia más determinantes e interesantes sobre epidemias, guerras, medicamentos, grandes hazañas o las fatídicas infecciones. Una obra donde se abordan desde los mayores logros médicos de la humanidad y las enfermedades más cruentas y devastadoras que asolaron ciudades y países, hasta las anécdotas y casos más curiosos que provocaron el mayor de los asombros.

“A magisterial history” (The Guardian) of humanity’s greatest natural disaster—the Black Death—that reveals the true global impact and terrible human cost of this calamity, from the renowned author of The Crusades and The Greatest Knight. “Terrific—and truly terrifying. Thomas...

Throughout the seventeenth century, medical lecturers demonstrated human anatomy by dissecting a cadaver while surrounded by students. After the Revolutionary War, though, instructors realized that they needed many more cadavers to serve a growing number of medical students. Enter the “resurrectionists”–body snatchers. Resurrectionists were a cruel lot; men (almost always men and often medical students themselves) who would sneak into a cemetery under the cover of darkness, remove a body, and then sell it to a physician or anatomist–usually for around $100.

A trailblazing, conversation-starting history of women’s health—from the earliest medical ideas about women’s illnesses to hormones and autoimmune diseases—brought together in a fascinating sweeping narrative. Elinor Cleghorn became an unwell woman ten years ago. She was diagnosed with...

Orphan is about the struggle to save the lives of children who, because of an unlucky roll of the genetic dice, are born with any one of several thousand rare genetic disorders. Many are burdened with diseases that carry mysterious names, some of which you will hear about for the first time in this audiobook, along with compelling stories about the physicians, scientists, and parents who have taken them on.

In the tradition of Oliver Sacks's The Island of the Colorblind, Rosemary Mahoney tells the story of Braille Without Borders, the first school for the blind in Tibet, and of Sabriye Tenberken, the remarkable blind woman who founded the school. Fascinated and impressed by what she learned from...

In 1943, Albert Schatz, a young Rutgers College Ph.D. student, worked on a wartime project in microbiology professor Selman Waksman's lab, searching for an antibiotic to fight infections on the front lines and at home. In his 11th experiment on a common bacterium found in farmyard soil, Schatz discovered streptomycin, the first effective cure for tuberculosis, one of the world's deadliest diseases.

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. 

A Life Lived Chronically: Memoir of a DES Daughter is a powerful and deeply moving memoir by Claire R. Silverstone-Bright, narrated by Kimberly Rog and published by Panda Publishing Agency UK. Before she was born, a widely prescribed drug, diethylstilbestrol (DES), had already shaped her destiny. Once marketed as a medical breakthrough to prevent miscarriage, DES was later discovered to have serious and life-altering consequences for the daughters exposed in the womb.

Ignác Semmelweis is remembered for the now-commonplace notion that doctors must wash their hands before examining patients. In mid-19th century Vienna, however, this was a subversive idea. With deaths from childbed fever exploding, Semmelweis discovered that doctors themselves were spreading the disease. While his simple reforms worked immediately - childbed fever in Vienna all but disappeared - they brought down upon Semmelweis the wrath of the establishment, and led to his tragic end. 

Drawing on accounts of ordinary Americans, Hidden Terrors offers the first comprehensive history of the enigmatic illness behind the 1830s cholera pandemic—and its profound consequences for the nation. From 1832 to 1836, cholera erupted across US cities as well as in small towns, rural farms, prisons, and plantations. Its victims experienced ghastly symptoms—vomiting, explosive diarrhea, painful spasms, turning blue, and collapsing into comas—and often perished within hours of first becoming sick.

Widely known today as the "Angel of the Battlefield", Clara Barton's personal life has always been shrouded in mystery. In Clara Barton, Professional Angel, Elizabeth Brown Pryor presents a biography of Barton that strips away the heroic exterior and reveals a complex and often trying woman. Based on the papers Clara Barton carefully saved over her lifetime, this biography is the first one to draw on these recorded thoughts. Not always altruistic, her accomplishments were nonetheless extraordinary.

Uncover the defining medical history crisis of the twentieth century, tracing a deadly pathogen that reshaped the globe. As troops mobilized for global conflict in 1918, a far more lethal and invisible enemy stalked military camps, transport ships, and crowded cities. This gripping historical...