Medical Industry

The Tudor dynasty died out because there was no heir of Elizabeth I's body to succeed her. Henry VIII, despite his six marriages, had produced no legitimate son who would live into old age. Three of the reigning Tudors (Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I) died without heirs apparent, the most tragic case being that of Mary Tudor, who went through two recorded cases of phantom pregnancy. If it were not for physical frailty and the lack of reproductive health among the Tudors, the course of history might have been different.

Author Cory Franklin, MD, who headed the hospital's intensive care unit from the 1970s through the 1990s, shares his most unique and bizarre experiences, including the deadly Chicago heatwave of 1995, treating the first AIDS patients in the country before the disease was diagnosed, the nurse with rare Munchausen syndrome, the only surviving ricin victim, and the professor with Alzheimer's hiding the effects of the wrong medication.

With poignant insight and humor, Frank Vertosick, Jr., MD, describes some of the greatest challenges of his career, including a six-week-old infant with a tumor in her brain, a young man struck down in his prime by paraplegia, and a minister with a .22-caliber bullet lodged in his skull. Told through intimate portraits of Vertosick's patients and unsparing-yet-fascinatingly detailed descriptions of surgical procedures, When the Air Hits Your Brain illuminates both the mysteries of the mind and the realities of the operating room.

People from all walks of life call 911 when things go bad. These are their stories, told by the people who respond and make things better. First responders often don't tell stories, preferring to keep what happens at work private. Rescue Captain Michael Morse changes that with these heartfelt descriptions of hundreds of emergency calls, with the usual coverings peeled back, exposing the bizarre, heartbreaking, and often hilarious reactions to 911 emergencies.

Medical Terminology for Dummies is a powerful resource for current and prospective healthcare professionals. It provides different ways to memorize the words and their meanings, including ideas for study materials, flash cards, quizzes, mind maps, and games. Plus, you'll discover how to identify, pronounce, define, and apply words in proper context. If you're one of the millions of professionals hoping to succeed in this booming field, this book gets you talking the talk so you can walk the walk! 

Known as one of America's most dangerous cities, New Orleans plays host to incidents ranging from the tragic and disturbing to the completely bizarre - and during his career as an emergency medic, Jon McCarthy saw it all. He chronicles some of the most formative calls of his career in this autobiography that sounds like crime fiction. McCarthy demonstrates with detail and clarity that the difficult choice is often the right choice. While not for the faint of heart, each entry in this collection provides poignant insight into the bonds between medics and the people and city they serve.

When Peter Canning started work as a paramedic on the streets of Hartford, Connecticut, 25 years ago, he believed drug users were victims only of their own character flaws. Although he took care of them, he did not care for them. But as the overdoses escalated, Canning began asking his patients how they had gotten started on their perilous journeys. And while no two tales were the same, their heartrending similarities changed Canning's view and moved him to educate himself about the science of addiction. 

Whether you're a new nurse or a veteran member of the clan, the nursing learning curve is a vast one. Part how-to guide with a touch of memoir thrown in, take the time to laugh and cry with an author who says what everyone else in the field is thinking. 

"I am a doctor." Every year, thousands of medical school graduates utter these four simple words. But as you will hear in Playing God, earning an MD is just the first step to becoming a real physician. In this thrilling and moving memoir, Dr. Anthony Youn reveals that the true metamorphosis from student to doctor occurs not in medical school but in the formative years of residency training and early practice. Here, you will take a journey through the world of surgery, hospitals, and the practice of medicine unlike any that you have traveled before.

This is a book of miracles - medical events witnessed by leading physicians for which there is no reasonable medical explanation, or, if there is, the explanation itself is extraordinary. These dramatic first-person essays detail spectacular serendipities, impossible cures, breathtaking resuscitations, extraordinary awakenings, and recovery from unimaginable disasters. Miracles We Have Seen is a book of inspiration and optimism, and a compelling glimpse into the lives of physicians.

In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white "ladies". Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities. 

Despite advances in health care, infectious microbes continue to be a formidable adversary to scientists and doctors. Vaccines and antibiotics, the mainstays of modern medicine, have not been able to conquer infectious microbes because of their amazing ability to adapt, evolve, and spread to new places. Terrorism aside, one of the greatest dangers from infectious disease we face today is from a massive outbreak of drug-resistant microbes.

Welcome to the life of a junior doctor: 97-hour weeks, life-and-death decisions, a constant tsunami of bodily fluids and the hospital parking meter earns more than you. Scribbled in secret after endless days, sleepless nights and missed weekends, Adam Kay's This Is Going to Hurt provides a no-holds-barred account of his time on the NHS front line. Hilarious, horrifying and heartbreaking, this diary is everything you wanted to know - and more than a few things you didn't - about life on and off the hospital ward.

The search to find medicines is as old as disease, which is to say as old as the human race. Through serendipity - by chewing, brewing, and snorting - some Neolithic souls discovered opium, alcohol, snakeroot, juniper, frankincense, and other helpful substances. Ötzi the Iceman, the 5,000-year-old hunter frozen in the Italian Alps, was found to have whipworms in his intestines and Bronze Age medicine, a worm-killing birch fungus, knotted to his leggings.

In the pursuit of possible links between childhood vaccines, intestinal inflammation, and neurologic injury in children, Wakefield lost his job in London’s Royal Free Hospital, his country of birth, his career, and his medical license. A recent General Medical Council ruling stated that he was “dishonest, irresponsible and showed callous disregard for the distress and pain of children.” Maligned by the medical establishment and mainstream media, Wakefield endeavors to set the record straight.

Antibiotics: What Everyone Needs to Know examines the personal and societal implications of our planet's most important - and frequently misused - medications. Grounded in the latest scientific research and crafted for general listeners, Antibiotics: What Everyone Needs to Know offers a clear-eyed overview of where we are, and what the future holds, as antibiotics lose their power.

By investigating thousands of descriptions of epidemics reaching back before the fifth-century-BCE Plague of Athens to the distrust and violence that erupted with Ebola in 2014, Epidemics challenges a dominant hypothesis in the study of epidemics, that invariably across time and space, epidemics provoked hatred, blaming of the "other", and victimizing bearers of epidemic diseases, particularly when diseases were mysterious, without known cures or preventive measures.

Journalist, doctor, professor, and CDC-trained disease detective Seema Yasmin, driven by a need to set the record straight, dissects some of the most widely circulating medical myths and pseudoscience. Exploring how epidemics of misinformation can spread faster than microbes, Dr. Yasmin asks why bad science is sometimes more believable and contagious than the facts. 

After his father died, James L. Nolan, Jr., took possession of a box of private family materials. To his surprise, the small secret archive contained a treasure trove of information about his grandfather's role as a doctor in the Manhattan Project. Dr. Nolan, it turned out, had been a significant figure. 

This book covers the history of 12 important diseases and addresses public health responses and societal upheavals.