Showing titles in History & Commentary

Before I can tell you about the shock treatment, I should tell you about the horse tranquilizer. Ted Scheinman has struggled with depression through his whole life, and gone to great lengths in his search for relief. As antidepressants prove less and less effective, he turns to the powerful...

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...

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.

From the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Medical Apartheid, the gripping, untold stories of three unsung Black physicians and their critical contributions to the field of medicine and American culture. Between 1847 and 1952, three New York City doctors transformed medicine...

The true story of the Holland America cruise ship Zaandam, which set sail with a deadly and little-understood stowaway—COVID-19—days before the world shut down in March 2020. This riveting narrative thriller takes readers behind the scenes with passengers and crew who were caught unprepared...

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.

Decades of data cannot be ignored: African-American adults are far more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than white adults. In a rousing indictment of the idea that notions of biological race should drive scientific inquiry, Sweetness in the Blood provides an ethnographic picture of biotechnology's framings of Type 2 diabetes risk and race and, importantly, offers a critical examination of the assumptions behind the recruitment of African American and African-descent populations for Type 2 diabetes research.

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

The first human organ transplant in 1950 at a suburban hospital is the focus of The Graft: How a Pioneering Operation Sparked the Modern Age of Organ Transplants. The book examines the controversies the operation generated and the progress medicine has made in organ transplantation.

From the acclaimed author of Billion Dollar Molecule and The Antidote, a revisionist, passionate history of the pharmaceutical industry, detailing how the nascent industry ushered in an age of cures. The Age of Cures is the in-depth history of the birth of the pharmaceutical industry in the...

The Power of Primary Care is the story of Dr. Nayana Vyas's 50-year journey across four continents, resulting in the creation of a nationally recognized, award-winning primary care medical conglomerate that produced superior patient outcomes in a cost-effective manner.

An “incredible, humane, insightful” (Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize winner) account of humankind’s battles with epidemic disease, and their outsized role in deepening inequality along racial, ethnic, class, and gender lines—in the vein of Medical Apartheid and Killing the Black Body. With...

Winner of the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction | Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize An unforgettable and inspiring true story of how one family’s grief transformed into a lifesaving gift—written by a bestselling author and palliative care doctor. The first of our organs to form and the...

Winner of the 2023 PROSE Award for Excellence in Biological and Life Sciences and the 2023 Chautauqua Prize! Named a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by The Economist, Oprah Daily, BookPage, Book Riot, the New York Public Library, and more! In The Song of the Cell, the...

Part biography and part clear-eyed examination of a healthcare system in crisis, Hospital, Heal Thyself tells the story of enigmatic healthcare visionary Eugene Litvak, whose research and strategies have already been implemented at many top twelve-ranked hospitals to save hundreds of millions of dollars and countless thousands of patient lives. While US healthcare costs continue to skyrocket, Litvak's program described in this book offers tested, effective methods to trim those costs while simultaneously improving patient outcomes.

Das bisher wichtigste Buch von Clemens Aldenbrock! Dieses Buch deckt eine der größten Lügen dieser Welt auf, die weder vom Mainstream noch von der alternativen Szene thematisiert wird. Die Viruslüge ist nicht nur eine Abrechnung mit der todbringenden Schulmedizin, sondern auch mit den Ärzten des Widerstands, die nach wie vor an der Keimtheorie festhalten, mit der wir seit über 150 Jahren belogen werden. Alternative Ansätze, die im Gegensatz zur Schulmedizin das Bewusstsein mit einbeziehen, wie die Germanische Heilkunde, werden von den bekannten Ärzten des Widerstands bis heute ignoriert.

A dramatic tale of explorers of the 1930s racing to find and harvest a poisonous Amazon vine, and how their work plundered local tribes and spurred the invention of new medicines. In the fall of 1938, a young, frail American explorer set off down a river in the western Amazon in search of curare...

A sweeping history 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 Asbridge puts a human...

We think of transplant surgery as one of the medical wonders of the modern world. But transplant surgery is as ancient as the pyramids, with a history more surprising than we might expect. Paul Craddock takes us on a journey—from sixteenth-century skin grafting to contemporary stem cell transplants—uncovering stories of operations performed by unexpected people in unexpected places. Bringing together philosophy, science and cultural history, Spare Parts explores how transplant surgery constantly tested the boundaries between human, animal, and machine.