Showing titles in History & Commentary

An updated edition of the classic history of schizophrenia in America, which gives voice to generations of patients who suffered through "cures" that only deepened their suffering and impaired their hope of recovery Schizophrenics in the United States currently fare worse than patients in the...

#1 New York Times bestseller #1 Washington Post bestseller #1 Indie Bestseller USA Today Bestseller John Green, award-winning author and passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest infectious...

Oliver Sacks died in August 2015 at his home in Greenwich Village, surrounded by his close friends and family. He was 82. He spent his final days doing what he loved: playing the piano, swimming, enjoying smoked salmon – and writing . . . As Dr Sacks looked back over his long, adventurous life...

“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...

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and The Boston Globe An authoritative, illuminating, and deeply humane history of addiction—a phenomenon that remains baffling and deeply misunderstood despite having touched countless lives—by an addiction psychiatrist striving to understand...

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE * A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 100 BOOK OF THE CENTURY * A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR * A TIME ALL-TIME 100 NONFICTION BOOK Updated with FOUR NEW MAJOR CHAPTERS illuminating the new developments in cancer detection, prevention, treatment, and...

The harrowing, dramatic and profoundly moving story of the Australian and New Zealand nurses who served in the Great War. Now a major six-part television series. By the end of the Great War, 45 Australian and New Zealand nurses had died on overseas service and over 200 had been decorated. These were the women who left for war looking for adventure and romance but were soon confronted with challenges for which their civilian lives could never have prepared them.

In this fascinating new exploration of mental illness, Professor Brendan Kelly examines ‘madness’ in history and how we have responded to it over the centuries. We travel from the psychiatric institutions of modern India to scientific studies of the brain in Victorian England. We discover the beginnings of formal asylum care and witness the experimental therapies of the cavernous psychiatric hospitals of the 19th and early 20th centuries in Ireland, England, Belgium, Italy, Germany and the United States.

**The instant New York Times bestseller.** *An international bestseller.* Finalist for the Lane Anderson Award Finalist for the RBC Taylor Award “Hugely impressive, a major work.”—NPR A pioneering and groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction that offers a dramatic new perspective on the...

Stanley Aylett's remarkable account of six years' service as a front-line surgeon with the British Army is that rare thing: a complete narrative from the first week of the Second World War until months after the final capitulation of Nazi Germany. That war was the last Western conflict in which military surgeons performed operations immediately behind the front line, often in makeshift theatres set up in tents or abandoned, battle-scarred buildings. Surgeon at War records the resilience and resourcefulness of the medical teams.

In The Beating Heart, Robin Choudhury explores how the heart has been represented over time and across cultures. He investigates the interplay between the heart depictions of successive eras and the prevailing cultural discourse – religious, social, philosophical – of each. In parallel, he considers how the ‘scientific’ understanding of the function of the heart has unfolded over 2,500 years, from the observations of Aristotle, through detailed anatomical descriptions beginning in the Renaissance, to the emergence of experimental physiology in the 17th century.

A fascinating account of the world’s most famous disease - polio - told as you have never heard it before. Epidemics of paralysis began to rage in the early 1900s, seemingly out of nowhere. Doctors, parents, and health officials were at a loss to explain why this formerly unheard-of disease began paralyzing so many children. Why did this disease start to become such a horrible problem during the late 1800s? Why did it affect children more often than adults? Why was it originally called teething paralysis by mothers and their doctors?

Dreams from My Mother is an inspiring story about childhood, race, identity, family, friendship, hope and what makes us who we are. Ultimately, it is an incredibly moving story of a mother and a daughter separated by society, but united in the dreams they shared for her future.

A brilliant and courageous doctor reveals, in gripping accounts of true cases, the power and limits of modern medicine. Sometimes in medicine the only way to know what is truly going on in a patient is to operate, to look inside with one's own eyes. This audio is exploratory surgery on medicine...

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

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.

Defining "medicalization" as the perception of nonmedical conditions as medical problems and nondiseases as diseases, Thomas Szasz has devoted much of his career to exposing the dangers of "medicalizing" the conditions of some who simply refuse to conform to society's expectations. Szasz argues that modern psychiatry's tireless ambition to explain the human condition has led to the treatment of life's difficulties and oddities as clinical illnesses rather than as humanity revealed in its fullness.

Always help, or at least do no harm." Following this simple yet revolutionary idea, Hippocrates laid the foundation for modern medicine over two millennia ago. From the Hippocratic Oath to the human genome, from Pasteur's germ theory to the worldwide eradication of smallpox, Medical Firsts brings to life 2,500 years of medical advances and discoveries. Organized chronologically, the book describes each milestone in a vivid capsule history, making it a fascinating and wonderfully listenable resource for anyone interested in medicine's past progress and future promise.

This major new Radio 4 series charts the development of Western medicine and healing from the ancient Greeks to the pioneering organ transplant operations of the 20th Century and beyond. ‘The Making of Modern Medicine’ covers over 2000 years of medical history and draws on a vast range of...

The 1964 murder of a nationally known cancer researcher sets the stage for this gripping exposé of medical professionals enmeshed in covert government operations over the course of three decades. Following a trail of police records, FBI files, cancer statistics, and medical journals, this revealing book presents evidence of a web of medical secret-keeping that began with the handling of evidence in the JFK assassination and continued apace....