Health Care History

Most stories of medical progress come with ready-made heroes. John Snow traced the origins of London's 1854 cholera outbreak to a water pump, leading to the birth of epidemiology. Florence Nightingale's contributions to the care of soldiers in the Crimean War transformed hospitals from crucibles of infection to sanctuaries of recuperation. Yet histories of individual innovators ignore many key sources of medical knowledge.

In the early 1960s, Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration became one of the most celebrated women in America when she prevented a deadly sedative from entering the U.S. market. A Canadian-born pharmacologist and physician, Kelsey saved countless Americans from the devastating side effects of thalidomide, routinely given to pregnant women to prevent morning sickness. As the FDA medical officer charged with reviewing Merrell Pharmaceutical’s application for approval, Kelsey was unconvinced that there was sufficient evidence of the drug’s efficacy and safety.

Pandemics have afflicted human civilizations throughout history, yet these health crises have also led to progress in medicine and society that improved people’s lives. History shows that scientific innovation often proceeds from the collaboration of researchers across disciplines, nations, and institutions.

Today it is known as Roosevelt Island. In 1828, when New York City purchased this narrow, two-mile-long island in the East River, it was called Blackwell's Island. There, over the next hundred years, the city would build a lunatic asylum, prison, hospital, workhouse, and almshouse. Stacy Horn has crafted a compelling and chilling narrative told through the stories of the poor souls sent to Blackwell's, as well as the period's city officials, reformers, and journalists (including the famous Nellie Bly). Damnation Island re-creates what daily life was like on the island....

Seamus O'Mahony writes about the illusion of progress, the notion that more and more diseases can be "conquered" ad infinitum. He punctures the idiocy of consumerism, the idea that healthcare can be endlessly adapted to the wishes of individuals. He excoriates the claims of Big Science, the spending of vast sums on research follies like the Human Genome Project. And he highlights one of the most dangerous errors of industrialized medicine: an over-reliance on metrics, and a neglect of things that can't easily be measured, like compassion.

A riveting, fast-paced, inside look at one of the most incredible private sector achievements in history, Moonshot recounts the intensive nine months in 2020 when the scientists at Pfizer, under the visionary leadership of Dr. Albert Bourla, made “the impossible possible”—creating, testing, and manufacturing a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine that previously would have taken years to develop. Dr. Bourla chronicles how the brilliant, dedicated minds at Pfizer overcame a series of crises that were compounded by social and political unrest.

Antebellum New Orleans sat at the heart of America's slave and cotton kingdoms. It was also where yellow fever epidemics killed as many as 150,000 people during the nineteenth century. With little understanding of mosquito-borne viruses, a person's only protection against the scourge was to "get acclimated" by surviving the disease. Repeated epidemics bolstered New Orleans's strict racial hierarchy by introducing another hierarchy, what Kathryn Olivarius terms "immunocapital." Whereas immunity conferred privilege on whites, it relegated enslaved people to the most grueling labor.

Almost daily, headlines announce newly discovered links between cancers and their genetic causes. Science journalist Jessica Wapner vividly relates the backstory behind those headlines, reconstructing the crucial breakthroughs, explaining the science behind them, and giving due to the dozens of researchers, doctors, and patients whose curiosity and determination restored the promise of a future to the more than 50,000 people diagnosed each year with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML).

Government, industry, and the medical profession, however, have a mixed record when it comes to framing policies and generating knowledge to address drug use and misuse. In Strange Trips, Lucas Richert investigates the myths, meanings, and boundaries of recreational drugs, palliative care drugs, and pharmaceuticals as well as struggles over product innovation, consumer protection, and freedom of choice in the medical marketplace.

For over 40 years Barbara Seaman has been a leading women’s health advocate. Now she blows the lid off the estrogen industry in this fascinating book that holds the power to improve—possibly even save—women’s lives. In America 30 million women take estrogen. Seaman shows that this powerful hormone is hardly the cure-all some claim it is. In fact, estrogen treatments may increase the risk of cancer, heart disease, and osteoporosis.

For 200 years, a noble Venetian family has suffered from an inherited disease that strikes their members in middle age, stealing their sleep, eating holes in their brains, and ending their lives in a matter of months. In Papua New Guinea, a primitive tribe is nearly obliterated by a sickness whose chief symptom is uncontrollable laughter. Across Europe, millions of sheep rub their fleeces raw before collapsing. What these strange conditions share is their cause: prions.

The Panic Virus is a gripping scientific detective story about how grassroots radicals, snake-oil salesmen, and cynical journalists have perpetrated the biggest health-scare hoax of all time. It explores what happens when the media treats all viewpoints as equally valid, regardless of facts, from parents who are convinced that vaccines caused their children's autism to right-wing radicals who believe that climate change is a myth

Filled with firsthand insights and stories from the frontlines of healthcare, as well as innovative solutions, Care After Covid shows all stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem exactly what needs to change and, more importantly, how to do it.

Notes on Nursing is a classic by Florence Nightingale (the first modern nurse). Florence Nightingale's methods were revolutionary in her time, and they form the basis for the techniques of patient management that have been taught ever since. Notes on Nursing is a great overview, in her own words, of Florence Nightingale's ideas on care, cleanliness, and the nursing process in general. Her directives are widely applicable today. First published in 1860, Notes on Nursing served as the cornerstone of the curriculum at the Nightingale School and other nursing schools established.

Weaving together family history, genetic discovery, and scenes from her life, Ami McKay tells the compelling, true-science story of her own family's unsettling legacy of hereditary cancer while exploring the challenges that come from carrying the mutation that not only killed many people you loved, but might also kill you.

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.

A wide-ranging and provocative look - teeming with little-known facts and engaging stories - at a subject of the direst interest. Poisons permeate our world. They are in the environment, the workplace, the home. They are in food, our favorite whiskey, medicine, well water. They have been used to cure disease as well as incapacitate and kill. They smooth wrinkles, block pain, stimulate, and enhance athletic ability. In this entertaining and fact-filled audiobook, science writer Peter Macinnis considers poisons in all their aspects. He recounts stories of the celebrated poisoners in history and literature....

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 exciting story illuminates the captivating world of the late Renaissance - in this case its plagues, remedies, and alchemy - through the life of Leonardo Fioravanti, a brilliant, remarkably forward-thinking, and utterly unconventional doctor. Fioravanti's marvelous cures and talent for self-aggrandizement earned him the adoration of the people, the scorn of the medical establishment, and a reputation as one of the age's most colorful, combative figures.

In 1959, a Cincinnati pharmaceutical firm, the William S. Merrell Company, quietly began distributing samples of an exciting new wonder drug already popular around the world. Touted as a sedative without risks, thalidomide was handed out freely, under the guise of clinical trials, by doctors who believed approval by the Food and Drug Administration was imminent. But in 1960, when the application for thalidomide landed on the desk of FDA medical reviewer Frances Kelsey, she quickly grew suspicious.