Health Wars

Few diseases are more gruesome than typhus. Transmitted by body lice, it afflicts the dispossessed - refugees, soldiers, and ghettoized peoples - causing hallucinations, terrible headaches, boiling fever, and often death. The disease plagued the German army on the Eastern Front and left the Reich desperate for a vaccine. For this they turned to the brilliant and eccentric Polish zoologist Rudolf Weigl.

Dr. Aribert Heim worked at the Mauthausen concentration camp for only a few months in 1941 but left a devastating mark. According to the testimony of survivors, Heim euthanized patients with injections of gasoline into their hearts. He performed surgeries on otherwise healthy people. Some recalled prisoners' skulls set out on his desk to display perfect sets of teeth. Yet in the chaos of the postwar period, Heim was able to slip away from his dark past and establish himself as a reputable doctor and family man in the resort town of Baden-Baden.

Wounded traces the journey made by a casualty from the battlefield to a hospital in Britain. It is a story told through the testimony of those who cared for him - stretcher bearers and medical officers, surgeons and chaplains, orderlies and nurses - from the aid post in the trenches to the casualty clearing station and the ambulance train back to Blighty. We feel the calloused hands of the stretcher-bearers; we see the bloody dressings and bandages; we smell the nauseating gangrene and, at London’s stations, the gas clinging to the uniforms of the men arriving home.

There are two things hurting men: repression of their emotions and the lack of deep human connections. But when men go to war it magnifies these issues. This book is a study of men, war, and a guide to discovering restoration after weapons are stacked and peace treaties are drawn up.

Richard Peck is a master of stories about people in transition, but perhaps never before has he told a tale of such dramatic change as this one, set during the first year of the Civil War. The whole country is changing in 1861, even the folks from a muddy little Illinois settlement on the banks of the Mississippi. Here, 15-year-old Tilly Pruitt frets over the fact that her brother is dreaming of being a soldier and that her sister is prone to supernatural visions.

They call Gabriela "Tree Girl". Gabi climbs trees to be within reach of the eagles and watch the sun rise into an empty sky. She is at home among the outstretched branches of the Guatemalan forests. Then one day from the safety of a tree, Gabi witnesses the sights and sounds of an unspeakable massacre. She vows to be Tree Girl no more and joins the hordes of refugees struggling to reach the Mexican border. She has lost her whole family; her entire village has been wiped out.

Heroines of Mercy Street tells the true stories of the nurses at Mansion House, the Alexandria, Virginia, mansion turned wartime hospital and setting for the new PBS drama Mercy Street. Among the Union soldiers, doctors, wounded men from both sides, freed slaves, politicians, speculators, and spies who passed through the hospital in the crossroads of the Civil War were nurses who gave their time freely and willingly to save lives and aid the wounded.

In World War II, 59,000 women voluntarily risked their lives for their country as US Army nurses. For more than half a century these women's experiences remained untold, almost without reference in books, historical societies, or military archives. After years of research and hundreds of hours of interviews, Evelyn M. Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee have created a dramatic narrative that at last brings to light the critical role that women played throughout the war.

When the ashes had settled after World War II and the Allies convened an international war crimes trial in Nuremberg, a psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley, and a psychologist, Gustave Gilbert, tried to fathom the psychology of the Nazi leaders using extensive psychiatric interviews, IQ tests, and Rorschach inkblot tests. Never before or since has there been such a detailed study of governmental leaders who orchestrated mass killings.

David W. Powell enlisted for a tour of duty in April 1966 with the US Marines after receiving an imminent draft notice. Believing he would be able to leverage his existing skills as a computer programmer, he never thought all they would see on his resume was his Karate expertise. Even less that he would wind up serving as a Rocket man in the jungles of Da Nang and Chu Lai for a 13 month tour in hell. David's journey from naive civilian to battle-hardened combat veteran shows us all how fragile our humanity really is.

Twelve-year-old Sumiko feels her life has been made up of two parts: before Pearl Harbor and after it. The good part and the bad part. Raised on a flower farm in California, Sumiko is used to being the only Japanese girl in her class. Even when the other kids tease her, she always has had her flowers and family to go home to. That all changes after the horrific events of Pearl Harbor.

African American Slave Medicine offers a critical examination of how African American slaves' medical needs were addressed during the years before and surrounding the Civil War. Drawing upon ex-slave interviews conducted during the 1930s and 1940s by the Works Project Administration (WPA), Dr. Herbert C. Covey inventories many of the herbal, plant, and non-plant remedies used by African American folk practitioners during slavery.

The gripping story of a chemical weapons catastrophe, the cover-up, and how one American Army doctor’s discovery led to the development of the first drug to combat cancer, known today as chemotherapy.

The War in The Heaven, by Jamaican author Gem C. Collie, examines the psychological effects of generational victimization in contemporary times. The book exposes perpetual inherited mistreatment due to the constant battle one goes through to fight for individuality against collectivism, social norms, and culture.

No real account of black women physicians in the US exists, and what little mention is made of these women in existing histories is often insubstantial or altogether incorrect. In this work of extensive research, Jasmine Brown offers a rich new perspective, penning the long-erased stories of nine pioneering black women physicians beginning in 1860, when a black woman first entered medical school.

Imagine arriving at your office each morning, only to be constantly worried about the safety of your glass-fronted facade against a potential terrorist attack. Picture the uneasy feeling while hosting clients, aware that the integrity of your building could be compromised at any moment. Consider the strain of keeping your high-value operations, like software development, legal services, or financial management, secure from threats that seem increasingly common in today’s uncertain world.

In, The War Against the Virus: The Ultimate Collection of Tips and Tricks to Help You Thrive During COVID-19 Pandemic, author Dr. Rich Murphy takes us on a detailed journey to understanding our new normal with COVID-19. As a long time survivalist, he brings over forty-five years of experience as an Army Officer and Engineer to his own war - a war against a virus. Reviewing the historical connections to similar mass epidemics, we learn how a virus is able to be spread so rapidly around the world, starting with its origin.

While the War on Drugs may have sounded like a good idea at one time, the consequences have been catastrophic. From physicians persecuted for providing health care to their patients to parents grieving the loss of their children to overdose or prison - we've all become victims of this war. Our health, our families, our assets, our safety and our freedom are at risk: One in three adults in the U.S. now has a criminal record. In War on Us, Colleen Cowles raises the alarm and offers practical, proven reforms.

Military sexual trauma impacts thousands of both female and male United States service members every year. In the last decade, those numbers have been recorded and they are on the rise. This book is just one story from one female and her journey from her experience in the military and years of struggle before she found hope and healing.

Another instalment of the anarchic diaries of 11-year-old Alistair Fury and his quest for justice for younger brothers. This time he's desperate to impress Giselle, his older brother's glamorous French exchange partner.