History Medicine Science

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.

The Tragedy of American Science explores how the US economy’s addiction to military spending distorts and deforms science by making it overwhelmingly subservient to military interests. The primary motive driving American science and technology has become the search for new and more efficient ways to kill people. This transforms science from the classic ideal of a creative force for the advancement of humankind into its destructive and antihuman opposite.

Even the greatest minds in medicine have been terribly, terribly wrong. Boneheads and Brainiacs profiles the winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine from 1901 to 1950 - a surprisingly diverse group of racists, cranks, and opportunists, as well as heroes, geniuses, and selfless benefactors of humanity. Forget all the ivory tower stereotypes of white-coated doctors finding miracle cures. Boneheads and Brainiacs reveals the messy human reality behind medical progress, in a highly entertaining audiobook for the ordinary listener.

In this landmark medical narrative, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Mark Johnson and Kathleen Gallagher chronicle the story of Nic Volker, the Wisconsin boy at the center of a daring breakthrough in medicine - a complete gene sequencing to discover the cure for an otherwise undiagnosable illness.

At its core, American Disgust wrestles with how changing cultural notions of digestion-what goes into the body and what comes out of it-create and impose racial categories motivated by feelings of disgust rooted in American settler-colonial racism. It shows how disgust is a changing, yet fundamental, aspect of American subjectivity and that engaging with it-personally, politically, and theoretically-opens up possibilities for conceptualizing health at the individual, societal, and planetary levels.

In 1900, the U.S. sent three doctors to Cuba to discover how yellow fever was spread. There, they launched one of history's most controversial human studies. Compelling and terrifying, The American Plague depicts the story of yellow fever and its reign in this country - and in Africa, where even today it strikes thousands every year. With "arresting tales of heroism," it is a story as much about the nature of human beings as it is about the nature of disease.

In Good Blood, best-selling writer Julian Guthrie tells the gripping tale of the race to cure a horrible affliction known as Rh disease that stalked families and caused a mother’s immune system to attack her own unborn child. The story is anchored by two very different men on two continents: Dr. John Gorman in New York, who would land on a brilliant yet contrarian idea, and the unassuming Australian whose almost magical blood - and his unyielding devotion to donating it - would save millions of lives.

Against a global backdrop of wartime suffering and postwar hope, Borrowing Life gathers the personal histories of the men and women behind the team that enabled and performed the modern medical miracle of the world's first successful organ transplant.

Bart Stupak, a nine-term Democratic Congressman from Michigan’s First Congressional District, brought two unshakable principles with him to Capitol Hill in 1992: a firm belief in the sanctity of life, and the conviction that health care was a right for all Americans and not a privilege for the fortunate few. Studies indicating that 45,000 Americans died needlessly every year for lack of access to health care inspired Congressman Stupak’s tireless efforts, often at great personal cost, to pass lifesaving legislation while remaining true to his right-to-life principles.

Dr. Lange graduated from medical school in 1981, right as a new plague swept across the globe. His story became intertwined with the story of HIV. At once a physician, scientist, AIDS activist, and medical diplomat, Lange studied ways to battle HIV and prevent its spread from mother to child. Fighting the injustices of poverty, Lange advocated for better access to health care for the poor and the vulnerable. The Impatient Dr. Lange is the story of one man's struggle against a global pandemic - and the tragic attack that may have slowed down the search for a cure.

Stuart Jamieson's story is the story of four decades of advances in heart surgery. Taut, elegantly crafted, and ever-attentive to the patients for whom he was the last best chance, Close to the Sun is an adventurous, riveting account based on the experience of over 40,000 heart surgeries, where everything was on the line every moment in the O.R.

It wasn’t supposed to be this hard. If America could send a man to the moon, shouldn’t the best surgeons in the world be able to build an artificial heart? In Ticker, Texas Monthly executive editor and two time National Magazine Award winner Mimi Swartz shows just how complex and difficult it can be to replicate one of nature’s greatest creations. Part investigative journalism, part medical mystery, Ticker is a dazzling story of modern innovation, recounting 50 years of false starts, abysmal failures, and miraculous triumphs.

In 1999, Munjed Al Muderis was a surgical resident working in Baghdad when the military police marched into the operating theatre and ordered the team to mutilate army deserters. When the head of surgery refused, he was executed. Munjed's choices were stark - comply and breach the medical oath, refuse and face death or flee. That day, Munjed's life changed forever. He escaped to Indonesia and boarded a boat to Australia.

Rabies enjoys a fearsome and lurid reputation. Throughout the decades of spiraling growth that defined New York City from the 1840s to the 1910s, the bone-chilling cry of "Mad dog!" possessed the power to upend the ordinary routines and rhythms of urban life. In Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers, Jessica Wang examines the history of this rare but dreaded affliction during a time of rapid urbanization.

When the woman he loved was diagnosed with a metastatic cancer, science writer George Johnson embarked on a journey to learn everything he could about the disease and the people who dedicate their lives to understanding and combating it. What he discovered is a revolution under way - an explosion of new ideas about what cancer really is and where it comes from. In a provocative and intellectually vibrant exploration, he takes us on an adventure through the history and recent advances of cancer research that will challenge everything you thought you knew about the disease.

Immergiti nella meravigliosa vastità della cultura dei nativi americani, scopri l'impressionante potenza della loro spiritualità ed entra in contatto con l'incredibile patrimonio di tradizioni, racconti, insegnamenti, leggende e ispirazioni che hanno lasciato. Entrare in contatto con le tradizioni, gli usi, i costumi e la visione dei nativi americani significa riscoprire la tua identità, ti permette di risvegliare la tua capacità di ascoltare ed connetterti con le forze della natura e con il grande spirito di cui ognuno di noi è parte.

When Lightning Tickled History is a popular, narrative nonfiction, history audiobook designed as a supplemental history book for college students as well as a general interest audiobook. It is a light, breezy, historically-accurate collection of vignettes of incidents when lightning played in part in the drama of human affairs. It includes sections on lightning’s impact on the origin of life, Roman history, both Babylonian Captivities, Martin Luther, Benjamin Franklin, Bible, Charles Darwin, Hindenburg, Nicholas Tesla, and the role of lightning in the modern age.

¿Qué cenaremos hoy? Nos hemos confrontado a esta pregunta desde que el hombre descubrió el fuego, pero para Michael Pollan la manera en que la abordamos hoy en día podría llegar a determinar nuestra supervivencia en cuanto a especie. El hecho de que seamos omnívoros y podamos ingerir todo tipo de alimentos hace que nuestro acto de decidir qué queremos comer se vuelva un dilema, sobre todo ante la abundancia de productos que nos ofrece el desconcertante y traicionero mercado alimenticio.

In this book, veteran constitutional lawyer Jonathan W. Emord explains the intellectual origins of freedom of speech from the Age of Enlightenment to the founding of the American republic. Today, government censorship of health information worldwide relies on the same mechanisms of prior restraint that were used in Europe from the 16th to the 18th centuries.

Important and provocative, The Undead examines why even with the tools of advanced technology, what we think of as life and death, consciousness and nonconsciousness, is not exactly clear - and how this problem has been further complicated by the business of organ harvesting.