History Medicine Science

The "absorbing and powerful" (Wall Street Journal) story of two pioneering suffragette doctors who shattered social expectations and transformed modern medicine during World War I. In No Man's Land, Wendy Moore illuminates this turbulent moment of global war and pandemic when women were, for the first time, allowed to operate on men. Their fortitude and brilliance serve as powerful reminders of what women can achieve against all odds.

Blood carries life, yet the sight of it makes people faint. It is a waste product and a commodity pricier than oil. It can save lives and transmit deadly infections. Each one of us has roughly nine pints of it, yet many don’t even know their own blood type. And for all its ubiquitousness, the few tablespoons of blood discharged by 800 million women are still regarded as taboo: menstruation is perhaps the single most demonized biological event.

Immerse yourself in the history of medicine - a colorful story of skill, serendipity, trial and error, moments of genius, and dogged determination.

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.

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.

On a Thursday in November of 2013, Guadalupe Morales waited anxiously with her sister-in-law and their four small children. Every Latino man who drove away from their shared apartment above a small auto repair shop that day had failed to return - arrested, one by one, by ICE agents and local police. As the two women discussed what to do next, a SWAT team clad in body armor and carrying assault rifles stormed the room. In Separated, William D. Lopez examines the lasting damage done by this daylong act of collaborative immigration enforcement in Washtenaw County, Michigan.

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.

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.

G. Wayne Miller has dramatically and meticulously reconstructed an amazing true story: how a group of renegade Minnesota surgeons, led by Dr. Walt Lillehei, made medical history by becoming the first doctors to operate deep inside the human heart.

James A. Garfield may have been the most extraordinary man ever elected president. Born into abject poverty, he rose to become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War hero, and a renowned and admired reformist congressman. Nominated for president against his will, he engaged in a fierce battle with the corrupt political establishment. But four months after his inauguration, a deranged office seeker tracked Garfield down and shot him in the back. But the shot didn’t kill Garfield. The drama of what hap­pened subsequently is a powerful story of a nation in tur­moil.

When British-born Elizabeth Blackwell earned her medical degree in America in 1849, there was an international outcry. Few at the time would have disagreed with the actress Fanny Kemble's remark - "What, trust a woman doctor - never!"

Since 2010, it has been possible to determine a person's genetic makeup in a matter of days at an accessible cost for many millions of people. Along with this technological breakthrough there has emerged a movement to use this information to help prospective parents "eliminate preventable genetic disease". As the prospect of systematically excluding the appearance of unwanted mutations in our children comes within reach, David B. Goldstein examines the possible consequences from these types of choices.

Shooting Up: A Short History of Drugs and War examines how intoxicants have been put to the service of states, empires, and their armies throughout history. Since the beginning of organized combat, armed forces have prescribed drugs to their members for two general purposes: to enhance performance during combat and to counter the trauma of killing and witnessing violence after it is over.

In the spring of 2020, COVID-19 arrived in New York City. Before long, America’s largest metropolis was at war against a virus that mercilessly swept through its five boroughs. In The Desperate Hours, award-winning journalist Marie Brenner, having been granted unprecedented 18-month access to the entire New York-Presbyterian hospital system, tells the story of the doctors, nurses, residents, researchers, and suppliers who tried to save lives across Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn and the northern periphery of the city.

On November 23, 1849, in the heart of Boston, one of the city's richest men vanished. Dr. George Parkman, a Brahmin who owned much of Boston's West End, was last seen that afternoon visiting his alma mater, Harvard Medical School. Police scoured city tenements and the harbor - some leads put Parkman at sea or in Manhattan - but a Harvard janitor held a much darker suspicion: that their ruthless benefactor had never even left the Medical School building. His shocking discovery engulfed America in one of its most infamous trials.

When Dr. David Hosack tilled the country's first botanical garden in the Manhattan soil more than 200 years ago, he didn't just dramatically alter the New York landscape; he left a monumental legacy of advocacy for public health and wide-ranging support for the sciences. In melodic prose, historian Victoria Johnson eloquently chronicles Hosack's tireless career to reveal the breadth of his impact. The result is a lush portrait of the man who gave voice to a new, deeply American understanding of the powers and perils of nature.

The beginning of the modern contraceptive era began in 1882, when Dr. Aletta Jacobs opened the first birth control clinic in Amsterdam. The founding of this facility, and the clinical provision of contraception that it enabled, marked the moment when physicians started to take the prevention of pregnancy seriously as a medical concern. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Donna Drucker traces the history of modern contraception, outlining the development, manufacturing, and use of contraceptive methods from the opening of Dr. Jacobs' clinic to the present.

In 1920, at the end of the last major pandemic, global life expectancy was just over 40 years. Today, in many parts of the world, human beings can expect to live more than 80 years. As a species, we have doubled our life expectancy in just one century. There are few measures of human progress more astonishing than this increased longevity.

At the height of World War I, history’s most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of science and epidemic disease.