Medical Biography

In the 1850s doctors began examining brain cells under microscopes to try and find the root cause of madness. A disease that long has been held to have multiple causes and cures, “madness” has stymied doctors for centuries. A breakthrough occurred in 1976, when Dr. Solomon Snyder published groundbreaking research showing that schizophrenia comes from having too much of a chemical called dopamine in the brain. A wunderkind who started medical school at 19, by 35 Snyder had discovered the brain's opiate receptor, which helped birth the modern science of drug addiction.

This is the very raw story of a man who served his country, fought in the Falklands, and then, had extreme difficulty adjusting after the war. But it is actually much more than that. Yes, like many veterans of combat he fought - and continues to fight - with post-traumatic stress disorder. However, the factors leading to his PTSD began long before he ever put on his uniform and picked up a gun.

Having once aspired to be a journalist, Griggs found that the only way to make sense of what she was witnessing around her and maintain her sanity was to keep a diary. The Sky Was Falling is her day-to-day account of what most of us were grateful to only see in the news—the sharply increasing case numbers, the dwindling supply of respirators, the lack of clarity on how to treat this new disease.

When the partner of Emmy Award–winning screenwriter Abi Morgan abruptly collapsed from a mysterious illness, doctors were concerned that he would not survive. Then, six months later, Jacob woke from his coma, to the delight and relief of his family and friends—except this proved to be anything but a Hollywood ending. Because to Jacob, the woman standing at his bedside, who had cared for him all these months, was not his partner. Not his children’s mother. Not the woman he loved. Sure, she looked like his Abi, but this was an imposter, living someone else’s life.

From the OR to the ICU, Dr. David Alfery brings you into a hidden world of medicine that has never before been seen. You will witness the exhilaration a physician feels when a life is miraculously saved, the terror when a life is on the line, the shock of an unexpected demise, the grace patients evidence when facing the end of life, the anguish one suffers when a family member is perilously close to dying, and much more.

Dr. Andrew Furey, an orthopedic surgeon, was sitting by the fireplace at his home in St John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, watching TV after work, when dreadful images of the aftermath of an earthquake in Haiti burst in on the cosy domestic scene. Human suffering on an epic scale was being documented in real time. Dr. Furey spent a sleepless night, and woke knowing he had to help in some way. In what has been a theme throughout Newfoundland and Labrador's history, he found himself answering the call.

Award-winning investigative journalist and contributing Wired editor Scott Carney leads listeners on a breathtaking journey through the macabre underworld of the global body bazaar, where organs, bones, and even live people are bought and sold on The Red Market. The Red Market sheds a blazing new light on the disturbing, billion-dollar business of trading in human body parts, bodies, and child trafficking, raising issues and exposing corruptions almost too bizarre and shocking to imagine.

Horrifying, heartbreaking and eye-opening, these are the stories, the patients and the cases that have characterised a career spent behind bars. The no-holds-barred memoirs of a GP who went from working at a quiet suburban practice to treating the country’s most dangerous criminals - first in young offenders’ institutions, then at the notorious Wormwood Scrubs and finally at Europe’s largest women-only prison in Europe, Bronzefield.

Danielle Perreault a neuf ans la première fois qu’elle souhaite s’expatrier: son père s’est fait offrir un poste à la nouvelle Université du Rwanda et, pour elle, c’est tout décidé : ils partent en Afrique ! Mais son père, à sa grande déception, refuse... Dix ans plus tard, toujours attirée par l’aventure, elle part enseigner au Togo. Elle reçoit un salaire de vingt dollars par mois, mais elle est logée, nourrie, et on lui fournit la mobylette. Que demander de plus?!

Dr. Jonathan Reisman - a physician, adventure traveler, and naturalist - brings listeners on an odyssey, navigating our insides like an explorer discovering a new world. With unique insight, Reisman shows us how understanding mountain watersheds helps to diagnose heart attacks, how the body is made mostly of mucus, not water, and how urine carries within it a tale of humanity’s origins.

Trauma surgeon Dr. Brian H. Williams has seen it all—gunshot wounds, stabbings, traumatic brain injuries—and ushers us into the trauma bay, where the wounds of a national emergency amass. As a Harvard-trained physician, he learned to keep his head down and his scalpel ready. As a Black man, he learned to swallow rage when patients told him to take out the trash. Just days after the tragic police shootings of two Black men, he tried to save the lives of officers shot in the deadliest incident for US law enforcement since 9/11.

Twenty-five years ago, my doctors had no cure for my cancer. So I went on a quest to find my own treatment. This is my story....

The Lobotomist explores one of the darkest chapters of American medicine: the desperate attempt to treat the hundreds of thousands of psychiatric patients in need of help during the middle decades of the 20th century. Into this crisis stepped Walter Freeman, MD, who saw a solution in lobotomy, a brain operation intended to reduce the severity of psychotic symptoms. Drawing on Freeman's documents and interviews with Freeman's family, Jack El-Hai takes a penetrating look at the life and work of this complex scientific genius.

In the novel Little Women, Mr. March goes off to war. But in real life, it was Jo March (Louisa May Alcott herself, an avowed abolitionist) who traveled to Washington to nurse Northern soldiers. This is Alcott’s memoir but she chose to use the pseudonym “Tribulation Periwinkle” to tell her story. Despite the subject matter, her account is full of amusing anecdotes as she makes her way alone from Concord, Massachusetts to DC, trying to finagle a free ticket and convinced she will drown during the journey.

"In 1960 I was given a transorbital, or 'ice pick' lobotomy. My stepmother arranged it. My father agreed to it. Dr. Walter Freeman, the father of the American lobotomy, told me he was going to do some 'tests'. It took 10 minutes and cost 200 dollars." Assisted by journalist/novelist Charles Fleming, Howard Dully recounts a family tragedy of Sophoclean proportions.

In the summer of 2015, Ross Douthat was moving his family, with two young daughters and a pregnant wife, from Washington, DC, to a sprawling farmhouse in a picturesque Connecticut town when he acquired a mysterious and devastating sickness. It left him sleepless, crippled, wracked with pain - a shell of himself. After months of seeing doctors and descending deeper into a physical inferno, he discovered that he had a disease which, according to CDC definitions, does not actually exist.

His name was Joshua Silver. He was 23 years old, educated, and had an impressive vocabulary. The NYPD had found Joshua Silver naked in Times Square, barking like a dog. It was just another night for Julie Holland, the attending doctor in the world famous Bellevue Hospital's psychiatric emergency room.

Out of the crucible of medical training, award-winning writer Terrence Holt shapes this stunning account of residency, the years-long ordeal in which doctors are made. "Amid all the mess and squalor of the hospital, with its blind random unraveling of lives", Internal Medicine finds the compassion from which doctors discover the strength to care.

He's into his second year of medicine, but this time Max is out of the wards and onto the streets, working for the Phoenix Outreach Project. Fuelled by tea and more enthusiasm than experience, he attempts to locate and treat a wide and colourful range of patients that somehow his first year on the wards didn't prepare him for...from Molly the 80-year-old drugs mule and God in a Tesco car park to middle-class mums addicted to appearances and pain killers in equal measure.

In Deep Water Dream, Roedde recounts stories from her long career - from working with a Cree community in developing a medical dictionary in their own language, to training community-based health workers, to delivering Amish babies in her own home. Roedde redraws the boundaries between physician and community, strengthening the capacity to care for those close by, and offers a hopeful and powerful example to the rest of the world.