Medical Historical Fiction

Busy putting in stitches and bandaging lumberjacks' injuries, young Dr. Thomas Parks has no idea that his worst enemy is lurking in the sleepy village of Port McKinney in the spring of 1892. When one of the working girls at the Clarissa Hotel is brought to the Clinic desperately ill, Thomas's newly arrived associate wastes no time in making the diagnosis: Asian Cholera has somehow found this back water near Puget Sound. The cholera strikes viciously and kills in days, sometimes even hours....

In this coming-of-age novel set in the 1970s, Gene Hull is whitewashing the trunks of Arizona citrus trees when he spots a beautiful girl and falls instantly in love. The girl is vulnerable and shy. Though Gene breaks through her reserve, a date at a wave park turns into a near disaster, and Gene must call on the one person he can always rely on - his father, who is a doctor.

Deciding on her 39th birthday that a baby is the best present she could give herself, single Manhattan public relations executive Nina Kitchener makes an appointment to undergo artificial insemination at the Human Fertility Institute. Nine months later the nightmare begins. Just hours after she gives birth, someone kidnaps her infant son from the nursery. The police aren't helping, the fertility institute has shut down, and Nina believes that the only way to find her baby is to learn the identity of the sperm donor.

In Roots, Heini is home in Wales nursing her sick mother while Naomi is attending launch parties for her latest novel. The civil war in Spain seems a world away, until the fascists bomb and destroy Guernica, murdering hundreds of men, women, and children. Heini’s boyfriend, Deiniol Price, a coal miner, feels he must rally to the Spanish Republic’s cause and volunteer for the International Brigades while Naomi’s paramour, Count Nicolas Esteban, a pilot, dreams of glory, fighting for the fascists.

The Sherlockian Canon, as prolific as it is, contains few accounts in which Mr. Holmes and his medical colleagues Doctors Watson and Verner solve cases involving frightening medical conditions. It strikes me that many more such cases were successfully solved by Mr. Holmes and his associates. It is unlikely that Doctors Watson and Verner would allow such mysteries remain unsolved.

The inspiring stories of six people who changed history. Contents: Edward Jenner, the man who fought the terrible disease smallpox; Florence Nightingale, the nurse known as 'the lady with the lamp'; Elizabeth Garrett, England's first female doctor; Carl Jung, the doctor who wanted to understand the human mind; Jonas Salk, who defeated the dangerous illness polio; Christiaan Barnard, the first man to replace a human heart.