Medical History

In July 1952, Dr. Walter Freeman arrived at the gates of a West Virginia asylum. In his medical bag he carried two metal picks and a surgical hammer. He had invented a “cheap, easy” ten-minute lobotomy. The press described it as a miracle cure, a new frontier in psychosurgery. That summer, in just twelve days, Freeman lobotomized 228 men, women, and children in West Virginia’s public mental hospitals. His blitzkrieg of brain surgery became known as “Operation Ice Pick,” named after the tools he wielded.

At the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, dramatized by the popular film Black Hawk Down, the majority of soldiers who died were killed instantly or bled to death before they could reach an operating table. This tragedy reinforced the need for a revolutionary treatment that could transform trauma medicine. So, when Frank Hursey and Bart Gullong—who had no medical or military experience—discovered that a cheap, crushed rock called zeolite had blood‑clotting properties, they brought it to the military's attention. The Marines and the Navy adopted the resulting product, QuikClot, immediately.

Tiny Dancer is the amazing true story of Zubaida Hasan, a nine-year-old girl from the remote deserts of Afghanistan who, in the summer of 2001, accidentally fell into a kerosene fire while heating water for a bath. Though she was horribly mutilated, her father refused to give up and exhaustively sought help to save his child.

For nearly three decades, Dr Colin Manock was in charge of South Australia's forensic pathology services. In cases of unexpected or unexplained death, it was his job to determine when a person took their final breath, and whether they had died naturally - or not. But Manock did not have the necessary training for such a specialist role, and made serious errors in several major cases. The full extent of his wrongdoing, and the exact number of cases impacted by it, remain a mystery more than twenty-five years after he retired.

The bloodless corporate coup of 2020 swept away every vestige of government, resulting in an ongoing struggle for dominance and survival of the fittest. The battle becomes more vicious day by day in the face of accelerating climate change, limited food supplies, and clean air only for the elite. Caught in the middle is Dr. Zoe Hidalaga, a MediCorp organ harvester, who has contracted a deadly retro virus that killed her husband and has resulted in her being declared an unfit mother for her daughter.  

This book is an antidote to hype and a salve to soothe the itch for stem-cell salvation. In it, Professor John Rasko, a leading physician-scientist, and writer-historian Carl Power take us on a wild historical tour of this scandal-prone field.

Try to imagine the city of Malaga is to be evacuated overnight. A total of 150,000 people will have to walk 200 kilometers along the coastal road in search of a safe refuge while being pursued by Italian tanks, bombed by German aircraft, and shelled by Rebel Nationalist ships. Many will be too weak to reach the safe port of Almería and will only survive because an ambulance and a Canadian doctor come to help. A doctor who will later be accused of spying and betrayal and will be unwillingly pushed out of Spain by the very people he had come to assist.

Long before the U.S. government began conducting secret radiation and germ-warfare experiments, and long before the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, medical professionals had introduced—and hotly debated the ethics of—the use of human subjects in medical experiments. In Subjected to Science, Susan Lederer provides the first full-length history of biomedical research with human subjects in the earlier period, from 1890 to 1940.

In the 1970s, Dr. Alan Scott sought to selectively weaken eye muscles to treat strabismus (when one or both eyes are misaligned) without surgery. After failed attempts with other agents, Scott developed a method to stabilize the bacteria that causes botulism, culminating in a drug that eventually became known as Botox.

Bradwel reminds us that the centenary of this apparent "wonder drug" should be no cause for celebration. Insulin often remains inaccessible to those who need it most: elusive prescriptions, uneven availability and sky-high prices result in rationing and desperate do-it-yourself research and development. In the face of bootstraps rhetoric and "Pharma Bro" capitalists, patients across the world are left to fend for themselves. There is a long way to go in the twenty-first century until insulin truly fulfills the extraordinary promises made by its discovery.

Jede Krankheit und jeder Mensch haben das Potential, Medizingeschichte zu schreiben. Seit Hunderten von Jahren ergründen Ärzte und Ärztinnen auf der ganzen Welt die Geheimnisse der Medizin, indem sie sich echte Fälle ansehen. Autor und Arzt Roy Benaroch hat für uns spannende Fälle der Medizingeschichte gesammelt, in denen bekannte Persönlichkeiten der Weltgeschichte als mysteriöser Patient oder Patientin vor uns stehen.

The Medical Committee for Human Rights was organized in the summer of 1964 by medical professionals, mostly white and Northern, to provide care and support for Civil Rights activists who were organizing black voters in Mississippi. They left their lives and lucrative private practices to march beside and tend the wounds of demonstrators from Freedom Summer, to the March on Selma, to the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968.

Quando Jennifer Doudna ainda cursava a sexta série, encontrou em sua cama um exemplar de A dupla hélice, de James Watson, deixado por seu pai. Avançando pelas páginas, Doudna ficou fascinada com os bastidores da competição científica pela descoberta dos tijolinhos que constroem a vida. Motivada pela paixão de entender o funcionamento da natureza e por transformar descobertas em invenções práticas, Doudna ajudaria a realizar aquilo que o próprio James Watson, um dos descobridores da estrutura do DNA, classificara como o próximo avanço científico mais importante da biologia.

The world has suffered many pandemics in the years since - at least three serious flu outbreaks among them - but no pandemic has been as deadly or as far-reaching as the Spanish flu. As the world reacts to a headline-grabbing - yet far, far less deadly - outbreak of this pandemic, Andrew Smith looks back to 1918 Spanish flu to see what we learned from one of the most devastating diseases in recent history.

This is the spellbinding tale of a mysterious doctor who revolutionized neonatal care more than 100 years ago and saved some 7,000 babies. Dr. Martin Couney's story is a kaleidoscopic ride through the intersection of ebullient entrepreneurship, enlightened pediatric care, and the wild culture of world's fairs at the beginning of the American Century.

He has been called the greatest surgeon of the 20th century. The son of Lebanese immigrants, Michael DeBakey rose from humble beginnings in a backwater Louisiana town to dominate the landscape of modern medicine. His contributions to our understanding and treatment of cardiovascular disease, in particular, were innumerable and epoch-making. DeBakey led a life of high drama, from the streets of Jazz Age New Orleans and the operating theaters of pre-war Europe, to the battlefields of World War II and the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina.

Crypto, decentralized blockchains, NFTs, and the ownership economy of web3 hold the future of healthcare. Discover how the metaverse provides innovative business models that are poised to revolutionize the way society approaches health. Wealthcare envisions what healthcare and wellness may look like when accidental wellness is a thing of the past. As web3 technology reshapes finance, supply chain, social media, and other industries, Wealthcare presents a clear case for including healthcare privacy and innovation within this new reality.

A young woman puts on a white coat for her first day as a student doctor. So begins this powerful debut, which follows our unnamed narrator through cadaver dissection, surgical rotation, difficult births, sudden deaths, and a budding relationship with a seminarian. In the troubled world of the hospital, where the language of blood tests and organ systems so often hides the heart of the matter, she works her way from one bed to another, from a man dying of substance use and tuberculosis, to a child in pain crisis, to a young woman, fading from confusion to aphasia to death.

A revealing biography of Dr. Benjamin Rush - fiery signer of the Declaration of Independence, prominent physician, ardent politician, zealous social reformer, passionate humanitarian, and dedicated educator. Known primarily as America's most influential and leading physician, Rush was also among the first to call for the abolition of slavery, equal rights for women, free education and health care for the poor, slum clearance, citywide sanitation facilities, an end to child labor, and universal public education, among other causes.

Every memoir of the American Civil War provides us with another view of the catastrophe that changed the country forever. The Other Side of the War reveals the war as experienced by the thousands of women volunteered to work in hospitals and for the Sanitary Commission, the organization that advocated better practices and lobbied for increased supplies. Katharine Prescott Wormeley was one of those volunteers, an American nurse in the Civil War, as well as author, editor, and and one of America’s best-known translators of French language literary works.