Health Care History

An articulate, compelling history of American battlefield medics.

In this first history of the military ambulance, historian John S. Haller Jr. documents the development of medical technologies for treating and transporting wounded soldiers on the battlefield. More than a history of medical evacuation systems and vehicles, this exhaustively researched and richly illustrated volume tells a fascinating story, giving listeners a unique perspective of the changing nature of warfare in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

A Family History of Illness is a gritty historical memoir that examines the body's immune system and microbial composition as well as the biological and cultural origins of memory and history, offering a startling, fresh way to view the role of history in understanding our physical selves.

From Rocks to Robots: The Evolution of Western Surgery takes listeners on a fascinating journey through the gripping, often gruesome, but always remarkable history of surgery—from ancient Greek healers performing primitive operations with bronze instruments, through the battlefield heroics of Renaissance surgeons, to the sterile precision of robotic surgery today.

For centuries, people have talked of a powerful bodily disorder called migraine, which currently affects about a billion people around the world. Yet until now, the rich history of this condition has barely been told. In Migraine, award-winning historian Katherine Foxhall reveals the ideas and methods that ordinary people and medical professionals have used to describe, explain, and treat migraine since the Middle Ages.

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.

What is embryonic stem cell research? Why is it so controversial? What is its relationship to human cloning? Events are moving so fast and biotechnology seems so complicated that many of us don't have an informed opinion about issues that are remaking the human future before our very eyes.

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.

Ever since we started huddling together in communities, the story of human history has been inextricably entwined with the story of microbes. They have evolved and spread amongst us, shaping our culture through infection, disease, and pandemic. At the same time, our changing human culture has itself influenced the evolutionary path of microbes. Dorothy H. Crawford here shows that one cannot be truly understood without the other. Beginning with a dramatic account of the SARS pandemic at the start of the 21st century, she takes us back in time to follow the interlinked history of microbes and man....

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.

Mosquito Warrior tells the engrossing story of General William C. Gorgas (1854-1920), the once-renowned pioneer in tropical disease research and public health. His fascinating life illuminates vast transformations in the United States. Carol R. Byerly's balanced and contemporary examination of Gorgas illuminates his complex legacy in medicine and public health, military history, and American ambitions at the dawn of United States global ascendency.

White coats, Hippocratic oaths, medicine as a calling–are these beneficial practices or harmful rituals? White Coat Ways traces seven medical traditions from their historical origins to their contemporary issues. Tracing these origins through common misconceptions–who really wrote the Hippocratic oath, are hospitals nonprofit–empowers the listener to approach contemporary controversies accurately.

We didn’t just crawl out of a cave. We know what works based on experience. Why must we constantly re-fight the same battles over and over? Our politics and even our spiritual lives too often resemble the film “Groundhog Day” in which actor Bill Murray wakes up and repeats the same event...

Dispatches from the AIDS Pandemic is a unique firsthand account from three public health leaders of CDC's early response to AIDS. Drawing in part on interviews from the CDC's AIDS oral history project, the authors trace the evolution of AIDS from newly recognized disease to pandemic.

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.

A crucial component of anti-Black racism is the unconscionable disparity in health outcomes between Black and white Americans. Sickening examines this institutionalized inequality through dramatic, concrete events from the past two decades, revealing how unequal living conditions and inadequate medical care have become routine. From the spike in chronic disease after Hurricane Katrina to the lack of protection for Black residents during the Flint water crisis, author Anne Pollock takes listeners on a journey through the diversity of anti-Black racism operating in healthcare.

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.

In this fascinating new exploration of mental illness, Professor Brendan Kelly examines ‘madness’ in history and how we have responded to it over the centuries. We travel from the psychiatric institutions of modern India to scientific studies of the brain in Victorian England. We discover the beginnings of formal asylum care and witness the experimental therapies of the cavernous psychiatric hospitals of the 19th and early 20th centuries in Ireland, England, Belgium, Italy, Germany and the United States.

Outlining how generations of public health and science advocates have attempted to hold the line against Big Pharma and their allies in government, Alexander Zaitchik's first-in-kind history documents the rise of medical monopoly in the United States and its subsequent globalization. From the controversial arrival of patent-wielding German drug firms in the late 19th century, to present-day coordination between industry and philanthropic organizations, Owning the Sun tells one of the most important and least understood histories of our time.

Adéntrese en la fascinante historia de la medicina con este audiolibro repleto de sorprendentes anécdotas y los pasajes de la historia más determinantes e interesantes sobre epidemias, guerras, medicamentos, grandes hazañas o las fatídicas infecciones. Una obra donde se abordan desde los mayores logros médicos de la humanidad y las enfermedades más cruentas y devastadoras que asolaron ciudades y países, hasta las anécdotas y casos más curiosos que provocaron el mayor de los asombros.