Health History

It's been said that, after 9/11, the 2008 financial crash and the COVID-19 pandemic, we're a more fearful society than ever before. Yet fear, and the panic it produces, have long been driving forces - perhaps the driving force - of world history: fear of God, of famine, war, disease, poverty, and other people. In Fear: An Alternative History of the World, Robert Peckham considers the impact of fear in history, as both a coercive tool of power and as a catalyst for social change.

Understanding how your ADHD brain works is the first step to conquering the pesky symptoms that have been plaguing your life for far too long. You don’t have to stumble through life any longer. With help from this definitive guide to living with ADHD as an adult male, you can and will take back control of your life and find the happiness and peace that has been missing for far too long.

Research on this syndrome continues to evolve, but in the meantime patients and their medical providers are left feeling lost and hopeless. In this new and exciting audiobook, dual-boarded neuropsychiatrist J.D. Claunch, MD dives into the symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment of long COVID. More than just the science of this illness, Dr. Claunch paints a picture of the suffering and medical trauma experienced by patients with long COVID and older versions of this post-infectious chronic illness, like chronic Lyme and myalgic encephalomyelitis.

Mary Aiken is the world's leading expert in forensic cyberpsychology - a discipline that combines psychology, criminology, and technology to investigate the intersection where technology and human behavior meet. In this, her first book, Aiken has created a starting point for all future conversations about how the Internet is shaping development and behavior, societal norms and values, children, safety, security, and our perception of the world.

Despite passionate debates about health care and the media’s endless fascination with surgery, most of us have no idea how the first surgeons came to be because the story of surgery has never been fully told. Now, Empire of the Scalpel elegantly reveals surgery’s fascinating evolution from its early roots in ancient Egypt to its refinement in Europe and rise to scientific dominance in the United States.

Over the past 70 years, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, has evolved from a virtually unknown and little-used pamphlet to an imposing and comprehensive compendium of mental disorder. Its nearly 300 conditions have become the touchstones for the diagnoses that patients receive, students are taught, researchers study, insurers reimburse, and drug companies promote.

Never before have we had so much information available to us about food and health. There's GAPS, paleo, detox, gluten-free, alkaline, the sugar conspiracy, clean eating.... Unfortunately, a lot of it is not only wrong but actually harmful. So why do so many of us believe this bad science? Assembling a crack team of psychiatrists, behavioral economists, food scientists, and dietitians, the Angry Chef unravels the mystery of why sensible, intelligent people are so easily taken in by the latest food fads, making brief detours for an expletive-laden rant.

Laura Amy Schlitz delivers this Horn Book Fanfare and Laura Amy Schlitz delivers this Horn Book Fanfare and Cybils Award-winning best-seller that whisks 11-year-old Maud Flynn from a cold New England orphanage and into the stately mansion of three wealthy spinsters. After the Hawthorne sisters adopt her in 1909, they tell her she's their secret child. She must remain indoors at all times and must never stand in front of windows. Maud doesn't mind their restrictions. But she does wonder what could possibly require such secrecy.

In 1851 a mysterious visitor to Art Mumby's space home has plans for a calamity that will destroy not only the entire British Empire, but also the known universe. Can disaster be prevented with help from Art's irritating sister Myrtle, a few exotic space creatures, and an extraterrestrial pirate?

Going to the doctor today looks a lot different than it did in the past. In fact, the entire history of medicine is riddled with unusual, amazing, and sometimes strange facts. Learn about how people used inventions, treatments, and more to survive and thrive in everyday life.

Rising Tide Car Wash in Parkland, Florida, isn’t average in any way. When Tom D’Eri and his father John bought the location in 2013, it was struggling. Now it’s one of the highest-volume washes in Florida. Its employee retention rate is five times that of its competitors. It has spun off into two additional locations that have been immediately successful, and the business is absurdly profitable.

ALA notable author Iain Lawrence pens a moving tale with a Dickensian atmosphere about a young man's life aboard a cruel 19th-century prison ship. 14-year-old Tom Tin is forced to scavenge on the grimy streets of London after his father is sent to debtor's prison. Tom's survival is threatened by the sinister lowlifes that inhabit his hopeless world. But when he is unjustly arrested for murder, he finds a place that is even worse than the dark city streets.

An investigative journalist exposes the many holes in today’s best-selling behavioral science and argues that the trendy, TED Talk-friendly psychological interventions that are so in vogue at the moment will never be enough to truly address social injustice and inequality.

From government to business, banks to media, trust in institutions is at an all-time low. But this isn't the age of distrust - far from it. Rachel Botsman reveals that we are at the tipping point of one of the biggest social transformations in human history. A new world order is emerging: We might have lost faith in institutions and leaders, but millions of people rent their homes to total strangers, exchange digital currencies, or find themselves trusting a bot. This is the age of "distributed trust", a paradigm shift driven by innovative technologies that are rewriting the rules....

Food is one of life's great joys. So why has eating become such a source of anxiety and confusion? Bee Wilson shows that in two generations the world has undergone a massive shift from traditional, limited diets to more globalized ways of eating, from bubble tea to quinoa, from Soylent to meal kits. Paradoxically, our diets are getting healthier and less healthy at the same time. For some, there has never been a happier food era than today: a time of unusual herbs, farmers' markets, and internet recipe swaps.

For twenty years, Jill Bialosky has lived with the grief, guilt, questions, and confusion unleashed her by twenty-one-year-old sister Kim's suicide. Now, in a remarkable work of literary nonfiction, she re-creates with unsparing honesty her sister’s inner life, the events and emotions that led her to take her life on this particular night. In doing so, she opens a window on the nature of suicide itself, our own reactions and responses to it—especially the impact a suicide has on those who remain behind.

Americans have traditionally placed great value on self-reliance and fortitude. Recent decades, however, have seen the rise of a therapeutic ethic that views Americans as emotionally underdeveloped, requiring the ministrations of mental-health professionals to cope with life's vicissitudes. Today, having a book for every ailment, a counselor for every crisis, a lawsuit for every grievance, and a TV show for every problem degrades one's native ability to cope with life's challenges.

In 1953, a 27-year-old factory worker named Henry Molaison - who suffered from severe epilepsy - received a radical new version of the then-common lobotomy, targeting the most mysterious structures in the brain. The operation failed to eliminate Henry’s seizures, but it did have an unintended effect: Henry was left profoundly amnesic, unable to create long-term memories. Over the next 60 years, Patient H.M., as Henry was known, became the most studied individual in the history of neuroscience, a human guinea pig who would teach us much of what we know about memory today.

At the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Joshua Mezrich creates life from loss, transplanting organs from one body to another. In this intimate, profoundly moving work, he illuminates the extraordinary field of transplantation that enables this kind of miracle to happen every day.

The prior record for vaccine development and distribution was approximately four-and-a-half years. Operation Warp Speed got the COVID-19 vaccine to the American people in less than ten months. Operation Warp Speed did not happen by accident. It was the result of exceptional leadership, explicit strategy, and unprecedented teamwork. Author Paul Mango, one of the key leaders of Operation Warp Speed and the former deputy chief of US Health and Human Services, chronicles the challenges of developing the vaccine.