Medical Biography

In 2002, at age 28, David MacLean woke up in a foreign land with his memory wiped clean. No money. No passport. No identity. Taken to a mental hospital by the police, MacLean then started to hallucinate so severely he had to be tied down. Soon he could remember song lyrics and scenes from television shows but not his family, his friends, or the woman he loved. All of these symptoms, it turned out, were the result of the commonly prescribed malarial medication he was taking. Upon hisreturn to the States, he struggled to piece together the fragments of his former life in a harrowing, absurd, and unforgettable journey back to himself.

As a medical detective of the modern world, forensic pathologist Ryan Blumenthal’s chief goal is to bring perpetrators to justice. He has performed thousands of autopsies, which have helped bring numerous criminals to book. In Autopsy he covers the hard lessons learnt as a rookie pathologist, as well as some of the most unusual cases he’s encountered. During his career, for example, he has dealt with high-profile deaths, mass disasters, death by lightning and people killed by African wildlife.

From the challenges of navigating disorientation to the moments when guilt and resentments creep in, listeners are guided gently through slow-burning grief. Along the way, Davis shares how her own fractured family came together, and how her father revealed his true self - always kind, even when he couldn't recognize his own daughter. The result is an achingly beautiful work on the fragile human condition from a profoundly wise and empathetic writer.

In 2004, doctors discovered that Carmen Rice had a stage 4 glioblastoma multiforme brain tumor, one of the deadliest of all cancers—the same cancer which killed John McCain, Edward Kennedy, and Beau Biden. After being diagnosed with a glioblastoma tumor, 29-year-old Brittany Maynard made headline news when she moved to Oregon to die with dignity. Carmen's doctor gave her six months to live, but with her faith in God and tenacious spirit, Carmen just kept beating the odds. They Call Me "The Miracle" is her story.

Heather is pale and thin, seventeen and pregnant with twins when Patricia Harman begins to care for her. Over the course of the next five seasons Patsy will see Heather through the loss of both babies and their father. She will also care for her longtime patient Nila, pregnant for the eighth time and trying to make a new life without her abusive husband. And Patsy will try to find some comfort to offer Holly, whose teenage daughter struggles with bulimia. She will help Rebba learn to find pleasure in her body and help Kaz transition into a new body.

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.

After years of prosecuting hard-core criminals, rising legal star Alan Bell took a private sector job in South Florida's newest skyscraper. Suddenly, he suffered such bizarre medical symptoms, doctors suspected he'd been poisoned by the Mafia. Bell's rapidly declining health forced him to flee his glamorous Miami life to a sterile "bubble" in the remote Arizona desert.

San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hôtel-Dieu (God's hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves - "anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times" and needed extended medical care - ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed for 20 years. Laguna Honda, lower-tech but human-paced, gave Sweet the opportunity to practice a kind of attentive medicine that has almost vanished.

This raw and unflinching narrative delves into the inner world of an Australian midwife, her professional journey, recounting experiences of empowering women to make choices and confronting a system that resists change. From homebirth scenes to the hallways of a hospital amid the pandemic, this is a story marked by passion, burnout, peaks and valleys, tears and triumphs. Midwife Crisis is an unfiltered emotional journey, interwoven tales of birth and loss, encapsulating the joy of bringing life into the world along with the profound love and heartbreak intrinsic to the midwifery profession.

Je venais de passer douze ans à être en colère, à penser la mort comme une ennemie qui ne pouvait causer que de la peine, de la noirceur et du vide. Et soudain, je découvre qu'elle est aussi une délivrance, qu'elle peut être douce et libératrice. Maman, tu vas peut-être me prendre pour une folle, mais mes mots sont trop faibles pour décrire ce que je viens de vivre. C'est un cadeau précieux que je n'oublierai jamais. Désormais, il est clair dans mon esprit que je veux travailler avec les morts pour apaiser les vivants.

Beneath the Surface tells that remarkable story. From the halls of University College Dublin in the 1970s, to a remote hospital in Tanzania where he would meet someone who was to have a transformative effect on his approach to health, and on through decades on the front line of Irish general practice, culminating in a life-altering realisation that would see him change the course of his career.

Was Andy Warhol a hoarder? Did Einstein have autism? Was Frank Lloyd Wright a narcissist? In this surprising, inventive, and meticulously researched look at the evolution of mental health, acclaimed health and science journalist Claudia Kalb gives listeners a glimpse into the lives of high-profile historic figures through the lens of modern psychology, weaving groundbreaking research into biographical narratives that are deeply embedded in our culture.

Introspective, richly layered, and surprisingly hopeful, A Real Emergency is a love letter from a paramedic to the best and worst parts of her career. For fifteen years, Joanna Sokol filled private notebooks with her confusion, humor, and anger toward the strange world of emergency street...

In the last half of the twentieth century, Don Thomas discovered a cure for every marrow-based disease—like leukemia, lymphoma, and sickle-cell anemia—forever changing treatment for some of the deadliest illnesses. His feats were extraordinary, earning him a Nobel Prize, and the cascade of treatments he inspired have reshaped and will continue to reshape the practice of clinical medicine. Yet no one has ever written Thomas’s courageous story.Dr. Frederick R. Appelbaum, a member of Thomas’s research team, does so for the first time.

ALS is a deadly disease that didn't want to let go of me. I went from hope to planning my own death as a way of escaping this demon. My journey is a view into the life of a person who needs 24-hour care, never any privacy. I was given 18 months to get my affairs in order. That lead me to seeking a higher power than the doctors. I have never witnessed an energy healing until it happened to me. This book is my call to each of you and your family who are challenged by ALS. My frame of mind was my only power.

G. Wayne Miller has dramatically and meticulously reconstructed an amazing true story: how a group of renegade Minnesota surgeons, led by Dr. Walt Lillehei, made medical history by becoming the first doctors to operate deep inside the human heart.

"Le voyage - ce voyage-là du moins - est pour moi terminé. A partir de demain, mieux : à partir de cet instant, tout est neuf. Je poursuis mon chemin. Demain, comme tous les jours d'ici ou d'ailleurs, sur ce versant ou sur l'autre, est désormais mon jour de naissance."

The perfect follow-up to You Are Not Alone: a guide for parents, educators, caregivers, and mental health professionals on how to navigate mental healthcare for the young people in their lives. A growing number of children and teens in the U.S. are struggling with mental health conditions, but...

Landing in Vancouver on a flight from Hong Kong on December 2018, Chinese telecom executive Meng Wanzhou was arrested by Canadian authorities with an American extradition warrant. The US Department of Justice accused Meng of fraud and bypassing sanctions against Iran. Nine days later, in an act...

Tim Booth is shocked when his first emergency call-out for someone short of breath turns out to be an adult man with a blocked nose. Far from beginner's luck, this turns out to be an omen for the rest of his paramedic career. Between the obligatory stories of objects lodged in body cavities to grown men who can't look after themselves when their wives are away, Tim finds that the promised life-saving moments are far outweighed by the trivial, frustrating and bizarre ambulance callouts.