Medical History

Who is considered most at risk for diabetes, and why? In this thorough, engaging book, historian Arleen Tuchman examines and critiques how these questions have been answered by both the public and medical communities for over a century in the United States. Beginning in the late 19th century, Tuchman describes how at different times Jews, middle-class whites, American Indians, African Americans, and Hispanic Americans have been labeled most at risk for developing diabetes, and that such claims have reflected and perpetuated troubling assumptions about race, ethnicity, and class.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER A raw, powerful portrait of Indigenous resilience drawn from stories of pain, survival, and cultural revival that challenge stereotypes and spark an essential conversation on healing and truth. In a country still reckoning with the legacy of colonialism, Crazywater is more...

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.

In the early 1800s, a century before there was any concept of the gene, physicians in insane asylums began to record causes of madness in their admission books. Almost from the beginning, they pointed to heredity as the most important of these causes. As doctors and state officials steadily lost faith in the capacity of asylum care to stem the terrible increase of insanity, they began emphasizing the need to curb the reproduction of the insane. They became obsessed with identifying weak or tainted families and anticipating the outcomes of their marriages.

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.

As an RAF medical officer, Aidan McCarthy served in France, survived Dunkirk, and was plunged into adventures in the Japanese-American arena comparable with those of famous war heroes. Interned by the Japanese in Java, he helped his fellow prisoners with amazing ingenuity in awful conditions. En route back to Japan in 1944, his ship was torpedoed, but he was rescued by a whaling boat and re-interned in Japan.

History of the 318 Field Hospital has been timely written for the 100th anniversary of the United States' entry into WWI, the Great War. The story will take you from the early days in Georgia, Camp Oglethorpe, as the medical specialist begins to learn about army life, to the Camp Lee, Virginia, experience, where nonspecialists learn quickly how to become soldiers.

An essential history of the recovery movement for people with mental illness, and an inspiring account of how former patients and advocates challenged a flawed system and encouraged mental health activism This definitive people’s history of the recovery movement spans the 1970s to the present...

Viruses are the world's most abundant life form, and now, when humanity is in the midst of a close encounter with their immense power, perhaps the most feared. But do we understand viruses? Possibly the most enigmatic of living things, they are sometimes not considered a life form at all...

In this "powerful and unflinching page-turner" (New York Times), a healthcare journalist examines the science, history, and culture of breast cancer. As a health-care journalist, Kate Pickert knew the emotional highs and lows of medical treatment well -- but always from a distance, through the...

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.

Soon to be a major motion picture, from Brad Pitt and Tony Kushner A Washington Post Best Book of 2015 A mid-century doctor's raw, unvarnished account of his own descent into madness, and his daughter's attempt to piece his life back together and make sense of her own. Texas-born and...

The field of biotechnology has evolved over the past four decades, developing medicines which are curing diseases. But this journey of success has been tough and arduous, built upon the shoulders of major failures. Good Genes Gone Bad highlights seven such colossal failures in drug...

"Starting with her years at the University of Texas Law School at Austin, Weddington, the attorney who won Roe v. Wade , traces the history of her involvement with this momentous Supreme Court case and its aftermath. She laments the ground that sometimes complacent pro-choice activists have lost...

Nearly two decades after it closed, the South Carolina State Hospital continues to hold a palpable mystique in Columbia and throughout the state. Founded in 1821 as the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum, it housed, fed, and treated thousands of patients incapable of surviving on their own. The patient population in 1961 eclipsed 6,600, well above its listed capacity of 4,823. By the mid-1990s, the patient population had fallen under 700, and the hospital had become a symbol of captivity, horror, and chaos.

Alice Payne Rides is the thrilling sequel to Kate Heartfield's Alice Payne Arrives. After abducting Arthur of Brittany from his own time in 1203, thereby creating the mystery that partly prompted the visit in the first place, Alice and her team discover that they have inadvertently brought the...

From the former editor of Slate and CEO of Atlas Obscura comes the unbelievable story of “the Nobel Prize sperm bank” and the children it produced—“a superb book about the quest for genius and, ultimately, family” (Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Talking to Strangers)...

Metabolism, behavior, sleep, mood swings, the immune system, fighting, fleeing, puberty, and sex: these are just a few of the things our bodies control with hormones. Armed with a healthy dose of wit and curiosity, Randi Hutter Epstein takes us on a journey through the unusual history of these potent chemicals and their discovery, from the London laboratory where the concept of hormones was identified to a basement filled with jarred brains to a canine sex lab.

The World Wars of the 20th century caused massive upheavals all over the world. Often overlooked by history are the extraordinary true-life stories of the brave women from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand who enlisted in the Allied forces in their thousands to serve as nurses behind the front lines, at great danger to themselves.

This “brutal and brave” (Booklist) novel transmutes the practice of medicine into a larger exploration of humanity, the meaning of care, and the nature of annihilation—physical, spiritual, or both. A young woman puts on a white coat for her first day as a student doctor. So begins this...