Medical Industry

Biosecurity Dilemmas examines conflicting values and interests in the practice of "biosecurity," the safeguarding of populations against infectious diseases through security policies. Biosecurity encompasses both the natural occurrence of deadly disease outbreaks and the use of biological weapons. Christian Enemark focuses on six dreaded diseases that governments and international organizations give high priority for research, regulation, surveillance, and rapid response: pandemic influenza, drug-resistant tuberculosis, smallpox, Ebola, plague, and anthrax. The book is organized around four ethical dilemmas that arise when fear causes these diseases to be framed in terms of national or international security: protect or proliferate, secure or stifle, remedy or overkill, and attention or neglect.

David M. Craig traveled across the US to assess its health care access, delivery, and finance. He interviewed religious hospital administrators and interfaith activists, learning how they balance the values of economic efficiency and community accountability. He discovered that health care in the US is not a private good or a public good, but a shared social good. This book argues that as escalating health costs absorb more and more of family income and government budgets, we need to take stock of the full range of health care values.

In November 1942, Paul Andrew Kennedy (1912-1993) boarded the St. Elena in New York Harbor and sailed for Casablanca as part of Operation Torch, the massive Allied invasion of North Africa. As a member of the US Army's 2nd Auxiliary Surgical Group, he spent the next 34 months working in North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany, in close proximity to the front lines and often under air or artillery bombardment. He was uncomfortable, struck by the sorrows of war, and homesick for his wife.

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.

This amazing tale is the story of one of America's oldest and most unusual urban hospitals. From it's inception as a "Poor House" dispensing free medical care to indigents, Chicago's Cook County Hospital has been both a renowned teaching hospital and the healthcare provider of last resort for the city's uninsured. County covers more than thirty years of its history, beginning in the late 1970s when the author began his internship, to the "Final Rounds" when the enormous iconic Victorian hospital building was replaced and hundreds of former trainees gathered to bid it an emotional farewell.

For most of human history, mental illness has been largely untreatable. Sufferers lived their lives - if they survived - in and out of asylums, accumulating life's wreckage around them. In 1948, all that changed when an Australian doctor and recently returned prisoner of war, working alone in a disused kitchen, set about an experimental treatment for one of the scourges of mankind - manic depression, or bipolar disorder. That doctor was John Cade and in that small kitchen he stirred up a miracle.

Already technology enables parents to select some genetic traits for their children, and soon it will be possible to begin to shape ourselves as a species. Countering loud cries of alarm, bioethics expert Ronald Green explains why our fears about genetic engineering are overblown and how we can move forward responsibly to create a better future.

Each year thousands of people die waiting for organ transplants. Many of these deaths could have been prevented were it not for the almost universal moral hand-wringing over the concept of selling human organs. Author and bioethicist Mark Cherry reasserts the case that health care could be improved and lives saved by introducing a regulated transplant organs market rather than by well-meant, but misguided, prohibitions.

Spirituality in Patient Care has earned a reputation as the authoritative introduction to the subject for health professionals interested in identifying and addressing the spiritual needs of patients. The body of research on religion, spirituality, and health continues to grow at a dramatic rate, creating an urgent need for a new edition of this landmark work. In this, the third edition, Harold G. Koenig, M.D., updates every chapter by incorporating the newest research and introducing sensible ways of translating that research into caring for patients.

Dr. Kathy Magliato is one of fewer than a dozen female heart surgeons practicing in the world today. She is also a member of an even more exclusive group - those surgeons who perform heart transplants. Healing Hearts is the story of the making of a surgeon who also calls herself a wife and mother.

Hoping for the stability he needs to start a family, Sandeep Jauhar, an attending cardiologist, accepts a position at a massive teaching hospital on the outskirts of Queens. With a decade's worth of elite medical training behind him, he is eager to settle down and reap the rewards of countless sleepless nights. Instead, he is confronted with sobering truths. Doctors' morale is low and getting lower.

A History of the Present Illness takes listeners into overlooked lives in the neighborhoods, hospitals, and nursing homes of San Francisco, offering a deeply humane and incisive portrait of health and illness in American today....In the tradition of Oliver Sacks and Abraham Verghese, Aronson's writing is based on personal experience and addresses topics of current social relevance. Masterfully told, A History of the Present Illness explores the role of stories in medicine and creates a world pulsating with life, speaking truths about what makes us human.

All seems tranquil as newly qualified health visitor Sarah motors into a small Kentish hilltop village in her new green mini. She's barely out of the car when she's called to assist the midwife with a bride who's gone into labour in the middle of her own wedding reception. And so her adventures begin.... As a health visitor, Nurse Sarah is as green as grass, but she puts her best foot into wellies and braves the mad dogs, killer ganders and muddy tracks of the farming community.

In this landmark medical narrative, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Mark Johnson and Kathleen Gallagher chronicle the story of Nic Volker, the Wisconsin boy at the center of a daring breakthrough in medicine - a complete gene sequencing to discover the cure for an otherwise undiagnosable illness.

Do you believe human life is inherently valuable? Unfortunately, in the secularized age of state-sanctioned euthanasia and abortion-on-demand, many are losing faith in the simple value of human life. To the disillusioned, human beings are a cosmic accident whose intrinsic value is worth no more than other animals. The Death of Humanity explores our culture's declining respect for the sanctity of human life drawing on philosophy and history to reveal the dark road ahead for society if we lose our faith.

Pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions for contraceptives. Surgeons who pray in the OR. Pro-life clinics and end-of-life interventions, intelligent-design activists and stem-cell-research opponents. Is this the state of modern medicine in America? In Blind Faith, Dr. Richard P. Sloan examines the fragile balance and dangerous alliance between religion and medicine - two practices that have grown disconcertingly close during the 21st century.

For two decades, Dr. Danielle Ofri has cared for patients at Bellevue, the oldest public hospital in the country and a crossroads for the world's cultures. In Medicine in Translation she introduces us, in vivid, moving portraits, to her patients, who have braved language barriers, religious and racial divides, and the emotional and practical difficulties of exile in order to access quality health care.

Ross Donaldson is one the few who have ventured into dark territory of a country ravaged by war to study one of the world's most deadly diseases. As an untried medical student studying the intersection of global health and communicable disease, Donaldson soon found himself in dangerous Sierra Leone, on the border of war-struck Liberia, where he struggled to control the spread of Lassa Fever. The words, "you know Lassa can kill you, don't you?" haunted him each day. He'ss forced to make life-and-death decisions alone as a never-ending onslaught of contagious patients flood the hospital.

Following the trail of an unexpected family connection, acclaimed journalist Pam Fessler has unearthed the lost world of the patients, nurses, doctors, and researchers at Carville who struggled for over a century to eradicate Hansen's disease, the modern name for leprosy. Amid widespread public anxiety about foreign contamination and contagion, patients were deprived of basic rights - denied the right to vote, restricted from leaving Carville, and often forbidden from contact with their own parents or children.

In his exceptionally thought-provoking and moving memoir, neurosurgeon Joseph D. Stern explores how personal loss influences the way physicians relate to patients and their families.