Medicine Philosophy

Medicine for the Heart is a guide to the extraordinary richness of Scripture seen through Kierkegaard's eyes. He wrote about Scripture as none other, a literature of surpassing artistry and rare moral power. Kierkegaard described a new believer who discovered that life was beautiful, that it was a new gloriousness of faith that no human being can give to another, but that every human being has what is highest, noblest, and most sacred in humankind. It is original in him, and every human being has it if he wants to have it.

We have entered what is called the "biological century" and a new biopolitics has emerged to address the implications for America's collective value system, our well-being, and ultimately, our future. The Body Politic is the first book to recognize and assess this new force in our political landscape - one that fuels today's culture wars and has motivated politicians of all stripes to reexamine their platforms.

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.

Immerse yourself in the history of medicine - a colorful story of skill, serendipity, trial and error, moments of genius, and dogged determination.

One hundred years after a milestone medical discovery, Insulin: The Crooked Timber tells the story of how insulin was transformed from what one clinician called "thick brown muck" into the very first drug to be produced using genetic engineering, one which would earn the founders of the US biotech company Genentech a small fortune. Taking the listener on a fascinating journey, starting with the discovery of insulin in the 1920s through to the present day, the book reveals a story of monstrous egos, toxic career rivalries, and a few unsung heroes.

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.

Long before the U.S. government began conducting secret radiation and germ-warfare experiments, and long before the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, medical professionals had introduced—and hotly debated the ethics of—the use of human subjects in medical experiments. In Subjected to Science, Susan Lederer provides the first full-length history of biomedical research with human subjects in the earlier period, from 1890 to 1940.

As her mother slips into the fog of dementia, a philosopher grapples with the unbreakable links between our bodies and our sense of self.  A diabetic woman awakens from a coma having forgotten the last ten years of her life. A Haitian immigrant has nightmares that begin...

The Tragedy of American Science explores how the US economy’s addiction to military spending distorts and deforms science by making it overwhelmingly subservient to military interests. The primary motive driving American science and technology has become the search for new and more efficient ways to kill people. This transforms science from the classic ideal of a creative force for the advancement of humankind into its destructive and antihuman opposite.

When Joselin Linder was in her 20s, her legs started to swell. She thought little of it until her health problems started to compound in ways that baffled her doctors. Diagnosed with extreme liver blockage and dangerous levels of lymph fluid, Joselin turned to the most similar case she could think of - her father's.

Everybody wants a long, full life of vitality. But beyond the basics of good diet and exercise, what can you do to achieve it? For more then 2,000 years, Chinese energy medicine has refined the use of meditation to build the body's qi, or life force. Now, a celebrated doctor of Chinese medicine and authority in the field of Taoist longevity medicine presents an indispensable resource for living a long and richer life: Meditations to Live to be 100.

Vitamin C begins with scurvy, which afflicted Europe for four hundred years and killed millions. The reasons that a disease whose cure was known from the outset persisted over that time are at once baffling and familiar, and these trials eventually lead to invention of the science of epidemiology. Author Stephen M. Sagar MD then chronicles the discovery of vitamins at the beginning of the twentieth century, a story that encapsulates the rise of a scientific approach to nutrition but with surprising twists and turns.

Princeton's McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence Robert P. George and USC's Graduate Director of Philosophy Christopher Tollefsen are experts in the field of bioethics. In Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, these esteemed scholars combine the latest scientific breakthroughs with the soundest tenets of philosophy to shed new light on a vital yet controversial issue of our day.

This riveting audiobook takes the listener around the globe and through the centuries to discover how different cultures have sought to combat and treat physical pain. With colorful stories and sometimes frightening anecdotes, Dr. Thomas Dormandy describes a checkered progression of breakthroughs, haphazard experiments, ignorant attitudes, and surprising developments in human efforts to control pain.

Humankind has always wrestled with the existence of suffering. For two centuries, many American ministers, physicians, and scientists believed that an omnipotent and omniscient God created the world such that people might relieve suffering through ingenuity and learning. Others responded to the new worldview introduced by the scientific revolution as a threat to the divine order. In Imagining Progress, Kristin Johnson traces the history of Americans' evolving relationship with science and religion at "one of its most dramatic places"—the bedsides of dying children.

Detrás de cada fármaco se esconde una historia. Puede ser la de un investigador excéntrico que resultó ser un genio, un momento decisivo en la historia geopolítica, un nuevo avance tecnológico o un inesperado pero afortunado efecto secundario descubierto en un ensayo clínico. A través de datos curiosos, anécdotas poco conocidas y personajes un tanto extravagantes, Thomas Hager propone un recorrido por las diez drogas más significativas de la historia a la vez que muestra la evolución de nuestra cultura y práctica de la medicina.

The natural limits of the human body make us vulnerable and therefore dependent, throughout our lives, on others. Yet American law and policy disregard these stubborn facts, with statutes and judicial decisions that presume people to be autonomous, defined by their capacity to choose. As legal scholar O. Carter Snead points out, this individualistic ideology captures important truths about human freedom, but it also means that we have no obligations to each other unless we actively, voluntarily embrace them.

When a waiting world learned on April 12, 1955, that Jonas Salk had successfully created a vaccine to prevent poliomyelitis, he became a hero overnight. Born in a New York tenement, humble in manner, Salk had all the makings of a 20th-century icon - a knight in a white coat. In the wake of his achievement, he received a staggering number of awards and honors; for years his name ranked with Gandhi and Churchill on lists of the most revered people.

Until the late 1960s, tens of thousands of American children suffered crippling birth defects if their mothers had been exposed to rubella, popularly known as German measles, while pregnant; there was no vaccine and little understanding of how the disease devastated fetuses. In June 1962, a young biologist in Philadelphia, using tissue extracted from an aborted fetus from Sweden, produced safe, clean cells that allowed the creation of vaccines against rubella and other common childhood diseases.

Bioethics and the Human Goods offers students and general listeners a brief introduction to bioethics from a "natural law" philosophical perspective. This perspective, which traces its origins to classical antiquity, has profoundly shaped Western ethics and law and is enjoying an exciting renaissance. While compatible with much in the ethical thought of the great religions, it is grounded in reason, not religion.