Military Medicine

The year was 1917. As a war raged across the world, young American women flocked to work, painting watches, clocks, and military dials with a special luminous substance made from radium. It was a fun job, lucrative and glamorous - the girls themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered head to toe in the dust from the paint. They were the radium girls. As the years passed, the women began to suffer from mysterious and crippling illnesses.

For more than 25 years, surgeon David Nott has volunteered in some of the world’s most dangerous conflict zones. From Sarajevo under siege in 1993 to clandestine hospitals in rebel-held eastern Aleppo, he has carried out life-saving operations in the most challenging conditions, and with none of the resources of a major metropolitan hospital. War Doctor is his extraordinary story, encompassing his surgeries in nearly every major conflict zone since the end of the Cold War, as well as his struggles to return to a “normal” life and routine after each trip.

Smallpox, the only infectious disease to have been eradicated, was one of the most terrifying of human scourges. It covered the skin with hideous, painful boils, killed a third of its victims, and left the survivors disfigured for life. In this riveting, often terrifying look at the history of smallpox, Jonathan B. Tucker tells the story of this deadly disease, the heroic efforts to eradicate it worldwide, and the looming dangers it still poses today.

After his father died, James L. Nolan, Jr., took possession of a box of private family materials. To his surprise, the small secret archive contained a treasure trove of information about his grandfather's role as a doctor in the Manhattan Project. Dr. Nolan, it turned out, had been a significant figure.

Some of the cruelest deeds of Japan's war in Asia did not occur on the battlefield, but in quiet, antiseptic medical wards in obscure parts of China. Far from front lines and prying eyes, Japanese doctors and their assistants subjected human guinea pigs to gruesome medical experiments in the name of science and Japan's wartime chemical and biological warfare research. Author Hal Gold draws upon a wealth of sources to construct a portrait of the Imperial Japanese Army's most notorious medical unit, giving an overview of its history and detailing its most shocking activities.

From Canada’s top war historian, a definitive medical history of the Great War, illuminating how the carnage of modern battle gave birth to revolutionary life-saving innovations. It brings to light shocking revelations of the ways the brutality of combat and the necessity of agonizing battlefield decisions led to unimaginable strain for men and women of medicine who fought to save the lives of soldiers.

The first full-length biography of the Civil War surgeon who, over the course of the war’s bloodiest battles - from Antietam to Gettysburg - redefined military medicine.

Jonathan Letterman was an outpost medical officer serving in Indian country in the years before the Civil War, responsible for the care of just hundreds of men. But when he was appointed the chief medical officer for the Army of the Potomac, he revolutionized combat medicine over the course of four major battles - Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg - that produced unprecedented numbers of casualties.

The Facemaker places Gillies’s ingenious surgical innovations alongside the dramatic stories of soldiers whose lives were wrecked and repaired. It also relates the work of the many doctors, nurses, artists, and orderlies who staffed Gillies’s hospital and boldly attempted to balance their obligations to the army, their patients, and science. The result is a vividly absorbing account of how medicine can be an art, and of what courage and imagination can accomplish in the presence of relentless horror.

Former naval doctor Peter Crane is summoned to a remote oil platform in the North Atlantic to help diagnose a bizarre medical condition. But when he arrives, Crane learns that the real trouble lies far below on "Deep Storm", a stunningly advanced science-research facility built two miles beneath the surface on the ocean floor. The top-secret structure has been designed for one purpose: to excavate a recently discovered undersea site that may hold the answers to an ancient mystery.

The Nobel laureate Otto Warburg was widely regarded in his day as one of the most important biochemists of the 20th century, a man whose research was integral to humanity’s understanding of cancer. He was also among the most despised figures in Nazi Germany. As a Jewish homosexual living openly with his male partner, Warburg represented all that the Third Reich abhorred. Yet Hitler and his top advisors dreaded cancer, and protected Warburg in the hope that he could cure it.

The first major bioterror event in the United States - the anthrax attacks in October 2001 - was a clarion call for scientists who work with "hot" agents to find ways of protecting civilian populations against biological weapons. In The Demon in the Freezer, his first nonfiction book since The Hot Zone, a number-one New York Times best seller, Richard Preston takes us into the heart of USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

Around the clock, across the country, these highly skilled and compassionate men and women sacrifice and struggle for us and our families. You have never heard their true stories. Not like this. From big-city and small-town hospitals. From behind the scenes. From the heart. This book will make you laugh, make you cry, make you understand.

Former naval doctor Peter Crane is summoned to a remote oil platform in the North Atlantic to help diagnose a bizarre medical condition. But when he arrives, Crane learns that the real trouble lies far below on "Deep Storm", a stunningly advanced science-research facility built two miles beneath the surface on the ocean floor. The top-secret structure has been designed for one purpose: to excavate a recently discovered undersea site that may hold the answers to an ancient mystery.

In January 1940, navy nurse Dorothy Still eagerly anticipated her new assignment at a military hospital in the Philippines. Her first year abroad was an adventure. She dated sailors, attended dances, and watched the sparkling evening lights from her balcony. But as 1941 progressed, signs of war became imminent. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, Dorothy and the other nurses braced for a direct assault. In that frantic dash, Dorothy transformed from a navy nurse to a war nurse. Along with the other women on the nursing staff, she provided compassionate, tireless, critical care.

One of the best books ever written about Lincoln by Dale Carnegie. Chronicles the inner life and struggles of Abraham Lincoln, how he led a life of poverty, how he went from pauper to become president, how he emerged from obscurity and became the Republican nominee at the 1860 Chicago convention, how he loved to tell humorous stories, and that he was an avid reader of Shakespeare. 

"A Trail to the West": Riding under an alias, Bowdrie joins up with Queen’s ruthless gang to rescue the pretty niece of a powerful Texas judge. "Love and the Cactus Kid": Folks far and wide know that the Cactus Kid can handle a pistol with the best of them. But for all his skill and coolness under fire, there’s just one small weakness he can’t seem to overcome.... "Medicine Ground": The Cactus Kid is on his way to the spring dance to meet his best girl, Bess O’Neal. As the Kid ambles through the lonely mountain trail toward town, two men emerge from the darkness - Miguel and Lobo Fernandez, of the menacing Fernandez brothers.

The harrowing, dramatic and profoundly moving story of the Australian and New Zealand nurses who served in the Great War. Now a major six-part television series. By the end of the Great War, 45 Australian and New Zealand nurses had died on overseas service and over 200 had been decorated. These were the women who left for war looking for adventure and romance but were soon confronted with challenges for which their civilian lives could never have prepared them.

Heroines of Mercy Street tells the true stories of the nurses at Mansion House, the Alexandria, Virginia, mansion turned wartime hospital and setting for the new PBS drama Mercy Street. Among the Union soldiers, doctors, wounded men from both sides, freed slaves, politicians, speculators, and spies who passed through the hospital in the crossroads of the Civil War were nurses who gave their time freely and willingly to save lives and aid the wounded.

For three years during World War II, 12,000 Nazis were held in a prisoner-of-war camp at the edge of Medicine Hat, an isolated city of 12,000 people on the bald Canadian prairie. The camp and the townsfolk lived cheerfully side-by-side, until two men were beaten and hanged by their fellow prisoners, and no one on the scene would admit to knowing anything about the crimes.

In World War II, 59,000 women voluntarily risked their lives for their country as US Army nurses. For more than half a century these women's experiences remained untold, almost without reference in books, historical societies, or military archives. After years of research and hundreds of hours of interviews, Evelyn M. Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee have created a dramatic narrative that at last brings to light the critical role that women played throughout the war.