Showing titles in History & Commentary

Hippocrates revolutionized the study of medicine in Ancient Greece, but some of his ideas still influence the medical field today. In his book On Ulcers, Hippocrates details the recommended treatment for this ailment. While modern medicine has moved beyond using honey, boiled leaves, and white wine to treat ulcers, Hippocrates’ advice on diet and rest hold true. This text is fascinating for anyone interested in the historical development of medical practices.

Savage Will brings to life a remarkable story of perseverance, heroism, and survival: the true tale of the American medics and nurses who endured two months in Nazi-occupied Albania - and the fearless citizens and Allied intelligence officers who risked all to save them. On a cold morning in war-ravaged Sicily in 1943, men and women of the 807th Medical Air Evacuation Squadron boarded a routine flight to the Italian mainland to care for wounded soldiers.

Now more than 133 million Americans live with chronic illness, accounting for nearly three-quarters of all health care dollars, and untold pain and disability. There has been an alarming rise in illnesses that defy diagnosis through clinical tests or have no known cure. Millions of people, especially women, with illnesses such as irritable bowel syndrome, chronic pain, and chronic fatigue syndrome face skepticism from physicians and the public alike.

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.

For centuries, royal families have feared the gut-roiling, vomit-inducing agony of a little something added to their food or wine by an enemy. To avoid poison, they depended on tasters, unicorn horns and antidotes tested on condemned prisoners. The Royal Art of Poison is a hugely entertaining work of popular history that traces the use of poison as a political - and cosmetic - tool in the royal courts of Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the Kremlin today.

For readers and listeners of Atul Gawande, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Henry Marsh, a riveting, gorgeously written biography of one of history's most fascinating and confounding diseases - Alzheimer's - from its discovery more than 100 years ago to today's race toward a cure.

A girl believes she has been struck blind for stealing a kiss. A mother watches helplessly as each of her children is replaced by a changeling. A woman is haunted each month by the same four chords of a single song. In neurology, illness is inextricably linked with narrative, the clues to unraveling these mysteries hidden in both the details of a patient's story and the tells of their body.

Drawing on his work as a primary care physician and a behavioral scientist, Michael Stein artfully examines the often conflicting goals of patients and their doctors. In those differences, Stein recognizes that kindness should not be a patient's forbidden or unrealistic expectation. This book leaves us with new knowledge of and insights into what we might hope for, and what might go wrong, or right, in the most intimate clinical moments.

The struggle against deadly microbes is endless. Diseases that have plagued human beings since ancient times still exist, new maladies make their way into the headlines, we are faced with vaccine shortages, and the threat of germ warfare has reemerged as a worldwide threat. In this riveting account, medical historian Howard Markel takes an eye-opening look at the fragility of the American public health system.

Doctors on the Edge is the true account of doctors who are faced with wrenching moral dilemmas, thrust upon them uninvited and unexpected. Sometimes complementary and sometimes conflicting, law, medicine, and morality intrude on the daily practice of medicine. In gripping stories that often include life-and-death decisions, doctors maneuver through ambiguities, subjectivity, and the essential principles of medical ethics.

Em Medicina dos horrores, a historiadora Lindsey Fitzharris narra como era o chocante mundo da cirurgia do século XIX, que estava às vésperas de uma profunda transformação. A autora evoca os primeiros anfiteatros de operações—lugares abafados onde os procedimentos eram feitos diante de plateias lotadas—e cirurgiões pioneiros, cujo ofício era saudado não pela precisão, mas pela velocidade e pela força bruta, uma vez que não havia anestesia. Não à toa, os mais célebres cirurgiões da época eram capazes de amputar uma perna em menos de trinta segundos.

Most people will, at some point or another, either find themselves dressed in a tiny hospital gown or staring at someone else dressed in a tiny hospital gown. Whether from the perspective of a patient, a family member, or a medical professional, we all have a significant stake in the process of medical education. While numerous memoirs recount physicians' grueling experiences during residency, few focus on the even more formative portion of medical training: the third year of medical school--the clinical year. Short White Coat: Lessons from Patients on Becoming a Doctor is the disarmingly ...

Dementia, heart failure and cancer are now the leading causes of death in industrialised nations, where life expectancy is mostly above 80. A century ago, life expectancy was about 50 and people died mainly from infectious diseases. In the Middle Ages, death was mostly caused by famine, plague, childbirth and war. In the Palaeolithic period, where our species spent 95% of its time, we frequently died from violence and accidents.

Investigative journalist Zuckerman takes us inside the top-secret laboratories, corporate clashes and high-stakes government negotiations that led to effective shots. Deeply reported and endlessly gripping, this is a dazzling blow-by-blow chronicle of the most consequential scientific breakthrough of our time. It's a story of courage, genius and heroism. It's also a tale of heated rivalries, unbridled ambitions, crippling insecurities and unexpected drama. A Shot to Save the World is the story of how science saved the world.

Richard Schweid examines home health care in detail, focusing on the women who tend to our elderly and disabled loved ones and how we fail to value their work. They are paid minimum wage so that we might be absent, getting on with our own lives. The book calls for a rethinking of home health care and explains why changes are urgent: the current system offers neither a good way to live nor a good way to die.

A crucial component of anti-Black racism is the unconscionable disparity in health outcomes between Black and white Americans. Sickening examines this institutionalized inequality through dramatic, concrete events from the past two decades, revealing how unequal living conditions and inadequate medical care have become routine. From the spike in chronic disease after Hurricane Katrina to the lack of protection for Black residents during the Flint water crisis, author Anne Pollock takes listeners on a journey through the diversity of anti-Black racism operating in healthcare.

O século XIX trouxe avanços tecnológicos e industriais em diversas áreas. Uma, porém, ficou para trás: a Medicina. Ao redor do planeta, a mortalidade infantil alcançava taxas altíssimas e a expectativa de vida era baixa. Doenças diversas castigavam a população. Mas o cenário mudou ao longo do século XX. Este audiolivro narra, de forma deliciosa, como médicos e cientistas lançavam mão de criatividade, coragem e raciocínio lógico para tornar os progressos possíveis.

Mysterious and misunderstood, distorted by biblical imagery of disfigurement and uncleanness, Hansen's disease or leprosy has all but disappeared from America's consciousness. In Carville, Louisiana, the closed doors of the nation's last center for the treatment of leprosy open to reveal stories of sadness, separation, and even strength in the face of what was once a life-wrenching diagnosis. Drawn from interviews with living patients and extensive research in the leprosarium's archives, Carville: Remembering Leprosy in America tells the stories of former patients.

Since 2010, it has been possible to determine a person's genetic makeup in a matter of days at an accessible cost for many millions of people. Along with this technological breakthrough there has emerged a movement to use this information to help prospective parents "eliminate preventable genetic disease". As the prospect of systematically excluding the appearance of unwanted mutations in our children comes within reach, David B. Goldstein examines the possible consequences from these types of choices.

Government, industry, and the medical profession, however, have a mixed record when it comes to framing policies and generating knowledge to address drug use and misuse. In Strange Trips, Lucas Richert investigates the myths, meanings, and boundaries of recreational drugs, palliative care drugs, and pharmaceuticals as well as struggles over product innovation, consumer protection, and freedom of choice in the medical marketplace.