For two hundred years a noble Venetian family has suffered from an inherited disease that strikes their members in middle age, stealing their sleep, eating holes in their brains, and ending their lives in a matter of months. In Papua New Guinea, a primitive tribe is nearly obliterated by a sickness whose chief symptom is uncontrollable laughter. Across …
Strange Medicine: A Shocking History of Real Medical Practices Through the Ages
Strange Medicine casts a gimlet eye on the practice of medicine through the ages that highlights the most dubious ideas, bizarre treatments, and biggest blunders. From bad science and oafish behavior to stomach-turning procedures that hurt more than helped, Strange Medicine presents strange but true facts and an honor roll of doctors, scientists, and dreamers who inadvertently turned …
Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not (Dover Books on Biology)
“My heart always sinks within me when I hear the good housewife, of every class, say, ‘I assure you the bed has been well slept in: and I can only hope it is not true. What? Is the bed already saturated with somebody else’s damp before my patient comes to exhale in it his own damp? Has it …
Today, astonishing surgical breakthroughs are making limb transplants, face transplants, and a host of other previously un dreamed of operations possible. But getting here has not been a simple story of medical progress. In Blood and Guts, veteran science writer Richard Hollingham weaves a compelling narrative from the key moments in surgical history. We have a ringside seat …
Let Me Heal: The Opportunity to Preserve Excellence in American Medicine
In Let Me Heal, prize-winning author Kenneth M. Ludmerer provides the first-ever account of the residency system for training doctors in the United States. He traces its development from its nineteenth-century roots through its present-day struggles to cope with new, bureaucratic work-hour regulations for house officers and, more important, to preserve excellence in medical training amid a …
This refreshing narrative history of nursing marks an exception to standard, often dry academic descriptions of the nursing profession. It presents dramatic, highly readable illustrated stories of nursing’s pioneering, often heroic leaders. Following an account of early nineteenth-century nursing practice during the Napoleonic Wars, the book goes on to highlight the life and work of Florence Nightingale …
“Thought-provoking. . . . [Allen] writes without sanctimony and never simplifies the people in his book or the moral issues his story inevitably raises.”―Wall Street Journal Few diseases are more gruesome than typhus. Transmitted by body lice, it afflicts the dispossessed―refugees, soldiers, and ghettoized peoples―causing hallucinations, terrible headaches, boiling fever, and often death. The disease plagued the German …
Cook County ICU: 30 Years of Unforgettable Patients and Odd Cases
An inside look at one of the nation’s most famous public hospitals, Cook County, as seen through the eyes of its longtime Director of Intensive Care, Dr. Cory Franklin. Readers will be riveted by stories of strange medical cases and unforgettable patients culled from his 30-year career in medicine that spanned the 1970s through the 1990s, including some …
Does your back pain flare up in the evening? Perhaps your water element is weak. Allergies in the spring? Emotional outbursts? Perhaps your wood element is too strong. Using the five element system of Chinese cosmology as a key-wood, fire, earth, metal, water-Gail Reichstein unlocks the ancient mysteries of Chinese medicine and makes …
Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus
The most fatal virus known to science, rabies-a disease that spreads avidly from animals to humans-kills nearly one hundred percent of its victims once the infection takes root in the brain. In this critically acclaimed exploration, journalist Bill Wasik and veterinarian Monica Murphy chart four thousand years of the history, science, and cultural mythology of rabies. From Greek …