History of Medicine

On the Shoulders of Medicine’s Giants: What Today’s Clinicians Can Learn from Yesterday’s Wisdom

Medical history offers us many wise thoughts, a few misguided notions, and a host of intriguing back-stories. On the Shoulders of Medicine’s Giants presents a selection of these, and tells how the words of medicine’s “giants”―such as Hippocrates, Sir William Osler, Francis Weld Peabody, and Elizabeth Kübler-Ross―are relevant to medical science and practice in the 21st century.Which physician was the inspiration for …

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Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped Our History

Combining tales of devastating epidemics with accessible science and fascinating history, Deadly Companions reveals how closely microbes have evolved with us over the millennia, shaping human civilization through infection, disease, and deadly pandemic. Beginning with a dramatic account of the SARS pandemic at the start of the 21st century, Dorothy Crawford takes us back in time to follow …

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The Speckled Monster: a Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox

The Speckled Monster tells the dramatic story of two parents who dared to fight back against smallpox. After barely surviving the agony of smallpox themselves, they flouted eighteenth-century medicine by borrowing folk knowledge from African slaves and Eastern women in frantic bids to protect their children. From their heroic struggles stems the modern science of immunology as well …

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Plagues and Peoples

Upon its original publication, Plagues and Peoples was an immediate critical and popular success, offering a radically new interpretation of world history as seen through the extraordinary impact–political, demographic, ecological, and psychological–of disease on cultures. From the conquest of Mexico by smallpox as much as by the Spanish, to the bubonic plague in China, to the typhoid epidemic …

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Extreme Medicine: How Exploration Transformed Medicine in the Twentieth Century

Little more than one hundred years ago, maps of the world still boasted white space: places where no human had ever trod. Within a few short decades the most hostile of the world’s environments had all been conquered. Likewise, in the twentieth century, medicine transformed human life. Doctors took what was routinely fatal and made it survivable. As …

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Risky Medicine: Our Quest to Cure Fear and Uncertainty

Will ever-more sensitive screening tests for cancer lead to longer, better lives? Will anticipating and trying to prevent the future complications of chronic disease lead to better health? Not always, says Robert Aronowitz in Risky Medicine. In fact, it often is hurting us. Exploring the transformation of health care over the last several decades that has led doctors …

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The Drug Book: From Arsenic to Xanax, 250 Milestones in the History of Drugs (Sterling Milestones)

Throughout history, humans everywhere have searched for remedies to heal our bodies and minds. Covering everything from ancient herbs to cutting-edge chemicals, this book in the hugely popular Milestones series looks at 250 of the most important moments in the development of life-altering, life-saving, and sometimes life-endangering pharmaceuticals. Illustrated entries feature ancient drugs like alcohol, opium, and hemlock; …

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The Philadelphia Chromosome: A Genetic Mystery, a Lethal Cancer, and the Improbable Invention of a Lifesaving Treatment

Philadelphia, 1959: A scientist scrutinizing a single human cell under a microscope detects a missing piece of DNA. That scientist, David Hungerford, had no way of knowing that he had stumbled upon the starting point of modern cancer research― the Philadelphia chromosome. It would take doctors and researchers around the world more than three decades to unravel the …

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Kill or Cure: An Illustrated History of Medicine

Telling the compelling stories behind mankind’s never-ending quest to cure every disease, Kill or Cure uses an all-new format — a text-rich narrative combined with DK’s beautiful visual design — to trace the extraordinary history of medicine. Beginning with early healers, chance discoveries, technological advancement, and “wonder” drugs, and using panels, timelines, and thematic spreads, Kill or Cure …

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Harvey Cushing: A Life in Surgery

Here is the first biography to appear in fifty years of Harvey Cushing, a giant of American medicine and without doubt the greatest figure in the history of brain surgery. Drawing on new collections of intimate personal and family papers, diaries and patient records, Michael Bliss captures Cushing’s professional and his personal life in …

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