Health Care History

At the turn of the last century, a smallpox epidemic swept the United States. The age-old disease spread swiftly through an increasingly interconnected American landscape: from southern plantations to the immigrant neighborhoods of northern cities to far-flung villages on the edges of the American empire. In Pox, historian Michael Willrich offers a gripping chronicle of how the nation's continent-wide fight against smallpox launched one of the most important civil liberties struggles of the 20th century.

In Good Blood, best-selling writer Julian Guthrie tells the gripping tale of the race to cure a horrible affliction known as Rh disease that stalked families and caused a mother’s immune system to attack her own unborn child. The story is anchored by two very different men on two continents: Dr. John Gorman in New York, who would land on a brilliant yet contrarian idea, and the unassuming Australian whose almost magical blood - and his unyielding devotion to donating it - would save millions of lives.

I once heard someone say, "You cannot aspire to be something you have never seen." This book is not only for every little Black girl out there who has dreamt of wearing a white coat and stethoscope but also for all the little Black girls who have not dreamt of it because they have never thought it possible.

The Cancer Problem offers the first medical, cultural, and social history of cancer in 19th-century Britain. It argues that it was in the 19th century that cancer acquired the unique emotional, symbolic, and politicized status it maintains today. Through an interrogation of the construction, deployment, and emotional consequences of the disease's incurability, this book reframes our conceptualization of the relationship between medicine and modern life and reshapes our understanding of chronic and incurable maladies, both past and present.

According to estimates, the healthcare AI market will grow to over $45 billion by 2026. Now is the time for everyone involved, including medical consumers and entrepreneurs, to understand and embrace the AI in healthcare revolution. AI continues to advance at breakneck speeds. Nowhere else is AI moving faster than in the health care sector, where it’s being used to improve millions of lives at every point in the healthcare system. In this book, you will take a deep dive into the remarkable strides that AI is making.

Rabies enjoys a fearsome and lurid reputation. Throughout the decades of spiraling growth that defined New York City from the 1840s to the 1910s, the bone-chilling cry of "Mad dog!" possessed the power to upend the ordinary routines and rhythms of urban life. In Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers, Jessica Wang examines the history of this rare but dreaded affliction during a time of rapid urbanization.

The amazing experiences of the Queen Alexandra nurses in the World Wars is one of the greatest adventure stories of modern times, and - incredibly - remains largely untold. Thousands of middle-class girls, barely out of school, were plucked from sheltered backgrounds, subjected to training regimes unimaginably tough by today's standards, and sent forth to share the harsh conditions of the fighting services.

In November 1942, Paul Andrew Kennedy (1912-1993) boarded the St. Elena in New York Harbor and sailed for Casablanca as part of Operation Torch, the massive Allied invasion of North Africa. As a member of the US Army's 2nd Auxiliary Surgical Group, he spent the next 34 months working in North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany, in close proximity to the front lines and often under air or artillery bombardment. He was uncomfortable, struck by the sorrows of war, and homesick for his wife.

Dr. Melody Glenn didn’t expect to find herself working with addiction patients when she started out in medicine. Like most physicians she’s encountered, she harbored a set of conscious and unconscious beliefs about addicts—she even sometimes resented them. Once she realized how effective harm reduction treatments like methadone could be, she set out to discover why these treatments weren’t used more broadly. This led her to Dr. Marie Nyswander.

The Right to Pain Relief and Other Deep Roots of the Opioid Epidemic offers a new lens through which to view the opioid epidemic as a consequence of serious misunderstandings of both opioids and pain. Based on their extensive research and experience with chronic pain care, science, ethics, and policy, the authors look beyond the usual villains—pharmaceutical companies and pharmacotherapy distributors—to examine the ethical and scientific concepts about pain that made the opioid epidemic possible.

When Jesus sent 70 disciples on ahead of him, part of their mission was to heal the sick. In fact, they were supposed to heal the sick before they preached the Gospel. Best-selling author Mike Aquilina calls this command the healing imperative. And it's an imperative that ushered in the world of modern medicine. In The Healing Imperative: The Early Church and the Invention of Medicine as We Know It, Aquilina reconstructs the fascinating history of a uniquely Christian institution: the hospital.

Trattner provides in-depth examination of developments in child welfare, public health, and the evolution of social work as a profession, showing how all these changes affected the treatment of the poor and needy in America. He explores the impact of public policies on social workers and other helping professions - all against the backdrop of social and intellectual trends in American history. From Poor Law to Welfare State directly addresses racism and sexism and pays special attention to the worsening problems of child abuse, neglect, and homelessness.

For centuries, people have talked of a powerful bodily disorder called migraine, which currently affects about a billion people around the world. Yet until now, the rich history of this condition has barely been told. In Migraine, award-winning historian Katherine Foxhall reveals the ideas and methods that ordinary people and medical professionals have used to describe, explain, and treat migraine since the Middle Ages.

Infectious disease specialist Dr. John Froude has worked on four continents over nearly 50 years, treating sufferers of plagues that arose over a century ago and never left us (like malaria and cholera) and battling new threats (like AIDS and COVID-19) as they emerge. In Plagued, he offers a gripping and timely account of the pandemics that have driven our evolution and shaped our history. Blending science and narrative, Froude explores not only the unstoppable march of pestilence and its effects, but our intimate relationship with bacteria and viruses.

La medicina acompaña al hombre desde el inicio de los tiempos, siempre hemos conocido la enfermedad y la muerte y siempre hemos luchado, con todos nuestros medios, contra ellas. Desde la Prehistoria, en la que la curación estaba ligada a la magia, hasta la actualidad, en la que existen máquinas nanotecnológicas o píldoras capaces de regular casi todos nuestros procesos, la historia de la medicina es una aventura apasionante llena de hombres que sacrificaron todo por acabar con las enfermedades principales de sus comunidades.

The Second History of Man focuses mostly on bacteria and bacterial infections as the foundation, jumping off into Darwin and evolution, gin and tonics and the discovery of the first antibiotic to treat infection (and it wasn’t penicillin), and visiting with those clever chaps who cook up drugs in the lab. We’ll call upon poets and poetry, celebrities like Frank Sinatra, the Rat Pack, and Bobby Darin, the classical music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, the tragic story of World War II, Anne Frank and the Holocaust....

The history of surgery in 28 famous operations - from Louis XIV to JFK, and from Einstein to Houdini. In Under the Knife, surgeon Arnold Van de Laar uses his own experience and expertise to tell the witty history of the past, present and future of surgery. From the story of the desperate man from 17th-century Amsterdam who grimly cut a stone out of his own bladder to Bob Marley's deadly toe infection, Under the Knife offers all kinds of fascinating and unforgettable insights into medicine and history.

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.

Weaving together family history, genetic discovery, and scenes from her life, Ami McKay tells the compelling, true-science story of her own family's unsettling legacy of hereditary cancer while exploring the challenges that come from carrying the mutation that not only killed many people you loved, but might also kill you.

The hunt for the origin of the AIDS virus began over 20 years ago. It was a journey that went around the world and involved painstaking research to unravel how, when, and where the virus first infected humans. Dorothy H. Crawford traces the story back to the remote rain forests of Africa - home to the primates that carry the ancestral virus - and reveals how HIV-1 first jumped from chimpanzees to humans in rural southeast Cameroon. Examining how this happened, and how it then travelled back to Colonial west central Africa where it eventually exploded as a pandemic, she asks why and how it was able to spread so widely.