Medical History

He has been called the greatest surgeon of the 20th century. The son of Lebanese immigrants, Michael DeBakey rose from humble beginnings in a backwater Louisiana town to dominate the landscape of modern medicine. His contributions to our understanding and treatment of cardiovascular disease, in particular, were innumerable and epoch-making. DeBakey led a life of high drama, from the streets of Jazz Age New Orleans and the operating theaters of pre-war Europe, to the battlefields of World War II and the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina.

This is the spellbinding tale of a mysterious doctor who revolutionized neonatal care more than 100 years ago and saved some 7,000 babies. Dr. Martin Couney's story is a kaleidoscopic ride through the intersection of ebullient entrepreneurship, enlightened pediatric care, and the wild culture of world's fairs at the beginning of the American Century.

Physician, researcher, and ethics professor Matt McCarthy is on the front lines of a groundbreaking clinical trial testing a new antibiotic to fight lethal superbugs, bacteria that have built up resistance to the life-saving drugs in our rapidly dwindling arsenal. This trial serves as the backdrop for the compulsively listenable Superbugs, and the results will impact nothing less than the future of humanity.

Of all the radioactive elements discovered at the end of the 19th century, it was radium that became the focus of both public fascination and entrepreneurial zeal. Half Lives tells the fascinating, curious, sometimes macabre story of the element through its ascendance as a desirable item - a present for a queen, a prize in a treasure hunt, a glow-in-the-dark dance costume - to its role as a supposed cure-all in everyday 20th-century life, when medical practitioners and business people (reputable and otherwise) devised ingenious ways of commodifying the new wonder element.

Once, not too long ago, there was just a single Irish country doctor tending to the lively little village of Ballybucklebo: Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly. Now his thriving practice is growing by leaps and bounds. Not only has O'Reilly taken a new trainee under his wing, Doctor Connor Nelson, he's also added a spirited Labrador puppy to his ever-expanding household at Number One Main Street. Meanwhile, his trusted partner, young Doctor Barry Laverty, finds himself wondering if he's truly ready to settle down and start a family with his lovely fiancée, Sue.

In 1907 Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung began what promised to be both a momentous collaboration and the deepest friendship of each man's life. Six years later they were bitter antagonists, locked in a savage struggle that was as much personal and emotional as it was theoretical and professional. In between them stood a young woman named Sabina Spielrein, who had been both patient and lover to Jung and colleague and confidante to Freud before going on to become an innovative psychoanalyst herself.

The "absorbing and powerful" (Wall Street Journal) story of two pioneering suffragette doctors who shattered social expectations and transformed modern medicine during World War I. In No Man's Land, Wendy Moore illuminates this turbulent moment of global war and pandemic when women were, for the first time, allowed to operate on men. Their fortitude and brilliance serve as powerful reminders of what women can achieve against all odds.

Caroline Crampton’s life was upended at the age of seventeen, when she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a relatively rare blood cancer. After years of invasive treatment, she was finally given the all clear. But being cured of the cancer didn’t mean she felt well. Instead, the fear lingered, and she found herself always on the alert, braced for signs that the illness had reemerged.

In 2018, the first genetically modified babies were reportedly born in China, made possible by the invention of CRISPR technology in 2012. This controversial advancement overturned the preexisting moral consensus, which had held for over 50 years before: While gene editing an adult person was morally acceptable, modifying babies, and thus subsequent generations, crossed a significant moral line. John H. Evans here provides a meta-level guide to how these debates move forward and their significance to society.

Widely known today as the "Angel of the Battlefield", Clara Barton's personal life has always been shrouded in mystery. In Clara Barton, Professional Angel, Elizabeth Brown Pryor presents a biography of Barton that strips away the heroic exterior and reveals a complex and often trying woman. Based on the papers Clara Barton carefully saved over her lifetime, this biography is the first one to draw on these recorded thoughts. Not always altruistic, her accomplishments were nonetheless extraordinary.

Americans are in the midst of a world-historic drug binge. Opiates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, marijuana, antidepressants, antipsychotics—across the board, consumption has shot up in the twenty-first century. At the same time, the United States is home to the largest prison system in the world, justified in part by a now zombified "war" on drugs. How did we get here?

G. Wayne Miller has dramatically and meticulously reconstructed an amazing true story: how a group of renegade Minnesota surgeons, led by Dr. Walt Lillehei, made medical history by becoming the first doctors to operate deep inside the human heart.

In 1918, a world war raged, and a lethal strain of influenza circled the globe. In the midst of all this death, a bizarre disease appeared in Europe. Eventually known as encephalitis lethargica, or sleeping sickness, it spread worldwide, leaving millions dead or locked in institutions. Then, in 1927, it disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived. Asleep, set in 1920s and '30s New York, follows a group of neurologists through hospitals and asylums as they try to solve this epidemic and treat its victims - who learned the worst fate was not dying of it, but surviving it.

When Dr. David Hosack tilled the country's first botanical garden in the Manhattan soil more than 200 years ago, he didn't just dramatically alter the New York landscape; he left a monumental legacy of advocacy for public health and wide-ranging support for the sciences. In melodic prose, historian Victoria Johnson eloquently chronicles Hosack's tireless career to reveal the breadth of his impact. The result is a lush portrait of the man who gave voice to a new, deeply American understanding of the powers and perils of nature.

Intensive care units and mechanical ventilation are the crucial foundation of modern medical care: without them, the appalling death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic would be even higher. In The Autumn Ghost, Dr. Hannah Wunsch traces the origins of these two innovations back to a polio epidemic in the autumn of 1952. Drawing together testimony from doctors, nurses, medical students, and patients, Wunsch relates a gripping tale of an epidemic that changed the world.

The Gene is the story of one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in our history, from best-selling, prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee. Spanning the globe and several centuries, The Gene is the story of the quest to decipher the master code that makes and defines humans, that governs our form and function. The story of the gene begins in an obscure Augustinian abbey in Moravia in 1856, where a monk stumbles on the idea of a 'unit of heredity'.

Country of Ash is the starkly compelling, original chronicle of a Jewish doctor who miraculously survived near-certain death, first inside the Lodz and Warsaw ghettoes, where he was forced to treat the Gestapo, then on the Aryan side of Warsaw, where he hid under numerous disguises. He clandestinely recorded the terrible events he witnessed, but his manuscript disappeared during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. After the war, reunited with his wife and young daughter, he rewrote his story.

It's the winter of 1967, and snow is on the ground in the colorful Irish village of Ballybucklebo, but the chilly weather can't stop love from warming hearts all over the county. Not just the love between a man and woman, as with young doctor Barry Laverty and his fiancée, Sue Nolan, who are making plans to start a new life together, but also the love of an ailing pensioner for a faithful dog that's gone missing, the love of the local gentry for the great estate they are on the verge of losing, or Dr. Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly's love for his longtime home and practice.

When a waiting world learned on April 12, 1955, that Jonas Salk had successfully created a vaccine to prevent poliomyelitis, he became a hero overnight. Born in a New York tenement, humble in manner, Salk had all the makings of a 20th-century icon - a knight in a white coat. In the wake of his achievement, he received a staggering number of awards and honors; for years his name ranked with Gandhi and Churchill on lists of the most revered people.

The Elephant Man is Treves' own firsthand account of how he met and befriended Joseph Merrick (whom he mistakenly calls John Merrick), a young man with very severe physical deformities, who was being exhibited as a sideshow freak, as half man, half elephant. Treves initially invited Merrick to his rooms in the London Hospital so as to examine him, and to ensure Merrick's admittance he gave him his card.