Medical History

Was Andy Warhol a hoarder? Did Einstein have autism? Was Frank Lloyd Wright a narcissist? In this surprising, inventive, and meticulously researched look at the evolution of mental health, acclaimed health and science journalist Claudia Kalb gives listeners a glimpse into the lives of high-profile historic figures through the lens of modern psychology, weaving groundbreaking research into biographical narratives that are deeply embedded in our culture.

An insightful, myth-busting biography of early 20th-century Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani, seen through the lenses of the artist’s tuberculosis and other ailments. Becoming Modigliani is a comprehensive biography that delves into the troubled life of the Jewish-Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani. Written by Dr. Henri Colt, an internationally recognized lung specialist, the book examines the artist's legend and Modigliani's creative journey from a medical perspective, from his birth in Livorno, Italy, to his tragic death in a paupers' hospital in Paris at the age of thirty-...

An estimated 10 percent of Americans are implanted with medical devices - like pacemakers, artificial hips, cardiac stents, etc. The overwhelming majority of high-risk implanted devices have never undergone a single clinical trial. The FDA lets device manufacturers decide whether to report serious complications or deaths that may have been caused by their products. Here, award-winning journalist Jeanne Lenzer brings these horrifying statistics to life through the story of one working-class man who, after his "cure" nearly kills him, ends up in a battle for justice.

For the truly well-rounded "intellectual," nothing fascinates so much as the subversive, the contrarian, the suppressed, and the bizarre. Richard Zacks has unloosed his admittedly strange mind and astonishing research abilities upon the entire spectrum of human knowledge, ferreting out endlessly fascinating facts, and stories guaranteed to make you laugh, gasp in wonder, and occasionally shudder at the depths of human depravity. The result of his labors is this quasi-encyclopedia that provides alternative takes on art, business, crime, science, medicine, sex (lots of that), and many other facets of human experience.

Dr. Aribert Heim worked at the Mauthausen concentration camp for only a few months in 1941 but left a devastating mark. According to the testimony of survivors, Heim euthanized patients with injections of gasoline into their hearts. He performed surgeries on otherwise healthy people. Some recalled prisoners' skulls set out on his desk to display perfect sets of teeth. Yet in the chaos of the postwar period, Heim was able to slip away from his dark past and establish himself as a reputable doctor and family man in the resort town of Baden-Baden.

How and why did humans begin to treat sick and injured animals? And how did those practices, and the associated attitudes, evolve from prehistory to the present day? To answer these questions, Dr. Schott shares stories of twenty-two different animal healers and veterinarians from across eras and continents, examining the always fascinating, often unexpected, and sometimes hilarious veterinary methods employed by these people and their colleagues. But at the heart of the tale lies the evolution of the human-animal bond, which has been more cyclical than linear.

Mary Jane Seacole (1805­-1881) was a British Jamaican nurse, author, world traveler, and businesswoman renowned for her work with the soldiers of the Crimean War.

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.

The death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1945 sent shock waves around the world. His lifelong physician swore that the president had always been a picture of health. Later, in 1970, Roosevelt's cardiologist admitted he had been suffering from uncontrolled hypertension and that his death from a cerebral hemorrhage was a cataclysmic event waiting to happen.

Of the three surgeons who accompanied Custer's Seventh Cavalry on June 25, 1876, only the youngest, 28-year-old Henry Porter, survived that day's ordeal, riding through a gauntlet of Indian attackers and up the steep bluffs to Major Marcus Reno's hilltop position. But the story of Dr. Porter's wartime exploits goes far beyond the battle itself.

Princeton's McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence Robert P. George and USC's Graduate Director of Philosophy Christopher Tollefsen are experts in the field of bioethics. In Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, these esteemed scholars combine the latest scientific breakthroughs with the soundest tenets of philosophy to shed new light on a vital yet controversial issue of our day.

As scientists confidently look forward to average life expectancies hitting 100+ years in some Western societies, it’s easy to forget how precarious our grasp on good health has been. It is a struggle no better demonstrated than by the myriad and extraordinary measures that humans have gone to – as diverse as animal sacrifice to stem cell transplants – in their quest to stave off death and disease. Acclaimed historian Mark Jackson takes a fresh global view of mankind’s great battle, exploring both Western and Eastern traditions.

Doctors at War tells the stories of physicians in France working to impede the German war effort and undermine French collaborators during the Occupation from 1940 to 1945. Determined to defeat the Third Reich's incursion, one group of prominent Paris doctors founded a medical network to treat injured Resistance fighters who they then secretly transported to Allied countries to avoid forced labor in Germany. Doctors at War stands as a dramatic, character-driven account of physicians' courage and resilience in the face of evil.

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.

If you don’t like going to the doctor, spare a thought for your ancestors. Got a headache? We can drill into your skull! Need to buy medicine? Can we recommend a dose of ground-up Egyptian mummy? Want to fight off diseases? Try smelling a stinky cesspit. It’s well-known that to make advances in science you have to make a few mistakes along the way. In this hilarious history book kids will be whisked around the world—from ancient Rome to imperial China—to meet the medical innovators who pushed the boundaries of what was possible, with sometimes disastrous effects.

Between the years 1918 and 1920, influenza raged around the globe in the worst pandemic in recorded history, killing at least 50 million people, more than half a million of them Americans. Yet despite the devastation, this catastrophic event seems but a forgotten moment in our nation's past. American Pandemic offers a much-needed corrective to the silence surrounding the influenza outbreak.

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.

Acclaimed nonfiction writer and Sibert Honor winner Gail Jarrow begins her new series on medical fiascoes with an in-depth look at the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history. The Civil War took the lives of more than 600,000 men. Bullet wounds were deadly, but twice as many soldiers died from disease—pneumonia, diarrhea, typhoid fever, measles, and smallpox. Tens of thousands who survived the war were permanently disabled or disfigured. Yet out of this tragedy came medical progress. Doctors and nurses gained valuable experience treating the injured and sick.

There Plant Eyes probes the ways in which blindness has shaped our ocularcentric culture, challenging deeply ingrained ideas about what it means to be “blind”. For millennia, blind­ness has been used to signify such things as thoughtlessness (“blind faith”), irrationality (“blind rage”), and unconsciousness (“blind evolution”). But at the same time, blind people have been othered as the recipients of special powers as compensation for lost sight (from the poetic gifts of John Milton to the heightened senses of the comic book hero Daredevil).

In Unsustainable, Dr. Christopher Voss—a physician with expertise in anesthesiology, critical care, pain medicine, and lifestyle medicine—offers a compelling, well-researched examination of how capitalism has shaped modern healthcare, often rewarding continuous treatment over definitive cures.