Medical History

This amazing tale is the story of one of America's oldest and most unusual urban hospitals. From it's inception as a "Poor House" dispensing free medical care to indigents, Chicago's Cook County Hospital has been both a renowned teaching hospital and the healthcare provider of last resort for the city's uninsured. County covers more than thirty years of its history, beginning in the late 1970s when the author began his internship, to the "Final Rounds" when the enormous iconic Victorian hospital building was replaced and hundreds of former trainees gathered to bid it an emotional farewell.

In Origin Story, medical historian Howard Markel recounts the two-year period (1858 to 1860) of Darwin's writing of On the Origin of Species through its spectacular success and controversy. Simultaneously, Markel delves into the mysterious health symptoms Darwin developed, combing the literature to emerge with a cogent diagnosis of a case that has long fascinated medical historians.

At the urging of his wife, Elizabeth, the Duke of York (known to the royal family as "Bertie") began to see speech therapist Lionel Logue in a desperate bid to cure his lifelong stammer. Little did the two men know that this unlikely friendship - between a future monarch and a commoner born in Australia - would ultimately save the House of Windsor from collapse.

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.

The life and medical practice of Reuben Harris Muth, M.D., a rural saddlebag doctor, is reconstructed from an extant set of physician’s daybooks, chronicling his professional activity from 1858 until 1898, including patients seen and the fees charged. The daybooks also provided a modicum of hints at other activities in his life, including his farming business and the whereabouts of his wayward son. However, there were no personal letters or diaries available. Thus, other primary sources and local newspaper accounts were utilized to fill out the most likely details and actions of his life,...

Dr. Sartor wrote an inspiring first-person account of how he treated more than 1,000 patients—and by his reckoning, lost only five—which lay forgotten in a lockbox of family artifacts until it was discovered decades later by his granddaughter, Beth Obermeyer, a journalist and author of three previous books. Beth knew her grandfather through her teenage years and grew up absorbing family stories. Based upon Dr. Sartor’s memoir and her years of research, she vividly reconstructs his life from childhood in Luxembourg to medical school in Chicago, courtship and marriage.

Nearly two decades after it closed, the South Carolina State Hospital continues to hold a palpable mystique in Columbia and throughout the state. Founded in 1821 as the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum, it housed, fed, and treated thousands of patients incapable of surviving on their own. The patient population in 1961 eclipsed 6,600, well above its listed capacity of 4,823. By the mid-1990s, the patient population had fallen under 700, and the hospital had become a symbol of captivity, horror, and chaos.

The New Year brings challenges and changes to the colorful Irish village of Ballybucklebo. The Christmas holidays have barely passed before a fire engulfs the humble thatched cottage housing of Donal Donnally and his family. Although the family escapes the blaze more or less unsinged, Donal, his wife, their three small children, and their beloved dog find themselves with nothing left but the clothes on their back.

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'.

Army combat veteran and registered nurse Erin Olszewski's most deeply held values were put to the test when she arrived as a travel nurse at Elmhurst Hospital in the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. After serving in Iraq, she was back on the front lines - and this time, she found, the situation was even worse. Rooms were filthy, nurses were lax with sanitation measures, and hospital-acquired cases of COVID-19 were spreading like wildfire.

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.

More than four hundred abandoned suitcases filled with patients’ belongings were found when Willard Psychiatric Center closed in 1995 after 125 years of operation. They are skillfully examined here and compared to the written record to create a moving—and devastating—group portrait of twentieth-century American psychiatric care.

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.

What do dinosaurs, a Neanderthal elder named Nandy, Ötzi-the Ice Mummy, Chinese Chickens, Roman Cats, Richard the Lionhearted, and Catherine of Aragon have in common? The answer: they all suffered from Lyme disease or related Tick-borne infections. Lyme disease is caused by a group of bacteria called Borrelia that have been around for millions of years. It is a spiral shaped spirochete that is spread by the bite of Ixodes ticks. Lyme disease is recognized by the CDC as the leading cause of tick-borne infection in the United States. The history of this spiral is one of persistence. ...

In 1953, a 27-year-old factory worker named Henry Molaison - who suffered from severe epilepsy - received a radical new version of the then-common lobotomy, targeting the most mysterious structures in the brain. The operation failed to eliminate Henry’s seizures, but it did have an unintended effect: Henry was left profoundly amnesic, unable to create long-term memories. Over the next 60 years, Patient H.M., as Henry was known, became the most studied individual in the history of neuroscience, a human guinea pig who would teach us much of what we know about memory today.

From the moment the first machine gun rang out over the Western Front, one thing was clear: mankind’s military technology had wildly surpassed its medical capabilities. Bodies were battered, gouged, hacked, and gassed. The First World War claimed millions of lives and left millions more wounded and disfigured. In the midst of this brutality, however, there were also those who strove to alleviate suffering. The Facemaker tells the extraordinary story of such an individual: the pioneering plastic surgeon Harold Gillies.

Ingrassia lost his mother, two sisters, brother, and nephew to cancer—different cancers developing at different points throughout their lives. And while highly unusual, his family is not the only one to wonder whether their heartbreak is the result of unbelievable bad luck, or if there might be another explanation. Through meticulous research and riveting storytelling, Ingrassia takes us from the 1960s—when Dr. Frederick Pei Li and Dr. Joseph Fraumeni Jr. first met, not yet knowing that they would help make a groundbreaking discovery that would affect cancer patients for decades to come.

Due to horrible physical deformities, he spent much of his life as a fairground freak. He was hounded, persecuted, and starving, until his fortune changed and he was rescued, housed, and fed by the distinguished surgeon, Frederick Treves. The subject of several books, a Broadway hit, and a film, Joseph Merrick has become part of popular mythology. Here, in this fully revised edition containing much fresh information, are the true and un-romanticized facts of his life.

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.

Dr. John Sullivan is the medical director of the Philadelphia General Hospital’s Alzheimer’s unit. He’s also a member of the West Philadelphia Historical Society, spearheading an effort to document as much information as possible regarding the hospital’s Franklin Wing, an abandoned section of the medical complex set to be razed. During his research, Dr. Sullivan acquaints himself with Dr. Zachary Schmidt, an eccentric and at times controversial physician who worked in the Franklin Wing until his mysterious disappearance on July 4th, 1976. There, in Dr. Schmidt’s former office, ...