New Books in Medicine Podcast

Jay Bhattacharya on the COVID-19 Pandemic and the Public Health Response from 2023-10-19T13:44:32

Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford University Professor of Medicine) joins to the podcast to discuss his beginnings being born in Calcutta, India, his journey to Stanford as a student obtaining four degree...

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Donna Dickenson, "Me Medicine vs. We Medicine: Reclaiming Biotechnology for the Common Good" (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Personalized healthcare?or what the award-winning author Donna Dickenson calls "Me Medicine"?is radically transforming our longstanding "one-size-fits-all" model. Technologies such as direct-to-con...

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Vanessa Heggie, "Higher and Colder: A History of Extreme Physiology and Exploration" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Vanessa Heggie talks about the history of biomedical research in extreme environments. Heggie is a Fellow of the Institute for Global Innovation at the University of Birmingham. She is the author o...

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Celeste Watkins-Hayes, "Remaking a Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality" (U California Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do women -- especially poor and low-income women with histories of childhood sexual trauma and drug addiction -- respond to and deal with an HIV/AIDS diagnosis? How do some manage to not merely...

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Alex Broadbent, "Philosophy of Medicine" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alex Broadbent's Philosophy of Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2019) asks two central questions about medicine: what is it, and what should we think of it? Philosophy of medicine itself has evo...

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Katie Batza, "Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The AIDS crisis of the 1980s looms large in recent histories of sexuality, medicine, and politics, and justly so—an unknown virus without a cure ravages an already persecuted minority, medical prof...

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Robin Scheffler, “A Contagious Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Could cancer be a contagious disease? Although this possibility might seem surprising to many of us, it has a long history. In fact, efforts to develop a cancer vaccine drew more money than the Hum...

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Paul Ramírez, "Enlightened Immunity: Mexico’s Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason" (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul Ramírez’s first book explores how laypeople impacted the new medical techniques and technologies implemented by the imperial state in the final decades of Spanish rule in colonial Mexico. Mor...

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Pauline W. Chen, "Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality" (Vintage, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Too often keeping patients alive gets in the way of helping them as they approach death. Dr. Pauline Chen shares her experiences as a medical student and transplant surgeon and how they’ve shaped t...

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Nara Milanich, "Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nara Milanich’s Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father (Harvard University Press, 2019) explains how fatherhood, long believed to be impossible to know with certainty, became a biological “fac...

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Stephan Bullard, "A Day-by-Day Chronicle of the 2013-2016 Ebola Outbreak" (Springer, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why did Ebola, a virus so deadly that it killed or immobilized its victims within days, have time to become a full-blown epidemic? That’s what happened in 2013 in when the virus, already well-known...

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Erika Dyck, "Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I talked with historian Erika Dyck about Aldous Huxley, Humphry Osmond and their correspondence over a ten year period. Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond (...

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James Crossland, "War, Law and Humanity: The Campaign to Control Warfare, 1853-1914" (Bloomsbury, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Beginning in the mid-1850s, a number of people in Europe and the United States undertook a range of efforts in response to the horrors of war. In his book War, Law and Humanity: The Campaign to Con...

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David Courtwright, "The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We are living in an age of addiction, from compulsive gaming and binge eating to pornography and opioid abuse. Today I talked with historian David Courtwright about the global nature of pleasure, v...

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Eric Topol, "Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again" (Basic Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Medicine has lost its humanity. Doctors no longer have the time to make personal connections with their patients. In his new book Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Huma...

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Nancy Tomes, "Remaking the American Patient" (UNC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In a work that spans the twentieth century, Nancy Tomes questions the popular--and largely unexamined--idea that in order to get good health care, people must learn to shop for it. Remaking the Ame...

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James L. A. Webb, "The Long Struggle against Malaria in Tropical Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is estimated that malaria kills between 650,000 to 1.2 million people every year; experts believe that nearly 90 percent of these deaths occur in Africa. In The Long Struggle against Malaria in ...

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Kate Brown, "Manuel for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We cannot learn from disasters we do not yet understand. That conviction motivated historian Kate Brown to conduct groundbreaking research into nuclear energy’s most infamous chapter and write Manu...

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Lukas Engelmann, "Mapping AIDS: Visual Histories of an Enduring Epidemic" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What role do visual media play in establishing a medical phenomenon? Who mobilizes these representations, and to what end? In Mapping AIDS: Visual Histories of an Enduring Epidemic (Cambridge UP, 2...

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Robert A. Voeks, "The Ethnobotany of Eden: Rethinking the Jungle Medicine Narrative" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jungle medicine: it's everywhere, from chia seeds to ginseng tea to CBD oil. In the US, what was once the province of counter culture has moved squarely into the mainstream of Walmart and Walgreen...

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Vivian Percy, "Saving Jenny: Rescuing Our Youth from America's Opioid and Suicide Epidemic" (Radius Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Normal turned to PTSD and a substance abuse nightmare for Jenny the instant a taxi struck her, catapulting her twenty feet across a busy New York City street. Jenny is one of the lucky ones to have...

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Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contri...

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Joseph Jarvis, "The Purple World: Healing the Harm in American Health Care" (Scrivener Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

American’s pay double what every other developed nation in the world pays for healthcare. Does that mean that we are the healthiest? No. In fact, we are the worst of them all. American healthcare i...

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Jessica Hardin, "Faith and the Pursuit of Health: Cardiometabolic Disorders in Samoa" (Rutgers UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jessica Hardin's new book Faith and the Pursuit of Health: Cardiometabolic Disorders in Samoa (Rutgers University Press, 2018) explores how Pentecostal Christians manage chronic illness in ways tha...

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Carl S. Armato, "A Future With Hope: An Inspiring Guide to Overcoming Diabetes" (Carl S. Armato, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carl Armato, the CEO of Novant Health, has lived with his diabetes diagnosis for over 50 years. In spite of his diabetes not being easy to live with, he has overcome it and lived a full, active, li...

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Janis Powers, "Health Care: Meet The American Dream" (River Grove Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

American health care is the most expensive in the world, yet it produces some of the worst outcomes among developed nations. Many people offer unrealistic ideas or hot buzz words for how to fix it ...

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Peter Hotez, "Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism: My Journey as a Vaccine Scientist, Pediatrician, and Autism Dad" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Peter Hotez is a pediatrician-scientist who develops vaccines for neglected tropical diseases affecting the worlds poor. He is also the father of a daughter who was diagnosed with autism. The a...

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Dave Chase, "The Opioid Crisis Wake Up Call: Health Care is Stealing the American Dream. Here is How We Take It Back" (Health Rosetta Media, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The opioid crisis in America is considered by many to be the worst national public health crisis in the last 100 years. In his new book, The Opioid Crisis Wake Up Call: Health Care is Stealing the ...

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Nicholas Bauch, "Geography of Digestion: Biotechnology and the Kellogg Enterprise" (U California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While most people in the US are familiar with the ubiquitous Kellogg cereal brand, few know how it relates to US geography, science and technology around the turn of the 20th century. In A Geograph...

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Julian Gill-Peterson, "Histories of the Transgender Child" (U Minnesota Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With transgender rights front and center in American politics, media, and culture, the pervasive myth still exists that today’s transgender children are a brand new generation—pioneers in a field o...

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Lindsey Fitzharris, "The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine" (Scientific American, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joseph Lister changed the world of medicine. In her book The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine (Scientific American, 2017), Dr. Lindsey Fitzh...

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William B. Young and Stephen D. Silberstein, "Navigating Life with Migraine and Other Headaches" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Migraine headaches can be absolutely devastating. In the book Navigating Life with Migraine and Other Headaches (Oxford University Press, 2018), William B. Young and Stephen D. Silberstein set out...

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Paul A. Offit, "Do You Believe in Magic?: Vitamins, Supplements, and All Things Natural" (Harper, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is alternative medicine quackery? In the book Do You Believe in Magic? Vitamins, Supplements, and All Things Natural: A Look Behind the Curtain (Harper, 2014) (Harper Paperbacks, 2014),Paul A. Offi...

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Stephan J. Guyenet, "The Hungry Brain: Outsmarting the Instincts That Make Us Overeat" (Flatiron Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this this interview, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Diana Hill talks with Dr. Stephan J. Guyenet, neurobiologist and obesity researcher, about the unconscious sys...

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Suman Seth, "Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Suman Seth's new book Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018)provides a new angle on the formation of modern ideas of ra...

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Howard Chiang, "After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China" (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Howard Chiang’s new book is a masterful study of the relationship between sexual knowledge and Chinese modernity. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Co...

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Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers, "The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The prologue to The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War (University of Chicago Press, 2018) begins by provocatively invoking a question Americ...

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Nivedita Lakhera, “Pillow of Dreams” (Nivedita Lakhera, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pillow of Dreams (Nivedita Lakhera, 2017) is an intensely emotional and inspirational collection of poetry and art by Dr. Nivedita Lakhera. She experienced a stroke, divorce, and then a heartbreak ...

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Shobita Parthasarathy, “Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Shobita Parthasarathy takes us through a thirty year history of...

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Hugh Cagle, “Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal’s Empire, 1450-1700” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal’s Empire, 1450-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) by Hugh Cagle is an exciting analysis of the production of the tropics as an idea and...

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Robert A. Wilson, “The Eugenic Mind Project” (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For most of us, eugenics — the “science of improving the human stock” — is a thing of the past, commonly associated with Nazi Germany and government efforts to promote a pure Aryan race. This view ...

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Dániel Margócsy, et al., “The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions” (Brill, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions (Brill, 2018) is a masterful new book that will long be on the shelves of a...

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Theodore M. Porter, “Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity (Princeton University Press, 2018), Theodore Porter uncovers the unfamiliar origins of human genetics in the asylums of Europe and...

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Hervé Guillemain, “Schizophrenics in the Twentieth Century: The Side Effects of History” (Alma, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Schizophrènes au XXe siècle: des effets secondaires de l’histoire [Schizophrenics in the Twentieth Century: The Side Effects of History] is a strong argument in support of the history of psychiatry...

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Hilary A. Smith, “Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine” (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hilary A. Smith’s new book examines the evolution of a Chinese disease concept, foot qi (jiao qi) from its documented origins in the fourth century to the present day. However, at its heart Forgott...

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Joshua Sharfstein, “The Public Health Crisis Survival Guide: Leadership and Management in Trying Times” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Joshua Sharfstein has learned a lot as from his years of experience as a public health leader. He has dealt with everything from a rabid raccoon, to protestors, to potentially losing refrigerat...

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Josh Luke, “Health-Wealth: 9 Steps To Financial Recovery” (ForbesBooks, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Healthcare is extremely expensive for both patients and their employers. The costs of healthcare continue to increase with no end in sight. Dr. Josh Luke is a former Hospital CEO, disruptor, and he...

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Andrew J. Hogan, “Life Histories of Genetic Disease: Patterns and Prevention in Postwar Medical Genetics” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did clinicians learn to see the human genome? In Life Histories of Genetic Disease (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Andrew J. Hogan makes the subtle argument that a process described by ...

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Seth Archer, “Sharks Upon the Land: Colonialism, Indigenous Health, and Culture in Hawai’i, 1778-1855” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Sharks Upon the Land: Colonialism, Indigenous Health, and Culture in Hawai’i, 1778-1855 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Utah State University Assistant Professor of History Seth Archer trace...

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Larisa Jašarevi?, “Health and Wealth on the Bosnian Market: Intimate Debt” (Indiana UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Health and Wealth on the Bosnian Market: Intimate Debt (Indiana University Press, 2017), Larisa Jašarevi? traces the odd entanglements between the body and the economy in Bosnia-He...

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Michelle Perro and Vincanne Adams, “What’s Making Our Children Sick?” (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pediatrician and integrative medicine practitioner Michelle Perro, MD, has been treating an increasing number of children with complex chronic illnesses that do not fit into our usual diagnostic bo...

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Beth Macy, “Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America” (Little, Brown & Company, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Appalachia was among the first places where the malaise of opioid pills hit the nation in the mid-1990s, ensnaring coal miners, loggers, furniture makers, and their kids.” This is how journalist B...

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Susan Greenfield, “You and Me: The Neuroscience of Identity” (Notting Hill Editions, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What makes you who you are? What makes you distinct from me? What is identity? In the book You and Me: The Neuroscience of Identity (Notting Hill Editions, 2016), Baroness Susan Greenfield scientif...

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Paul Offit, “Bad Advice: Or Why Celebrities, Politicians, and Activists Aren’t Your Best Source of Health Information” (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

You should never trust celebrities, politicians, or activists for health information. Why? Because they are not scientists! Scientists often cannot compete with celebrities when it comes to charm o...

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Jacob Levine, “Cannabis Discourse: Facts and Opinions in Context” (Jacob Levine, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the landscape of our cannabis knowledge? In his new book Jacob Levine author of the Cannabis Discourse: Facts and Opinions in Context (Jacob Levine, 2018) gives readers an overview of the p...

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Michael Kearney, “The Nest in the Stream: Lessons from Nature on Being with Pain” (Parallax Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, cross posted from the podcast Psychologists Off the Clock, Dr. Diana Hill interviews Dr. Michael Kearney, a palliative care physician who takes an interpersonal, integrative approa...

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Dorothy H. Crawford, “Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped our History” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The history of mankind is interlinked with microbes. As humans evolved and became more advanced, microbes evolved right along with us. Through infection, disease, and pandemic they have helped shap...

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Marsha MacDowell, Clare Luz, and Beth Donaldson, “Quilts and Health” (Indiana UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Quilts and Health (Indiana University Press, 2017), Marsha MacDowell and her colleagues examine the phenomenon of health-related quilts, of which there are millions around the world. In fact, an...

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Pablo Gomez, “The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic” (UNC Press, 2017). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pablo Gomez‘s The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) examines the strategies by which health and spiritua...

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Edward Khantzian, “Treating Addiction: Beyond the Pain” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Treatment of addiction often focuses on abstinence or ‘harm reduction.’ While many people benefit greatly from such approaches, the underlying pain and heartache often go untreated, leaving individ...

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Randi Hutter Epstein, “Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything” (Norton, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Metabolism, behavior, sleep, mood swings, the immune system, fighting, fleeing, puberty, and sex: these are just a few of the things our bodies control with hormones. Armed with a healthy dose of w...

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Sam Kean, “The Violinist’s Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code” (Back Bay, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Disappearing Spoon, bestselling author Sam Kean unlocked the mysteries of the periodic table. In The Violinist’s Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genet...

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Joanna Radin, “Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Whether through the anxiety of mutually assured destruction or the promise of decolonization throughout Asia and Africa, Cold War politics had a peculiar temporality. In Life on Ice: A History of N...

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Adam Tanner, “Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records” (Beacon Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Personal health information often seems locked-down: protected by patient privacy laws, encased in electronic record systems (EHRs) and difficult to share or transport by and between physicians and...

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Londa Schiebinger, “Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World” (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Londa Schiebinger‘s new book Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford University Press, 2017) examines the contexts, programs, and eth...

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Daisy Deomampo, “Transnational Reproduction: Race, Kinship, and Commercial Surrogacy in India” (NYU Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Transnational Reproduction: Race, Kinship, and Commercial Surrogacy in India (NYU Press, 2016), Daisy Deomampo explores relationships between Indian surrogates, their families, aspiring parents ...

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Stephen Klasko, “Bless This Mess: A Picture Story of Healthcare in America” (Lulu Publishing, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Our neighbors on other planets look with puzzlement at the United States, located on the beautiful planet Earth. Despite amazing knowledge, discovery, and skill, healthcare delivery in this country...

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Melanie A. Kiechle, “Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America” (U Washington Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Melanie Kiechle‘s Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America (University of Washington Press, 2017) takes us into the cellars, rivers, gutters and similar smelly rec...

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Jonathan W. Marshall, “Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot is perhaps most well known today from the images of his “hysterical” female patients featured in Bourneville’s Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. ...

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Lydia Kang, “Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything” (Workman Publishing Company, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What won’t we try in our quest for perfect health, beauty, and the fountain of youth? Well, just imagine a time when doctors prescribed morphine for crying infants. When liquefied gold was touted a...

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Martha Few, “For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala” (U Arizona Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Professor Martha Few’s For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala (University of Arizona Press, 2015) describes the implementation of public health reforms in l...

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Toby Cosgrove, “The Cleveland Clinic Way: Lessons in Excellence from One of the World’s Leading Health Care Organizations” (McGraw-Hill Education, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

American healthcare is in crisis. It doesn’t have to be. Dr. Toby Cosgrove‘s The Cleveland Clinic Way: Lessons in Excellence from One of the World’s Leading Health Care Organizations (McGraw-Hill E...

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Laura Spinney, “Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World” (PublicAffairs, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was one of the greatest human disasters of all time. It infected a third of the people on Earth–from the poorest immigrants of New York City to the king of Spain, Franz...

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John J. Pitney, “The Politics of Autism: Navigating the Contested Spectrum” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Autism as a condition has received much focused attention recently, but less attention has been paid to its politics. It is a condition that necessitates significant accommodations and intervention...

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Christy Ford Chapin, “Ensuring America’s Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christy Ford Chapin, an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has written a history of the funding of America’s health care system: Ensuring America’s Heal...

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Eric Yarbrough, “Transgender Mental Health” (American Psychiatric Association, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How and where do transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) people find good mental healthcare? And how can psychotherapists and other mental health professionals become competent in this kind of...

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Sam Kean, “The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons” (Little, Brown and Co., 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Early studies of the functions of the human brain used a simple method: wait for misfortune to strike—strokes, seizures, infectious diseases, lobotomies, horrendous accidents-and see how the victim...

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Jenny Reardon, “The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Knowledge and Justice after the Genome” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do we create meaning after the genome? Such a profound question is at the center of the recently published book by Jenny Reardon, The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Knowledge and Justice after ...

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Samuel Harrington, “At Peace: Choosing a Good Death After a Long Life” (Grand Central Life & Style, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most people say they would like to die quietly at home. But overly aggressive medical advice, coupled with an unrealistic sense of invincibility or overconfidence in our health-care system, results...

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Jonathan Engel, “Unaffordable: American Healthcare from Johnson to Trump” (U Wisconsin Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Earlier this year, Jamila Michener visited the podcast to talk about her new book, Fragmented Democracy, about Medicaid and the state-based structure that results in very different experiences of M...

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Susan M. Squier, “Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor” (Duke UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Susan M. Squier’s book, Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor (Duke University Press, 2017) is about development— biological and ecological. It explores how the media (paintings, films, grap...

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Thomas Morris, “The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations” (Thomas Dunne, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For thousands of years the human heart remained the deepest of mysteries; both home to the soul and an organ too complex to touch, let alone operate on. Then, in the late nineteenth century, medics...

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Carolyn Day, “Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease” (Bloomsbury, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease (Bloomsbury, 2017), Carolyn Day tracks the relationship between dress, appearance, and tuberculosis in the eighteenth an...

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Halee Fischer-Wright, “Back to Balance: The Art, Science, and Business of Medicine” (Disruption Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this highly engaging, thoroughly persuasive book, Dr. Halee Fischer-Wright presents a unique prescription for fixing America’s health care woes, based on her thirty years of experience as a phys...

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Mara Buchbinder, “All in Your Head: Making Sense of Pediatric Pain” (U California Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As physicians, we cannot image or measure it, we can only try to locate within the lives and (sometimes) bodies of our patients. In All in Your Head: Making Sense of Pediatric Pain (University of C...

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Molly Ladd-Taylor, “Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eugenic sterilization is usually associated with Nazi horrors before and during World War II. But, as Dr. Molly Ladd-Taylor reminds us, it was also practiced in the United States. In her new book F...

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Robert Pearl, “Mistreated: Why We Think Were Getting Good Health Care and Why We’re Usually Wrong” (PublicAffairs, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The biggest problem in American health care is us. Do you know how to tell good health care from bad health care? Guess again. As patients, we wrongly assume the best care is dependent mainly on t...

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Urmi Engineer Willoughby, “Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteeth-Century New Orleans” (LSU Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A disease cannot be fully understood unless considered in its environmental context. That conviction drives Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteeth-Century New Orleans (LSU Press, 2017) by his...

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Jonathan D. Quick, “The End of Epidemics: The Looming Threat to Humanity and How to Stop It” (St. Martin’s Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A leading doctor offers answers on the one of the most urgent questions of our time: How do we prevent the next global pandemic? The 2014 Ebola epidemic in Liberia terrified the world?and revealed...

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Jamila Michener, “Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism, and Unequal Politics” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Medicaid provides health care for around 1 in 5 Americans. Despite the large number served, the programs administration by state and local governments means very different things in different place...

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Andrew Lees, “Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment” (Notting Hill Editions, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment (Notting Hill Editions, 2017) is a fascinating account by one of the world’s leading and most decorated neurologists of the profound influence...

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Henry Jay Przybylo, “Counting Backwards: A Doctor’s Notes on Anesthesia” (W.W. Norton, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For many of the 40 million Americans who undergo anesthesia each year, it is the source of great fear and fascination. From the famous first demonstration of anesthesia in the Ether Dome at Massach...

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Shiri Noy, “Banking on Health: The World Bank and Health Sector Reform in Latin America” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What role has the World Bank played in influencing health sector reform in Latin America? In her new book, Banking on Health: The World Bank and Health Sector Reform in Latin America (Palgrave Macm...

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Anita Johnston, “Eating in the Light of the Moon” (Gurze Books, 2000) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anita Johnston, author of Eating in the Light of the Moon: How Women Can Transform Their Relationships with Food Through Myth, Metaphor, and Storytelling (Gurze Books, 2000), is an expert in the fi...

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Howard I. Kushner, “On the Other Hand: Left Hand, Right Brain, Mental Disorder, and History” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the early twentieth century, Robert Hertz, a French anthropologist, and Cesare Lombroso, the Italian criminologist, debated the causes and consequences of left-handedness. According to Lombroso,...

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Kim Yi Dionne, “Doomed Interventions: The Failure of Global Responses to AIDS in Africa” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

AIDS is one of the primary causes of death in Africa. Of the more than 24 million Africans infected with HIV, only about 54% have access to the treatment that they need. Despite the progress made i...

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Erika Dyck and Alex Deighton, “Managing Madness” (U Manitoba Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Embracing a multi-perspectival authorial voice, Managing Madness: Weyburn Mental Hospital and the Transformation of Psychiatric Care in Canada (University of Manitoba Press, 2017), tells the story ...

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Zoe Wool, “After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Zoe Wool‘s ethnography of rehabilitation After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed (Duke University Press, 2015) describes how soldiers injured in the war on terror are pulled towards a normal a...

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Samuel Totten, “Sudan’s Nuba Mountains People Under Siege” (McFarland, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This podcast is usually devoted to book written about the past. The authors may be historians, or political scientists, or anthropologists, or even a member of the human rights community. But we’re...

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Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs, “Jonas Salk: A Life” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Polio was a scourge that terrified generations of people throughout the United States and the rest of the world until Jonas Salk’s vaccine provided the first effective defense against it. In Jonas ...

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Sarah D. Phillips, “Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine” (Indiana UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2010), Sarah D. Phillips offers a compelling investigation of disability policies and movements in Ukraine a...

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Carolyn Sufrin, “Jailcare: Finding the Safety Net for Women behind Bars” (U. Cal Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1976, the landmark supreme court case Estelle v. Gamble, established that under the Eighth Amendment “deliberate indifference” to the health needs of incarcerated individuals was tantamount to c...

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Carla Joinson, “Vanished in Hiawatha: The Story of the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians” (U. Nebraska, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Between 1902 and 1934, hundreds of Native American men, women, and children were institutionalized at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians; only nine of them, however, were officially committed by ...

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Katherine Paugh, “The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Katherine Paugh‘s new book The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition (Oxford University Press, 2017) examines the crucial role that reproduction took in th...

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Leigh Straw, “After the War: Returned Soldiers and the Mental and Physical Scars of World War I” (UWA Publishing, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, After the War: Returned Soldiers and the Mental and Physical Scars of World War I (UWA Publishing, 2017), Leigh Straw, a Senior Lecturer in Aboriginal Studies and History at the Un...

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Gareth M. Thomas, “Down’s Syndrome Screening and Reproductive Politics: Care, Choice, and Disability in the Prenatal Clinic” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Drawing on an ethnography of Down’s syndrome screening in two UK clinics, Gareth M. Thomas‘ Down’s Syndrome and Reproductive Politics: Care, Choice, and Disability in the Prenatal Clinic (Routledge...

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Claire D. Clark, “The Recovery Revolution” (Columbia UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Before the 1960s, doctors were generally in control of the treatment of drug addicts. And that made a certain sense, because drug addicts had something that looked a lot like a disease or mental il...

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Mark Solms, “The Feeling Brain: Selected Papers in Neuropsychoanalysis” (Karnac, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you steered yourself away from books about brain science because you were interested in something completely different–psychoanalysis–then this is the book for you! This book will renew your app...

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Daniel P. Keating, “Born Anxious: The Lifelong Impact of Early Life Adversity” (St. Martin’s Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anxiety has become a social epidemic. People feel anxious all the time about nearly everything: their work, families, and even survival. However, research shows that some of us are more prone to ch...

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Oscar Fernandez, “The Calculus of Happiness” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The book discussed here is entitled The Calculus of Happiness: How a Mathematical Approach to Life Adds Up to Health, Wealth, and Love (Princeton University Press, 2017) by Oscar Fernandez. If the ...

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Megha Amrith, “Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia” (NIAS Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you’ve been hospitalized in Europe, North America, Australia or the Middle East in recent years, chances are that at some point a nurse from the Philippines has had some part in your treatment. ...

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Sharrona Pearl, “Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other” (U. Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sharrona Pearl‘s new book is an absolute pleasure to read. Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other (The University of Chicago Press, 2017) looks closely at facial allotransplantations...

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Amy Ziettlow and Naomi Cahn, “Homeward Bound: Modern Families, Elder Care, and Loss” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The U.S. population is aging and we often rely on our family to care for us during our twilight years. But, families today can be quite complex, with divorce, step-families, and cohabitation changi...

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J. C. McKeown, “A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Healing Arts of Greece and Rome” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The back cover of J. C. McKeown‘s new book, A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities (Oxford University Press, 2017), is adorned not with review quotes from contemporary scholars, but rather the di...

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Grace Davie, “Poverty Knowledge in South Africa: A Social History of Human Science, 1855-2005” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Apartheid in South Africa formally ended in 1994, but the issue of poverty and what to do about it remained as contentious as it had been a century earlier. In the new book, Poverty Knowledge in So...

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Susanna L. Blumenthal, “Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Susanna L. Blumenthal is a professor of law and associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota. Her book, Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal ...

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Amit Prasad, “Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India” (MIT, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amit Prasad is widely admired for using Postcolonial Studies to explore questions about science, technology and medicine. In Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United Sta...

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John Hudak, “Marijuana: A Short History” (Brookings, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Hudak‘s book Marijuana: A Short History (Brookings Institutions Press, 2016) is an accessible and informative dive into marijuana on a number of levels and from a variety of perspectives. Huda...

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Eugene Raikhel, “Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic” (Cornell UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alcoholism is a strange thing. That it exists, no one seriously doubts. But it’s not entirely clear (diagnostically speaking) what it is, who has it, how they get it, or how to treat it. The answer...

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Colleen Derkatch, “Bounding Biomedicine: Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine” (U of Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What makes for new science? What happens to the evidentiary basis of the medical profession when patients demand treatments beyond the range of their conception of human biology? Are the criteria o...

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Susan E. Cayleff, “Nature’s Path: A History of Naturopathic Healing in America” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Susan Cayleff’s Nature’s Path: A History of Naturopathic Healing in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016) offers a fascinating alternative to the development of allopathic orthodoxy in the...

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Linda Craighead, “The Appetite Awareness Workbook: How to Listen to Your Body and Overcome Bingeing, Overeating, and Obsession with Food” (New Harbinger, 2006) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many people who either overeat, chronically diet, or feel a loss of control over food, have reduced awareness of their body’s internal signals of hunger and fullness. As children, most of us tend t...

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Kathleen McAuliffe, “This is Your Brain on Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society” (Mariner Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kathleen McAuliffe‘s This is Your Brain on Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society (Mariner Books, 2017) unveils the world of parasites. From the influence of parasi...

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Norman Ohler, “Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Norman Ohler’s Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) explores the drug culture of Nazi Germany. Far from being a nation of physical and mental purity portrayed by Goeb...

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Ericka Johnson, ed. “Gendering Drugs: Feminist Studies of Pharmaceuticals” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On the frontier of feminist technoscience research, Ericka Johnson’s collaborative project Gendering Drugs: Feminist Studies of Pharmaceuticals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) explores how the gendered ...

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Matthew James Crawford, “The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630-1800” (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Matthew James Crawford’s new book is a fascinating history of an object that was central to the history of science, technology, and medicine in the early modern Spanish Atlantic world. The Andean W...

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Andrew Scull, “Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity” (Princeton UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The wish to understand mental suffering is universal and requires an appreciation for its history. Since Biblical times, humans have understood madness, or other deviations from normal mental funct...

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Projit Bihari Mukharji, “Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Science: (University of Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Projit Bihari Mukharji’s new book explores the power of small, non-spectacular, and everyday technologies as motors or catalysts of change in the history of science and medicine. Focusing on practi...

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Philip Rosenbaum, “Making our Ideas Clear: Pragmatism in Psychoanalysis” (Information Age Publishing, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pragmatism, as a philosophical concept, is often misunderstood and misapplied. Fortunately, I had the chance to speak with Philip Rosenbaum, psychoanalyst and editor of the book Making our Ideas Cl...

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Elizabeth Barnes, “The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We are all familiar with the idea that some persons are disabled. But what is disability? What makes it such that a condition–physical, cognitive, psychological–is a disability, rather than, say, a...

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Claudia Malacrida, “A Special Hell: Institutional Life in Albertas Eugenic Years” (U of Toronto Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In A Special Hell: Institutional Life in Alberta’s Eugenic Years (University of Toronto Press, 2015), Claudia Malacrida explores the practices of the Michener Center in Red Deer, Northern Alberta, ...

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Ann Bracken, “Mind, Body, Baby” (Yellow Kite Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When trying to conceive doesn’t go as planned, many women and couples are faced with difficult decisions about which interventions to pursue. Treatment of infertility, whether natural or high-tech,...

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Alisha Brosse, “End the Insomnia Struggle” (New Harbinger, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Every night around the world, millions of people lie in bed at night, struggling to fall asleep. Experts suggest that about one in three people struggle with at least mild insomnia. Paradoxically, ...

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Jessica van Horssen, “A Town Called Asbestos” (UBC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 2012, Canada stopped mining and exporting asbestos. Once considered a miracle mineral for its fireproof qualities, asbestos came to be better known as a carcinogenic, hazardous material banned i...

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Robert Aronowitz, “Risky Medicine: Our Quest to Cure Fear and Uncertainty” (U. Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Statistics have been on the minds of more people than usual in the run-up and post-mortem of this past U.S. presidential election; some feel as though they were misled by numbers intended to lend a...

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Ruth Rogaski, “Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China” (U. California Press, 2014 reprint) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since it was published in 2004, Ruth Rogaski’s Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (University of California Press, 2014 reprint) has won four major prizes in fi...

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Jean-Germain Gros, “Healthcare Policy in Africa” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Healthcare Policy In Africa: Institutions and Politics from Colonialism to the Present (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), Jean-Germain Gros argues that healthcare policy should be the black box rat...

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Anthony M. Petro, “After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Emerging in the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic was not just a public health crisis. It was a moral crisis too, argues Anthony M. Petro in his new book, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and Americ...

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Kelly Underman, "Feeling Medicine: How the Pelvic Exam Shapes Medical Training" (NYU Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The pelvic exam is considered a fundamental procedure for medical students to learn; it is also often the one of the first times where medical students are required to touch a real human being in a...

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Robert Brain, “The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (U. of Washington Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” Oscar Wilde famously observed. Wilde’s waning romanticism can be read in stark contrast with Nietzsche, who argued around the same time, “art is...

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M. Newhart and W. Dolphin, "The Medicalization of Marijuana: Legitimacy, Stigma, and the Patient Experience" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Medical marijuana laws have spread across the U.S. to all but a handful of states. Yet, eighty years of social stigma and federal prohibition creates dilemmas for patients who participate in state ...

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Orna Ophir, “On the Borderland of Madness: Psychosis, Psychoanalysis, and Psychiatry in Postwar USA” (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When it comes to the history of psychoanalysis and psychiatry in the United States, to paraphrase Luce Irigaray, one never stirs without the other. While Freud sent Theodore Reik across the ocean t...

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Marta Zaraska, "Growing Young: How Friendship, Optimism, and Kindness Can Help You Live to 100" (Appetite/Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I interview Marta Zaraska about her book Growing Young: How Friendship, Optimism, and Kindness Can Help You Live to 100 (Appetite/Random House, 2020). Now you may be thinking to yourself, “10...

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Robert Peckham, “Epidemics in Modern Asia” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Peckham’s Epidemics in Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores the crucial yet under-explored role that epidemics have played in both colonial and postcolonial Asia. At once ...

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Dan Royles, "To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle Against HIV/AIDS" (UNC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the decades since it was identified in 1981, HIV/AIDS has devastated African American communities. Members of those communities mobilized to fight the epidemic and its consequences from the begi...

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Roman Sieler, “Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets: Medicine and Martial Arts in South India” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Roman Sieler’s?? Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets: Medicine and Martial Arts in South India (Oxford University Press, 2015) is a fine-grained ethnographic study of varmakkalai–the art of vital spots, a ...

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Rene Almeling, "GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men’s Reproductive Health" (U California Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rene Almeling’s new book GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men’s Reproductive Health (University of California Press, 2020) provides an in-depth look at why we do not talk about men’s reproductiv...

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Ahmed Ragab, “The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion, Charity” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his shining new book The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion, and Charity (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Ahmed Ragab, Assistant Professor of Religion and Science at Harvard Divini...

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Boel Berner, "Strange Blood: The Rise and Fall of Lamb Blood Transfusion in 19th-Century Medicine and Beyond" (Transcript Verlag, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the mid-1870s, the experimental therapy of lamb blood transfusion spread like an epidemic across Europe and the USA. Doctors tried it as a cure for tuberculosis, pellagra and anemia; proposed it...

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James Pennebaker and Joshua Smyth, “Opening Up by Writing it Down: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain” (Guilford Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many people carry around unresolved feelings and thoughts tied to difficult experiences, with no idea what to do with them. When left unattended for too long, these pent up feelings can lead to a v...

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Tamara McClintock Greenberg, "Treating Complex Trauma: Combined Theories and Methods" (Springer, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Relationship problems, struggles with substance abuse, poor memory, and difficulties with emotions are typical symptoms of complex trauma—yet many traumatized individuals have no idea their symptom...

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Greg Eghigian, “The Corrigible and the Incorrigible: Science, Medicine, and the Convict in Twentieth-Century Germany” (U. of Michigan Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When I first read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish as an undergrad, I remember wondering, “What does this look like, though? How might the disciplining of the body play out in different places?” Gr...

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Kat Arney, "Rebel Cell: Cancer, Evolution, and the New Science of Life's Oldest Betrayal" (Benbella Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cancer exists in nearly every animal and has afflicted humans as long as our species has walked the earth. In Rebel Cell: Cancer, Evolution, and the New Science of Life's Oldest Betrayal (Benbella ...

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Andrew Schulman, “Waking the Spirit: A Musician’s Journey Healing Body, Mind, and Soul (Picador 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What do the musical compositions of Bach, Gershwin, and the Beatles all have in common? Besides being great pieces of music, according to Andrew Schulman, they promote healing in intensive care (IC...

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John Whysner, "The Alchemy of Disease" (Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since the dawn of the industrial age, we have unleashed a bewildering number of potentially harmful chemicals. But out of this vast array, how do we identify the actual threats? What does it take t...

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Sam Quinones, “Dreamland: The True Tale of American’s Opiate Epidemic” (Bloomsbury Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the early 2000s, the press–at least in Boston, where I was living at the time–was full of shrill stories about drug-crazed addicts breaking into area pharmacies in search of something called “Ox...

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Arleen Tuchman, "Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease" (Yale UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease (Yale University Press, 2020), Arleen Tuchman, professor of history at Vanderbilt University, describes the history of how the perception of ...

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Carol Gignoux, “Your Innovator Brain: The Truth About ADHD” (Balboa Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What exactly is ADHD, and is it time to update our ideas about it? In her new book, Your Innovator Brain: The Truth About ADHD (Balboa Press, 2016), Carol Gignoux turns our ideas about Attention De...

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Jennifer J. Carroll, "Narkomania: Drugs, HIV, and Citizenship in Ukraine" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Against the backdrop of a post-Soviet state set aflame by geopolitical conflict and violent revolution, Narkomania: Drugs, HIV, and Citizenship in Ukraine (Cornell UP, 2019) considers whether subst...

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Anne Mac Lellan, “Dorothy Stopford Price: Rebel Doctor” (Irish Academic Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Among the achievements of Irish medicine in the twentieth century was ending the persistent epidemic of tuberculosis throughout the island, and one of the central figures in that effort was Dorothy...

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Jennifer Lisa Koslow, "Exhibiting Health: Public Health Displays in the Progressive Era" (Rutgers UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the early twentieth century, public health reformers approached the task of ameliorating unsanitary conditions and preventing epidemic diseases with optimism. Using exhibits, they believed they ...

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Sabine Arnaud, “On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sabine Arnaud‘s new book explores a history of discursive practices that played a role in the construction of hysteria as pathology. On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 an...

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Michele Goodwin, "Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood (Cambridge University Press, 2020) a brilliant but shocking account of the criminalization of all aspects of reproduction, p...

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Miranda Brown, “The Art of Medicine in Early China: The Ancient and Medieval Origins of a Modern Archive” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Miranda Brown‘s new book takes a sustained look at the role and significance of the medical fathers in the historiography of Chinese medicine. Paying careful attention to the ubiquity and persisten...

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Wendy Wood, "Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick" (FSG, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today's guest is psychologist and behavioral scientist, Wendy Wood. She is currently a professor of psychology and business at the University of Southern California, and a visiting professor at the...

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Mark Navin, “Values and Vaccine Refusal: Hard Questions in Epistemology, Ethics, and Health Care” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Communities of parents who refuse, delay, or selectively decline to vaccinate their children pose familiar moral and political questions concerning public health, safety, risk, and immunity. But ad...

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James L. Nolan, Jr., "Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After his father died, James L. Nolan, Jr., took possession of a box of private family materials. To his surprise, the small secret archive contained a treasure trove of information about his grand...

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Samuel Morris Brown, “Through the Valley of Shadows: Living Wills, Intensive Care, and Making Medicine Human” (Oxford University Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Conversations about death during hospitalization are among the most difficult imaginable: the moral weight of a human life is suspended by stressful conversations in which medical knowledge and per...

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Linville Meadows, "A Spiritual Pathway to Recovery from Addiction: A Physician’s Journey of Discovery" (The Meadows Farm, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Addiction occurs among physicians at the same rate as in the general population, about 10%. Unlike the general population, however, an intensive rehabilitation program, geared specifically for thei...

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Saul J. Weiner and Alan Schwartz, “Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care” (Oxford University Press 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When clinicians listen to patients, what do they hear? In Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care (Oxford UP, 2016), Saul Weiner and Alan Schwartz provide a riveting a...

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Christopher Robertson, "Exposed: Why Our Health Insurance is Incomplete and What can be Done About" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today's guest is Christopher Robertson, Associate Dean for Research and Innovation and Professor of Law at the University of Arizona. His background and research interests overlap several academic ...

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Gabriel Mendes, “Under the Strain of Color: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry” (Cornell University Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his 1948 essay, “Harlem is Nowhere,” Ralph Ellison decried the psychological disparity between formal equality and discrimination faced by Blacks after the Great Migration as leaving “even the m...

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Robert Kolker, "Hidden Valley Road: Inside The Mind of An American Family" (Doubleday, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hidden Valley Road: Inside The Mind of An American Family (Doubleday, 2020) is the story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became ...

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Daniel E. Dawes, “150 Years of ObamaCare” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daniel E. Dawes has written 150 Years of ObamaCare (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). Dawes is the executive director of health policy and external affairs at Morehouse School of Medicine and ...

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Joseph E. Davis, "Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Everyday suffering—those conditions or feelings brought on by trying circumstances that arise in everyone’s lives—is something that humans have grappled with for millennia. But the last decades hav...

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Rebecca Lemov, “Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity” (Yale University Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rebecca Lemov‘s beautifully written Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (Yale University Press, 2015) is at once an exploration of mid-century social science through paths less t...

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Zachary Dorner, "Merchants of Medicine: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long 18th Century" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Merchants of Medicine: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century (The University of Chicago Press), medicines embody the hopes of those who prepared, sold, and ing...

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John M. Chamberlain, “Medical Regulation, Fitness to Practice and Revalidation: A Critical Introduction” (Policy Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How is the medical profession regulated in a ‘risk society’. This is the core question of John M. Chamberlain‘s Medical Regulation, Fitness to Practice and Revalidation: A Critical Introduction (Po...

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Gerald Posner, "Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America" (Simon and Schuster, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today’s guest is investigative journalist and author, Gerald Posner. His new book, Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America (Simon and Schuster), explores the fascinating and complex histo...

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Carin Berkowitz, “Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform” (University of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carin Berkowitz‘s new book takes readers into the world of nineteenth century London to explore the landscape of medicine and surgery along with Charles Bell, artist-anatomist-teacher-natural philo...

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Wendy Moore, "No Man’s Land: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran Britain's Most Extraordinary Military Hospital During World War I (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today’s guest is journalist and author, Wendy Moore. Her new book, No Man’s Land: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran Britain's Most Extraordinary Military Hospital During World War I (Basic Books) expl...

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Jamie Koufman, “Dr. Koufman’s Acid Reflux Diet” (Katalitix, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I love this book, am using its recipes, and was thrilled to interview Dr. Koufman, an iconoclast who appears poised to torpedo a terribly wasteful and dangerous arm of the pharmaceutical-industrial...

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Charles Allan McCoy, "Diseased States: Epidemic Control in Britain and the United States" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Outbreaks of Ebola, SARS, MERS, and pandemic influenza are brutal reminders of the dangers of infectious disease. Comparing the development of disease control in Britain and the United States, from...

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Ronald Chase, “Schizophrenia: A Brother Finds Answers in Biological Science” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his book, Schizophrenia: A Brother Finds Answers in Biological Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), biologist Ronald Chase explores the frequently misunderstood condition through an e...

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Paul Offit, "Overkill: When Modern Medicine Goes Too Far" (HarperCollins, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why Do Unnecessary and Often Counter-Productive Medical Interventions Happen So Often? Today I talked to Paul Offit about his book Overkill: When Modern Medicine Goes Too Far (HarperCollins, 2020)...

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Christopher Bollas, “When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia” (Yale University Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his second visit with New Books in Psychoanalysis, Christopher Bollas elucidates his thinking about schizophrenia. But he also does more than that; because his beginnings as a clinician are inti...

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Mary Augusta Brazelton, "Mass Vaccination: Citizens' Bodies and State Power in Modern China" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While the eradication of smallpox has long been documented, not many know the Chinese roots of this historic achievement. In this revelatory study, Mass Vaccination. Citizens' Bodies and State Powe...

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Janet Gyatso, Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet (Columbia University Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Janet Gyatso‘s new book is a masterfully researched, compellingly written, and gorgeously illustrated history of medicine in early modern Tibet that looks carefully at the relationships between med...

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Nicole Hassoun, "Global Health Impact: Expanding Access to Essential Medicines" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Every year nine million people are diagnosed with tuberculosis, every day over 13,400 people are infected with AIDs, and every thirty seconds malaria kills a child. For most of the world, critical ...

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Nick Hopwood, “Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud” (University of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nick Hopwood‘s Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud (University of Chicago Press, 2015) blends textual and visual analysis to answer the question of how images succeed or fail. Hopwood ...

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György Buzsáki, "The Brain from Inside Out" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Brain from Inside Out (Oxford University Press, 2019), György Buzsáki contrasts what he terms the ‘outside-in’ and ‘inside-out’ perspectives on neuroscientific theory and research methodolog...

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Jorg Matthias Determann, “Researching Biology and Evolution in the Gulf States: Networks of Science in the Middle East” (I. B. Tauris, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jorg Matthias Determann‘s new book looks at the history of modern biology in the Arab Gulf monarchies, focusing on the treatment of evolution and related concepts in the publications of biologists ...

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Joy Knoblauch, "The Architecture of Good Behavior" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Inspired by the rise of environmental psychology and increasing support for behavioral research after the Second World War, new initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels looked to influen...

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Andrea Celenza, “Erotic Revelations: Clinical Applications and Perverse Scenarios” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

[NB:Please be forewarned, there is some brief audio difficulty at the beginning of the interview. It does clear up quickly, so please do listen through.] We are drawn to what is hidden. We are exci...

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Jill A. Fisher, "Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals" (NYU Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Imagine that you volunteer for the clinical trial of an experimental drug. The only direct benefit of participating is that you will receive up to $5,175. You must spend twenty nights literally loc...

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Anita Guerrini, “The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anita Guerrini‘s wonderful new book explores Paris as a site of anatomy, dissection, and science during the reign of Louis XIV between 1643-1715. The journey begins with readers accompanying a dead...

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Danielle Giffort, "Acid Revival: The Psychedelic Renaissance and the Quest for Medical Legitimacy" (U Minnesota Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Psychedelic drugs are making a comeback. In the mid-twentieth century, scientists actively studied the potential of drugs like LSD and psilocybin for treating mental health problems. After a decade...

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Darian Leader, “Strictly Bipolar” (Penguin, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

To those unfamiliar with psychodiagnostics, Bipolar 3.5 might sound like the latest Apple software. To psychoanalyst Darian Leader it is indicative of the relatively recent proliferation and growin...

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Stuart Ritchie, "Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype in Science" (Penguin Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

So much relies on science. But what if science itself can’t be relied on? In Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype in Science (Penguin Books, 2020), Stuart Ritchie, a profess...

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Miriam Solomon, “Making Medical Knowledge” (Oxford, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How are scientific discoveries transmitted to medical clinical practice? When the science is new, controversial, or simply unclear, how should a doctor advise his or her patients? How should inform...

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Nicole Piemonte, "Afflicted: How Vulnerability Can Heal Medical Education and Practice" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Afflicted: How Vulnerability Can Heal Medical Education and Practice (The MIT Press), Nicole Piemonte examines the preoccupation in medicine with cure over care, arguing that the traditional foc...

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Eugene Raikhel, Todd Meyers, Emily Yates-Doerr, “Somatosphere.net” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Somatosphere is “a collaborative website covering the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural psychiatry, psychology and bioethics.” Founded in July 2008, So...

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Donna Drucker, "Contraception: A Concise History" (The MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The beginning of the modern contraceptive era began in 1882, when Dr. Aletta Jacobs opened the first birth control clinic in Amsterdam. The founding of this facility, and the clinical provision of ...

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Gillian Isaacs Russell, “Screen Relations: The Limits of Computer-Mediated Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy” (Karnac, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At New Books in Psychoanalysis, interviews are conducted using Skype. As the program is audio rather than video based, it never occurred to me to use the camera on my computer to see on the screen ...

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Nathan Carlin, "Pastoral Aesthetics: A Theological Perspective on Principlist Bioethics" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is often said that bioethics emerged from theology in the 1960s, and that since then it has grown into a secular enterprise, yielding to other disciplines and professions such as philosophy and ...

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John Kinder, “Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Kinder brings to life the challenges and problems faced by the disabled veteran in American history from the Civil War to the current day in his evocative book, Paying with Their Bodies: Ameri...

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Mari K. Webel, "The Politics of Disease Control: Sleeping Sickness in Eastern Africa, 1890-1920" (Ohio UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Politics of Disease Control. Sleeping Sickness in Eastern Africa, 1890-1920 (Ohio University Press, 2019), Mari K. Webel tells a history of colonial interventions among three communities of ...

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Isabelle Dussauge, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, and Francis Lee, “Value Practices in the Life Sciences and Medicine” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Valuation is a central question in contemporary social science. Indeed the question of value has a range of academic projects associated with it, whether in terms of specific questions or in terms ...

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Lesly-Marie Buer, "RX Appalachia: Stories of Treatment and Survival in Rural Kentucky" (Haymarket, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Using the narratives of women who use(d) drugs, this account challenges popular understandings of Appalachia spread by such pundits as JD Vance by documenting how women, families, and communities c...

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Brett Hendrickson, “Border Medicine: A Transcultural History of Mexican American Curanderismo” (NYU Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mexican American religious healing – often called curanderismo – is a vital component of life in the US-Mexican borderlands. In his book Border Medicine: A Transcultural History of Mexican American...

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Olivia Weisser, "ll Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England" (Yale UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Olivia Weisser, Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts – Boston, to talk about her 2015 Yale University Pre...

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Kristin Peterson, “Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kristin Peterson‘s new ethnography looks carefully at the Nigerian pharmaceutical market, paying special attention to the ways that the drug trade links West Africa within a larger global economy. ...

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Sarah B. Rodriguez, "The Love Surgeon: A Story of Trust, Harm, and the Limits of Medical Regulation" (Rutgers UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. James Burt believed women’s bodies were broken, and only he could fix them. In the 1950s, this Ohio OB-GYN developed what he called “love surgery,” a unique procedure he maintained enhanced the...

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Stefan Ecks, “Eating Drugs: Psychopharmaceutical Pluralism in India” (NYU Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Drugs exist that are meant to help people feel better. The doctors who prescribe them might believe that they work, while their patients do not. In explaining the drugs to their patients, should th...

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Theresa Kaminski, "Dr. Mary Walker's Civil War: One Woman's Journey to the Medal of Honor and the Fight for Women's Rights" (Lyons Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Among the tens of thousands of Americans who volunteered their services during the Civil War was Mary Walker, a daring young woman who was one of the handful of female doctors in the nation at that...

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Paul A. Christensen, “Japan, Alcoholism, and Masculinity: Suffering Sobriety in Tokyo” (Lexington Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul A. Christensen‘s new book is a thoughtful ethnography of drinking, drunkenness, and male sociability in modern urban Japan. Focusing on two major alcohol sobriety support groups in Japan, Alco...

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Kathleen Bachynski, "No Game for Boys to Play: The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Public Health Crisis" (UNC Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we are joined by Kathleen Bachynski, Assistant Professor of Public Health at Muhlenberg College, and author of No Game for Boys to Play: The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Pub...

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William Davies, “The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being” (Verso, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Are you happy? In his new book The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (Verso, 2015), William Davies, a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths’ College, University of ...

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Luke Messac, "No More to Spend: Neglect and the Construction of Scarcity in Malawi's History of Health Care" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dismal spending on government health services is often considered a necessary consequence of a low per-capita GDP, but are poor patients in poor countries really fated to be denied the fruits of mo...

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Alexandra Minna Stern, “Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Due in part to lobbying efforts on behalf of the human genome project, human genes tend to be thought of in light of the present–genetic components of human disease and differential risks associate...

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Luz María Hernández Sáenz, "Carving a Niche: The Medical Profession in Mexico 1800-1870" (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Carving a Niche: The Medical Profession in Mexico 1800-1870 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018), Luz María Hernández Sáenz follows the trajectory of physicians in their quest for the profess...

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Eva Hemmungs Wirten, “Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information” (U of Chicago, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When we study the history of a famous scientific figure – especially one that has gone on to become a cultural icon – we are dealing not just with a person, but also with an identity or series of i...

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Elizabeth A. Williams, "Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why do we eat? Is it instinct? Despite the necessity of food, anxieties about what and how to eat are widespread and persistent. In Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to ...

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MK Czerwiec, et al., “Graphic Medicine Manifesto” (Penn State UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Physician/author Ian Williams coined the term “graphic medicine” to “denote the role that comics can play in the study and delivery of healthcare.” The robust emerging graphic medicine community ca...

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Alyson McGregor, "Sex Matters: How Male-Centric Medicine Endangers Women's Health" (Hachette, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sex Matters: How Male-Centric Medicine Endangers Women's Health and What We Can Do About It?(Hachette, 2020) tackles one of the most urgent, yet unspoken issues facing women's health care today: al...

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Jonathan Eig, “The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution” (Norton, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jonathan Eig is a New York Times best-selling author of four books and former journalist for the Wall Street Journal. His book The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched ...

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Sabine Hildebrandt, "The Anatomy of Murder: Ethical Transgressions and Anatomical Science during the Third Reich" (Berghahn, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Of the many medical specializations to transform themselves during the rise of National Socialism, anatomy has received relatively little attention from historians. While politics and racial laws d...

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Charis Thompson, “Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research” (MIT Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Charis Thompson‘s Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research (MIT Press, 2013) is an important book. Good Science explores the “ethical choreography” of the consolidation of human...

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Saul J. Weiner, "On Becoming a Healer: The Journey from Patient Care to Caring about Your Patients" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Medical students and physicians-in-training embark on a long journey that, although steeped in scientific learning and technical skill building, includes little guidance on the emotional and interp...

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Beatrix Hoffman, “Health Care for Some: Rights and Rationing in the United States since 1930” (U of Chicago, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Disputes over the definitions or legality of ‘rights’ and ‘rationing’ in their various guises have animated much of the debate around the United States Affordable Care Act. Many legislators and voc...

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He Bian, "Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

He Bian’s new book Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China (Princeton University Press, 2020) is a beautiful cultural history of pharmacy in early modern China. This trans-dy...

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Todd Meyers, “The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy” (U of Washington Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Todd Meyers‘ The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy (University of Washington Press, 2013) is many things, all of them compelling and fully realized. Most di...

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Natalie Kimball, "An Open Secret: The History of Unwanted Pregnancy and Abortion in Modern Bolivia" (Rutgers UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Natalie Kimball is the author of An Open Secret: The History of Unwanted Pregnancy and Abortion in Modern Bolivia, out this year from Rutgers University Press. An Open Secret argues that, despite s...

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Myles W. Jackson, “The Genealogy of a Gene: Patents, HIV/AIDS, and Race” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What happens when you allow human materials to become property? More specifically, how does granting monopoly rights over genetic material affect the potential for innovation and research on treatm...

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B. L. Johnson and M. M. Quinlan, "You’re Doing it Wrong!?Mothering, Media and Medical Expertise" (Rutgers UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

New mothers face a barrage of confounding decisions during the life-cycle of early motherhood which includes... Should they change their diet or mindset to conceive? Exercise while pregnant? Should...

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Hillel D. Braude, “Intuition in Medicine: A Philosophical Defense of Clinical Reasoning” (U Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Can we define ‘clinical reasoning’? Is it the ability to marshal the best available evidence to come to adecision within a medical framework, or is it the capacity to think holistically aboutwhethe...

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Elisheva A. Perelman, "American Evangelists and Tuberculosis in Modern Japan" (Hong Kong UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Elisheva A. Perelman's new book American Evangelists and Tuberculosis in Modern Japan (Hong Kong University Press, 2020) examines the consequences of Japan’s decision not to tackle the tuberculosis...

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Matthew M. Heaton, “Black Skin, White Coats” (Ohio UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry (Ohio University Press, 2013), Matthew M. Heaton explores changes in psychiatric theory and p...

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Nandini Patwardhan, "Radical Spirits: India’s First Woman Doctor and Her American Champions" (Story Artisan Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1883, a young woman named Anandi Joshi set out from her native India to the United States to study medicine. To do so, as Nandini Patwardhan describes in her book Radical Spirits: India’s First ...

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Joanna Kempner, “Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health” (U of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Migraine is real, and it is pervasive–at least 12% of Americans suffer some form of this spectrum disorder. Still, migraine remains a conflicted illness–people routinely dispute the legitimacy of b...

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Jonathan Gelber, "Tiger Woods’s Back and Tommy John’s Elbow" (Skyhorse, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we are joined by Dr Jonathan Gelber, author of the book Tiger Woods’s Back and Tommy John’s Elbow: Injuries and Tragedies That Transformed Careers, Sports and Society (Skyhorse Publishing, 20...

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James A. Holstein, Richard S. Jones, George Koonce, Jr., “Is There Life After Football? Surviving the NFL” (New York UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The health of former NFL players has received plenty of attention in recent years. The suicides of Junior Seau and Dave Duerson, along with stories of retired players in only their 40s and 50s affe...

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Jay Timothy Dolmage, "Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race" (OSU Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Jay Timothy Dolmage of the University of Waterloo on the new book Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Constru...

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Donna J. Drucker, “The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge” (University of Pittsburg Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Donna J. Drucker is a guest professor at Darmstadt Technical University in Germany. Her book The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge (University of Pittsburg Pres...

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Tamara Venit-Shelton, "Herbs and Roots: A History of Chinese Doctors in the American Medical Marketplace" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The modern popularity of acupuncture and herbal medicine belies the long history of Chinese medicine in the U.S. In Herbs and Roots: A History of Chinese Doctors in the American Medical Marketplace...

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Lisa Stevenson, “Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic” (University of California Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lisa Stevenson‘s new book opens with two throat-singing women and one listening king. Whether we hear them sitting down to a normal night’s dinner (as the women) or stalking the pages of a short st...

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Casey Schwartz, "Attention: A Love Story" (Pantheon, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Combining expert storytelling with genuine self-scrutiny, Casey Schwartz details the decade she spend taking Adderall to help her pay attention (or so she thought) and then considers the role of at...

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Joseph M. Gabriel, “Medical Monopoly: Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry” (U Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Commercial interests are often understood as impinging upon the ethical norms of medicine. In his new book, Medical Monopoly: Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutic...

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Donald Stevens, "Mexico in the Time of Cholera" (U New Mexico Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Donald F. Stevens offers us a portrait of early republican life in his new book, Mexico in the Time of Cholera, published in 2019 by the University of New Mexico Press. Although Stevens uses the 18...

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Emilie Cloatre, “Pills for the Poorest: An Exploration of TRIPS and Access to Medication in Sub-Saharan Africa” (Palgrave, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Emilie Cloatre‘s award-winning book, Pills for the Poorest:An Exploration of TRIPS and Access to Medication in Sub-Saharan Africa (Palgrave, 2013), locates the effects–and ineffectualness–of a land...

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Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, a...

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Elena Conis, “Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization” (University of Chicago, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The 1960s marked a “new era of vaccination,” when Americans eagerly exposed their arms and hind ends for shots that would prevent a range of everyday illnesses–not only prevent the lurking killers,...

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Anthony Valerio, "Semmelweis: The Women's Doctor" (Zantedeschi Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Though his advice has saved the lives of millions of people, the name Ignaz Semmelweis is not one commonly known today. In his book Anthony Valerio’s Semmelweis: The Women's Doctor (Zantedeschi Boo...

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Keith Wailoo, “Pain: A Political History” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is pain real? Is pain relief a right? Who decides? In Pain: A Political History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014),Keith Wailoo investigates how people have interpreted and judged the suffering...

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B. Earp and J. Savulescu, "Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships" (Stanford UP, 2020) ) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Consider a couple with an infant (or two) whose lives have become so harried and difficult the marriage is falling apart. Would it be ethical for them to take oxytocin to help them renew their emot...

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S. Lochlann Jain, “Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us” (U of California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cancer pervades American bodies–and also habits of mind. Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (University of California Press, 2013) is a sharp, adventurous book by the established legal anthropologist...

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Howard Friedman, "Ultimate Price: The Value We Place on Life" (U California Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Howard Friedman's new book Ultimate Price: The Value We Place on Life (University of California Press, 2020) should be required reading for anyone sitting down to watch the evening news. The Covid-...

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Alex Nading, “Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health and the Politics of Entanglement” (University of California Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dengue fever is on the rise globally. Since it is transmitted by mosquitoes which reside and reproduce in human environments, eradication efforts involve households and the people who keep them cle...

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Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of schola...

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Lisa L. Gezon, “Drug Effects: Khat in Biocultural and Socioeconomic Perspective” (Left Coast Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Khat, the fresh leaves of the plant Catha edulis, is a mild psycho-stimulant. It has been consumed in Yemen, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia for over one thousand years. Khat consumption is an...

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Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, "Stages: On Dying, Working, and Feeling" (Thick Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Can care be enacted through art? Inside a cathedral, staff members from a nursing home work with an artist to perform a poetic text about caregiving, loss, and taking the time to feel one’s feeling...

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Janet K. Shim, “Heart-Sick: The Politics of Risk, Inequality, and Heart Disease” (NYU Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Janet K. Shim‘s new book juxtaposes the accounts of epidemiologists and lay people to consider the roles of race, class, and gender (among other things) in health and illness. Heart-Sick: The Polit...

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Lloyd B. Minor, "Discovering Precision Health" (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today's guest is scientist, surgeon, and dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine, Dr. Lloyd B. Minor. Previously he served as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Th...

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Jeremy A. Greene, “Generic: The Unbranding of Modern Medicine” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is there any such thing as a generic drug? Jeremy A, Greene‘s new book Generic: The Unbranding of Modern Medicine (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) treats its subject matter with a learned ske...

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Richard G. Tedeschi, "Posttraumatic Growth: Theory, Research and Applications" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During this global pandemic, many of us will experience trauma, which the authors define as a severely stressful life-altering event. A traumatic event is like an earthquake, shattering an individu...

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Pamela Klassen, “Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity” (University of California Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Liberal Protestants are often dismissed as reflecting nothing more than a therapeutic culture or viewed as a measuring rod for the decline of Christian orthodoxy. Rarely have they been the subjects...

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Baptiste Brossard, "Forgetting Items: The Social Experience of Alzheimer’s Disease" (Indiana UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alzheimer's disease has not only profound medical consequences for the individual experiencing it but a life-changing impact on those around them. From the moment a person is suspected to be suffer...

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David Wright, “Downs: The History of a Disability” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Wright‘s 2011 book Downs: The History of a Disability (Oxford University Press, 2011), offers readers a history that stretches far beyond the strictly defined genetic disorder that is its nam...

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Carlo Caduff, "The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger" (U California Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carlo Caduff’s The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger (University of California Press, 2015) is an ethnographic inquiry into pandemic anxieties in the mid-2000s when su...

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Beth Linker, “War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Beth Linker is the author of War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America (University of Chicago Press, 2011). As she reveals, the story of individual rehabilitation from war-related injury ...

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Sara E. Davies, "Containing Contagion: The Politics of Disease Outbreaks in Southeast Asia" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At the start of 2020 few of us would have recognized the face of the current director general of the World Health Organization. Three months later, and in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic he a...

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Michael Osborne, “The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Michael Osborne offers a new way to think about and practice the history of colonial medicine. Eschewing pan-Eur...

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Travis Lupick, "Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle with Addiction" (Arsenal, 2108) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

North America is in the grips of a drug epidemic; with the introduction of fentanyl, the chances of a fatal overdose are greater than ever, prompting many to rethink the war on drugs. Public opinio...

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Amit Prasad, “Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India” (MIT Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India (MIT Press, 2014), Amit Prasad, an associate professor of sociology at the Universit...

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George Scialabba, "How To Be Depressed" (U Penn Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

George Scialabba is a prolific critic and essayist known for his incisive, wide-ranging commentary on literature, philosophy, religion, and politics. He is also, like millions of others, a lifelong...

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Sharon K. Farber, “Hunger for Ecstasy: Trauma, the Brain, and the Influence of the Sixties” (Aronson, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It may seem silly to ask why we seek ecstasy. We seek it, of course, because it’s ECSTASY. We are evolved to want it. It’s our brain’s way of saying “Do this again and as often as possible.” But th...

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Ray Dorsey, "Ending Parkinson's Disease: A Prescription for Action" (Public Affairs, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brain diseases are now the world's leading source of disability. The fastest growing of these is Parkinson's: the number of impacted patients has doubled to more than six million over the last twen...

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Paula A. Michaels, “Lamaze: An International History” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The twentieth-century West witnessed a revolution in childbirth. Before that time, most women gave birth at home and were attended by family members and midwives. The process was usually terribly ...

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Owen Whooley, "On the Heels of Ignorance: Psychiatry and the Politics of Not Knowing" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Psychiatry has always aimed to peer deep into the human mind, daring to cast light on its darkest corners and untangle its thorniest knots, often invoking the latest medical science in doing so. Bu...

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Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, “Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Abena Dove Osseo-Asare‘s wonderful new book is a thoughtful, provocative, and balanced account of the intersecting histories and practices of drug research in modern Ghana, South Africa, and Madaga...

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Baptiste Brossard, "Why do We Hurt Ourselves? Understanding Self-Harm in Social Life" (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why does an estimated 5% of the general population intentionally and repeatedly hurt themselves? What are the reasons certain people resort to self-injury as a way to manage their daily lives? In W...

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George E. Vaillant, “Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study” (Harvard UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There are very few studies like the Harvard Grant Study. Started in 1938, it has been following its approximately 200 participants ever since, analyzing their physical and mental health and assess...

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Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like ra...

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Ellen J. Amster, “Medicine and the Saints” (University of Texas Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the interplay between the physical human body and the body politic? This question is at the heart of Ellen J. Amster‘s Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in...

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Melissa Kravetz, "Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany: Maternalism, Eugenics and Professional Identity" (U Toronto Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany: Maternalism, Eugenics and Professional Identity (University of Toronto Press, 2019), Melissa Kravetz examines how German women physicians ...

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Sarah Franklin, “Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship” (Duke University Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sarah Franklin‘s new book is an exceptionally rich, focused yet wide-ranging, insightful account of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and the worlds that it creates and inhabits. Biological Relatives: I...

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Tania Jenkins, "Doctors’ Orders: The Making of Status Hierarchies in an Elite Profession" (Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Doctors’ Orders: The Making of Status Hierarchies in an Elite Profession (Columbia University Press, 2020), Dr. Tania Jenkins engages readers in readers in a ethnography where she ...

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Carlo C. DiClemente, “Substance Abuse Treatment and the Stages of Change: Selecting and Planning Interventions” (Guilford Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, I talk with Carlo C. DiClemente, a Presidential Research Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland- Baltimore County, about his co-authored book, Subs...

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Travis Bell et al., "CTE, Media, and the NFL: Framing a Public Health Crisis as a Football Epidemic" (Lexington, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we are joined by Travis Bell, Janelle Applequist, and Christian Dotson-Pierson to discuss their new book CTE, Media, and the NFL: Framing a Public Health Crisis as a Football Epidemic (Lexing...

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Karen G. Weiss, “Party School: Crime, Campus, and Community” (Northeastern UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, I sit down with Karen G. Weiss, associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at West Virginia University, to talk about her book, Party School: Crime, Campus...

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Josh Seim, "Bandage, Sort, and Hustle: Ambulance Crews on the Front Lines of Urban Suffering" (U California Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the role of the ambulance in the American city? The prevailing narrative provides a rather simple answer: saving and transporting the critically ill and injured. This is not an incorrect de...

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Angela N. H. Creager, “Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Angela Creager‘s deeply researched and elegantly written new book is a must-read account of the history of science in twentieth-century America. Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science a...

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Sandro Galea, "Well: What We Need to Talk About When We Talk About Health" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Well: What We Need to Talk About When We Talk About Health (Oxford University Press, 2019), physician Sandro Galea examines what Americans miss when they fixate on healthcare: health. Americans ...

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Eugene Raikhel and William Garriott, eds., “Addiction Trajectories” (Duke UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Addiction has recently emerged as an object of anthropological inquiry. In a wonderful, focused volume of ethnographies of addiction in a wide range of contexts, Eugene Raikhel and William Garriott...

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Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McM...

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Sienna R. Craig, “Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine” (University of California Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Two main questions frame Sienna R. Craig‘s beautifully written and carefully argued new book about Tibetan medical practices and cultures: How is efficacy determined, and what is at stake in those ...

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Daniel Skinner, "Medical Necessity: Health Care Access and the Politics of Decision Making" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The definition of medical necessity has morphed over the years, from a singular physician’s determination to a complex and dynamic political contest involving patients, medical companies, insurance...

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Marga Vicedo, “The Nature and Nurture of Love” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Between WWII and the 1970s, prominent researchers from various fields established and defended a view that emotions are integral to the self, and that a mother’s love determines an individual’s emo...

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Sarah Fawn Montgomery, "Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir" (Mad Creek Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you live in America, chances are good you’ve heard the term “mental health crisis” bandied about in the media. While true that anxiety, depression, and other mood disorders seem to be on the ris...

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Francesca Minerva, "The Ethics of Cryonics: Is It Immoral to be Immortal" (Palgrave, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cryonics?also known as cryopreservation or cryosuspension?is the preservation of legally dead individuals at ultra-low temperatures. Those who undergo this procedure hope that future technology wil...

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Dorothy H. Crawford, “Virus Hunt: The Search for the Origin of HIV” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you think about it, pretty much everything has a history insofar as everything exists in time. Historians, however, usually limit themselves to the history of humans and the things humans make. ...

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David S. Cohen and Carole Joffe, "Obstacle Course: The Everyday Struggle to Get an Abortion in America" (UC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It seems unthinkable that citizens of one of the most powerful nations in the world must risk their lives and livelihoods in the search for access to necessary health care. And yet it is no surpris...

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John P. DiMoia, “Reconstructing Bodies: Biomedicine, Health, and Nation-Building in South Korea Since 1945” (Stanford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For a patient choosing among available forms of healing in the medical marketplace of mid-20th century South Korea, the process was akin to shopping. In Reconstructing Bodies: Biomedicine, Health, ...

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Ronald Epstein, "Attending: Medicine, Mindfulness, and Humanity" (Scribner, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Attending: Medicine, Mindfulness, and Humanity (Scribner, 2017) is the first book about mindfulness and medical practice written for patients, their families, and for doctors and others providing h...

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Mark A. Largent, “Vaccine: The Debate in Modern America” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Children born in the 1970s and 1980s received just a handful of vaccinations: measles, rubella, and a few others. Beginning the 1990s, the numbers of mandated vaccines exploded, so that today a ful...

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K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years work...

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Virginia Gray et al., “Interest Group$ and Health Care Reform Across the United State$” (Georgetown UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Virginia Gray, David Lowery, and Jennifer Benz are the authors of Interest Group$ and Health Care Reform Across the United State$ (Georgetown University Press, 2013). Gray is Distinguished Professo...

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Nancy D. Campbell, "OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For years, drug overdose was unmentionable in polite society. OD was understood to be something that took place in dark alleys?an ugly death awaiting social deviants?neither scientifically nor clin...

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Rachel Prentice, “Bodies in Formation: An Ethnography of Anatomy and Surgery Education” (Duke UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rachel Prentice‘s new book blends methodological approaches from science studies and anthropology to produce a riveting account of anatomical and surgical education in twenty-first century North Am...

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Christina Adams, "Camel Crazy" (New World Library, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I’m speaking with author Christina Adams, and Adams has something of a surprising muse: camels. That’s right, camels. One hump, two humps, crossing the Egyptian desert or the Siberian tundra....

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Hannah S. Decker, “The Making of DSM-III: A Diagnostic Manual’s Conquest of American Psychiatry” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Like it or not, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) has an enormous influence in deciding what qualifies as a mental health disorder in the United States ...

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Nicci Gerrard, "The Last Ocean: A Journey Through Memory and Forgetting" (Penguin, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dementia provokes profound moral questions about our society and the meaning of life itself. How much are we connected to one another? In what ways are we distant and separated? What does it mean t...

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T. J. Hinrichs and Linda L. Barnes, eds., “Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History” (Harvard UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

T. J. Hinrichs and Linda L. Barnes have produced a volume that will change the way we learn about and teach the history of health and healing in China and beyond. Chinese Medicine and Healing: An I...

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Jessica Lynne Pearson, "The Colonial Politics of Global Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa" (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

International organizations throw up several obstacles—their immense scale, their dry bureaucratic language—to the historian trying to piece together their past. In her book, The Colonial Politics ...

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Alisha Rankin, “Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany” (U. Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dorothea was a widow who treated Martin Luther, the Duke of Saxony, and throngs of poor peasants with her medicinal waters. Anna was the powerful wife of the Elector of Saxony who favored testing m...

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Rachel Louise Moran, "Governing Bodies: American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern Physique" (U Penn Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did the modern, American body come into being? According to Rachel Louise Moran this is a story to be told through the lens of the advisory state. In her book, Governing Bodies: American Politi...

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Gary Greenberg, “The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry” (Blue Rider Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is common today to treat depression and other mental disorders as concrete illnesses – akin to having pneumonia or the flu. In fact, being prescribed a pill after complaining to your family doct...

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Joe Miller, "US of AA: How the Twelve Steps Hijacked the Science of Alcoholism" (Chicago Review Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the aftermath of Prohibition, America’s top scientists joined forces with members of a new group, called Alcoholics Anonymous, and put their clout behind a campaign to convince the nation that a...

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Nathaniel Comfort, “The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine” (Yale UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“This is a history of promises.”So begins Nathaniel Comfort‘s gripping and beautifully written new book on the relationships between and entanglements of medical genetic and eugenics in the history...

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Ayo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China" (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in eac...

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Nancy Segal, “Born Together-Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study” (Harvard UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Identical twins, separated at birth, raised in different families, and reunited in adulthood. In 1979, psychology researchers in Minnesota found some twins who had been reunited after a lifetime of...

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Babette Becker, "I Should Have Been Music" (Page Publishing, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Babette Becker’s memoir I Should Have Been Music (Page Publishing, 2018) recounts her experience as a patient in four different mental hospitals from 1957 to 1960. It was a time when little was...

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Lawrence R. Samuel, “Shrink: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in America” (Nebraska UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Before the Second World War, very few Americans visited psychologists or psychiatrists. Today, millions and millions of Americans do. How did seeing a “shrink” become, quite suddenly, a typical par...

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Andrea Kitta, "The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore" (Utah State UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Disease is a social issue and not just a medical one. This is the central tenet underlying The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore (Utah State University Press 2019) by Andrea Kit...

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Suzanne Corkin, “Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesia Patient, H.M.” (Basic Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you have studied neuroscience, memory, or even basic psychology, it is likely that you have heard of the famous amnesic patient Henry Molaison, or “H.M.” as he was known during his lifetime. In ...

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David Spiegelhalter, "The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data" (Basic, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today's guest is distinguished researcher and statistician, Sir David Spiegelhalter. A fellow of the Royal Society, he is currently Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at...

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Joseph November, “Biomedical Computing: Digitizing Life in the United States” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There are pigeons, cats, and Martians here. There are CT scanners, dentures, computers large enough to fill rooms, war games, and neural networks. In Biomedical Computing: Digitizing Life in the Un...

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Laura Cabrera, "Rethinking Human Enhancement: Social Enhancement and Emergent Technologies" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Rethinking Human Enhancement: Social Enhancement and Emergent Technologies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Laura Cabrera discusses three possible human enhancement paradigms and explores how each in...

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Andrew Koppelman, “The Tough Luck Constitution and the Assault on Health Care Reform” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Every hundred years or so, the Supreme Court decides a question with truly vast economic implications. In 2012 such a decision was handed down, in a case that had the potential to affect the econom...

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Emilia Nielsen, "Disrupting Breast Cancer Narratives: Stories of Rage and Repair" (U Toronto Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this interview, Prof. Emilia Nielsen discusses the problem of the usual breast cancer narrative. She says that the happy stories of breast cancer survivors are so common that any other types of ...

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Jenny Trinitapoli and Alexander Weinreb, “Religion and AIDS in Africa” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The liberal media in the Western World takes a firm line on how two of the big issues facing Africa intersect – bluntly speaking Africa’s high levels of religiosity have contributed substantially t...

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Sarah Handley-Cousins, "Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

All wars, in a practical sense, center on the destruction of the human body, and in Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North (University of Georgia Press, 2019), Sarah Handley-Cousins, a c...

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Chris Cooper, “Run, Swim, Throw, Cheat: The Science Behind Drugs in Sport” (Oxford University Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This past August, the saga of Lance Armstrong came to its inglorious end. The seven-time champion of the Tour de France and Olympic medalist ended his defense against charges that he had engaged in...

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Rosalind Fredericks, "Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

They were throwing garbage in the streets. Rosalind Fredericks makes sense of the garbage-scape of Dakar, Senegal in the wake of the 2007 trash “revolts” against the city and country’s uneven and f...

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Volker Scheid and Hugh MacPherson, “Integrating East Asian Medicine into Contemporary Healthcare” (Churchill Livingstone, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Volker Scheid and Hugh MacPherson‘s Integrating East Asian Medicine into Contemporary Healthcare (Churchill Livingstone, 2011) is the result of a wonderfully transdisciplinary project that aims t...

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Lundy Braun, "Breathing Race into the Machine" (U Minnesota Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“We cannot get answers to questions that cannot be asked.” Lundy Braun’s influential book, Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics (Univ...

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Charlotte Pierce-Baker, “This Fragile Life: A Mother’s Story of a Bipolar Son” (Lawrence Hill Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When a mother listens to the beats of her own heart, where angst, fear and fortitude compete, and then beautifully weaves emotion into a story about her ongoing journey to support a bipolar son, th...

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Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous?and easier to sh...

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Sherine Hamdy, “Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt” (University of California Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of the best things about co-hosting New Books in STS is the opportunity to discover books like this one. Sherine Hamdy has given us something special in Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transpla...

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Stephen Le, "100 Million Years of Food: What Our Ancestors Ate and Why It Matters Today" (Picador, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There are few areas of modern life that are burdened by as much information and advice, often contradictory, as our diet and health: eat a lot of meat, eat no meat; whole-grains are healthy, whole-...

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Sally Pipes, “The Pipes Plan: The Top Ten Ways to Dismantle and Replace Obamacare” (Regnery Publishing, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, The Pipes Plan: The Top Ten Ways to Dismantle and Replace Obamacare (Regnery Publishing, 2012), Sally C. Pipes, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Pacific Research Instit...

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John P. Davis, "Russia in the Time of Cholera" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The idea of “backwardness” often plagues historical writing on Russia. In Russia in the Time of Cholera: Disease under Romanovs and Soviets (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Dr. John P. Davis counteract...

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Heather Munro Prescott, “The Morning After: A History of Emergency Contraception in the United States” (Rutgers UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What would a Presidential campaign be without a good dose of reproductive politics? To be sure, many of us are surprised to see contraception, and not just abortion, called into question – but mayb...

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Michael G. Vann, "The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A funny thing happened to historian Michael Vann* on the way to his PhD thesis. While he was doing his research on French colonialism and the urbanist project in Hanoi, he came across an intriguing...

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Laurence Monnais, C. Michele Thompson, and Ayo Wahlberg, “Southern Medicine for Southern People: Vietnamese Medicine in the Making” (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Southern Medicine for Southern People: Vietnamese Medicine in the Making (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) gives me hope for the future of edited volumes. Not only is it a fascinating and coher...

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Wendy Gonaver, "The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840–1880" (UNC Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Wendy Gonaver discusses her book, The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840-1880 (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Virginia, and...

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Marta Hanson, “Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China” (Routledge, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Marta Hanson‘s book is a rich study of conceptions of space in medical thought and practice. Ranging from a deep history of the geographic imagination in China to an account of the SARS outbreak of...

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Claire Edington, "Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Both colonies and insane asylums are well known institutions of power. But what of asylums in Europe’s early 20th-century colonial empires? How did they operate? Who was confined in them? Who worke...

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Jean H. Baker, “Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion” (Hill and Wang, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Forty-five years after her death, the reproductive rights activist Margaret Sanger remains a polarizing figure. Conservatives attack her social liberalism while liberals shy away from her perceived...

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Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might...

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Erica Prussing, “White Man’s Water: The Politics of Sobriety in a Native American Community” (University of Arizona Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For the past half century, Alcoholics Anonymous and its 12-step recovery program has been the dominant method for treating alcohol abuse in the United States. Reservation communities have been no e...

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J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not nec...

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Yi-Li Wu’s book, “Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China” (University of California Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In what must be one of the most well-organized and clearly-written books in the history of academic writing, Yi-Li Wu‘s book, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial ...

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Theodore Dalrymple, "False Positive: A Year of Error, Omission, and Political Correctness in the New England Journal of Medicine" (Encounter Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Theodore Dalrymple is a retired physician in Great Britain, who has written an account of his year’s-worth of reading the New England Journal of Medicine. In his new book False Positive: A Year of ...

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John Eric Goff, “Gold Medal Physics: The Science of Sports” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The instructor of my freshman physics course fit the stereotype of a physics professor: unkempt white hair, black glasses case in the breast pocket of his short-sleeved shirt, thick German accent, ...

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Thomas Hager, "Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine" (Abrams Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Behind every landmark drug is a story. It could be a researcher’s genius insight, a catalyzing moment in geopolitical history, a new breakthrough technology, or an unexpected but welcome side effec...

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Elizabeth Pisani, “The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS” (Norton, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When in medical school, I found myself drawn to the study of infectious diseases in large part because of the mixture of science and anthropology – infectious diseases are always about the way we i...

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David Sinclair, "LifeSpan: Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To" (Simon and Schuster, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today's guest is David Sinclair, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the Paul Glenn Center Biological Mechanisms of Aging. He is widely considered on the world's fore...

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Paul Offit, “Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All” (Basic Books, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If a parent decides not to vaccinate their children, is that an individual choice, or is it a serious threat to the public health? In Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All ...

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Nora Jaffary, "Reproduction and its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905" (UNC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nora Jaffary’s Reproduction and its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905 (University of North Carolina Press. 2016), tracks how medical ideas, practices, and polici...

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Robert Goldberg, “Tabloid Medicine: How the Internet is Being Used to Hijack Medical Science for Fear and Profit” (Simon & Schuster, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This week New Books in Public Policy interviews Bob Goldberg about his new book Tabloid Medicine: How the Internet Is Being Used to Hijack Medical Science for Fear and Profit (Simon & Schuster, 201...

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Judith Grisel, "Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction" (Doubleday, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Not a lot of authors go from spending their early twenties homeless and addicted to cocaine to becoming one of the world’s leading researchers on the neuroscience of addiction. But Dr. Judith Grise...

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Jeffrey Reznick, “John Galsworthy and the Disabled Soldiers of the Great War” (Manchester UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

You may not know who John Galsworthy is, but you probably know his work. Who hasn’t seen some production of The Forsyte Saga? Galsworthy was one of the most popular and famous British writers of th...

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Travis Rieder, "In Pain: A Bioethicist’s Personal Struggle with Opioids" (Harper Collins, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On a spring day in 2015, Dr. Travis Rieder’s life changed. A motorcycle accident, a shattered foot, and a long series of surgeries later, the John Hopkins University bioethicist had a far deeper un...

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Nick Reding, “Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town” (Bloomsbury, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1980 I left Kansas to go to college in Iowa. A lot of things caught my attention about Iowa, for example, that the people really are very nice. I also noticed that there were a lot of drugs. One...

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Harriet Washington, "A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind" (Little, Brown Spark, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Environmental racism is visible not only as cancer clusters or the location of grocery stores. It is responsible for the reported gap in IQ scores between white Americans and Black, Latinx, and Nat...

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Heather Prescott, “Student Bodies: The Influence of Student Health Services in American Society and Medicine” (University of Michigan Press, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When you were in college, did you visit the health center? I did, several times. Did you ever wonder why there was a student health center? I didn’t. It seemed like a part of the college scenery, s...

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Shai Lavi, "Bioethics and Biopolitics in Israel: Socio-legal, Political and Empirical Analysis" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Once upon a time, or so we’ve been told, medical ethics were confined to the patient-doctor relationship. As long as doctors were true to their Hippocratic oaths, as long as they acted with compass...

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Matt Oram, "The Trials of Psychedelic Therapy: LSD Psychotherapy in America" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Are we in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance? If so, what can we learn about the present moment through the history of psychedelic experiments in the past? Matt Oram discusses contemporary deba...

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Sharra L. Vostral, "Toxic Shock: A Social History" (NYU Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1978, doctors in Denver, Colorado observed several healthy children who suddenly and mysteriously developed a serious, life-threatening illness with no visible source. Their condition, which doc...

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Okezi Otovo, "Progressive Mothers, Better Babies: Race, Public Health, and the State in Brazil, 1850-1945" (U Texas Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Okezi Otovo’s Progressive Mothers, Better Babies: Race, Public Health, and the State in Brazil, 1850-1945 (U Texas Press, 2016) explores the intersecting histories of race, gender, and class in mod...

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Heather Prescott, “Student Bodies: The Influence of Student Health Services in American Society and Medicine” (University of Michigan Press, 2007) from 2008-08-15T02:46:54

When you were in college, did you visit the health center? I did, several times. Did you ever wonder why there was a student health center? I didn’t. It seemed like a part of the college scenery, s...

Listen

Heather Prescott, “Student Bodies: The Influence of Student Health Services in American Society and Medicine” (University of Michigan Press, 2007) from 2008-08-15T02:46:54

When you were in college, did you visit the health center? I did, several times. Did you ever wonder why there was a student health center? I didn’t. It seemed like a part of the college scenery, s...

Listen

Podcasts by New Books in Medicine

All episodes

Jay Bhattacharya on the COVID-19 Pandemic and the Public Health Response from 2023-10-19T13:44:32

Donna Dickenson, "Me Medicine vs. We Medicine: Reclaiming Biotechnology for the Common Good" (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Vanessa Heggie, "Higher and Colder: A History of Extreme Physiology and Exploration" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Celeste Watkins-Hayes, "Remaking a Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality" (U California Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alex Broadbent, "Philosophy of Medicine" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Katie Batza, "Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robin Scheffler, “A Contagious Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul Ramírez, "Enlightened Immunity: Mexico’s Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason" (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pauline W. Chen, "Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality" (Vintage, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nara Milanich, "Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stephan Bullard, "A Day-by-Day Chronicle of the 2013-2016 Ebola Outbreak" (Springer, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Erika Dyck, "Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James Crossland, "War, Law and Humanity: The Campaign to Control Warfare, 1853-1914" (Bloomsbury, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Courtwright, "The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eric Topol, "Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again" (Basic Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nancy Tomes, "Remaking the American Patient" (UNC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James L. A. Webb, "The Long Struggle against Malaria in Tropical Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kate Brown, "Manuel for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lukas Engelmann, "Mapping AIDS: Visual Histories of an Enduring Epidemic" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert A. Voeks, "The Ethnobotany of Eden: Rethinking the Jungle Medicine Narrative" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Vivian Percy, "Saving Jenny: Rescuing Our Youth from America's Opioid and Suicide Epidemic" (Radius Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joseph Jarvis, "The Purple World: Healing the Harm in American Health Care" (Scrivener Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jessica Hardin, "Faith and the Pursuit of Health: Cardiometabolic Disorders in Samoa" (Rutgers UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carl S. Armato, "A Future With Hope: An Inspiring Guide to Overcoming Diabetes" (Carl S. Armato, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Janis Powers, "Health Care: Meet The American Dream" (River Grove Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Peter Hotez, "Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism: My Journey as a Vaccine Scientist, Pediatrician, and Autism Dad" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dave Chase, "The Opioid Crisis Wake Up Call: Health Care is Stealing the American Dream. Here is How We Take It Back" (Health Rosetta Media, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nicholas Bauch, "Geography of Digestion: Biotechnology and the Kellogg Enterprise" (U California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Julian Gill-Peterson, "Histories of the Transgender Child" (U Minnesota Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lindsey Fitzharris, "The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine" (Scientific American, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

William B. Young and Stephen D. Silberstein, "Navigating Life with Migraine and Other Headaches" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul A. Offit, "Do You Believe in Magic?: Vitamins, Supplements, and All Things Natural" (Harper, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stephan J. Guyenet, "The Hungry Brain: Outsmarting the Instincts That Make Us Overeat" (Flatiron Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Suman Seth, "Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Howard Chiang, "After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China" (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers, "The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nivedita Lakhera, “Pillow of Dreams” (Nivedita Lakhera, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Shobita Parthasarathy, “Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hugh Cagle, “Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal’s Empire, 1450-1700” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert A. Wilson, “The Eugenic Mind Project” (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dániel Margócsy, et al., “The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions” (Brill, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Theodore M. Porter, “Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hervé Guillemain, “Schizophrenics in the Twentieth Century: The Side Effects of History” (Alma, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hilary A. Smith, “Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine” (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joshua Sharfstein, “The Public Health Crisis Survival Guide: Leadership and Management in Trying Times” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Josh Luke, “Health-Wealth: 9 Steps To Financial Recovery” (ForbesBooks, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andrew J. Hogan, “Life Histories of Genetic Disease: Patterns and Prevention in Postwar Medical Genetics” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Seth Archer, “Sharks Upon the Land: Colonialism, Indigenous Health, and Culture in Hawai’i, 1778-1855” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Larisa Jašarevi?, “Health and Wealth on the Bosnian Market: Intimate Debt” (Indiana UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michelle Perro and Vincanne Adams, “What’s Making Our Children Sick?” (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Beth Macy, “Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America” (Little, Brown & Company, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Susan Greenfield, “You and Me: The Neuroscience of Identity” (Notting Hill Editions, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul Offit, “Bad Advice: Or Why Celebrities, Politicians, and Activists Aren’t Your Best Source of Health Information” (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jacob Levine, “Cannabis Discourse: Facts and Opinions in Context” (Jacob Levine, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael Kearney, “The Nest in the Stream: Lessons from Nature on Being with Pain” (Parallax Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dorothy H. Crawford, “Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped our History” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Marsha MacDowell, Clare Luz, and Beth Donaldson, “Quilts and Health” (Indiana UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pablo Gomez, “The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic” (UNC Press, 2017). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Edward Khantzian, “Treating Addiction: Beyond the Pain” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Randi Hutter Epstein, “Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything” (Norton, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sam Kean, “The Violinist’s Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code” (Back Bay, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joanna Radin, “Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Adam Tanner, “Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records” (Beacon Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Londa Schiebinger, “Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World” (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daisy Deomampo, “Transnational Reproduction: Race, Kinship, and Commercial Surrogacy in India” (NYU Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stephen Klasko, “Bless This Mess: A Picture Story of Healthcare in America” (Lulu Publishing, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Melanie A. Kiechle, “Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America” (U Washington Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jonathan W. Marshall, “Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lydia Kang, “Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything” (Workman Publishing Company, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Martha Few, “For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala” (U Arizona Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Toby Cosgrove, “The Cleveland Clinic Way: Lessons in Excellence from One of the World’s Leading Health Care Organizations” (McGraw-Hill Education, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Laura Spinney, “Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World” (PublicAffairs, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John J. Pitney, “The Politics of Autism: Navigating the Contested Spectrum” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christy Ford Chapin, “Ensuring America’s Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eric Yarbrough, “Transgender Mental Health” (American Psychiatric Association, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sam Kean, “The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons” (Little, Brown and Co., 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jenny Reardon, “The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Knowledge and Justice after the Genome” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393