Showing titles in History & Commentary

If you want to make a living by transitioning into the medical writing field as a freelancer or by working a job, then this book is for you. It doesn’t matter if you have previous experience working in the medical field or not, as this field has a vast array of opportunities.

The Healing Cell is an easy to follow, carefully researched, and clear-eyed view of medicine many decades in the making that is now paying off with treatments that repair damaged hearts, restore sight, kill cancer, cure diabetes, heal burns, and stop the march of such degenerative diseases. The emotionally and intellectually stimulating stories throughout the audiobook dramatically illustrate that stem cell therapies can change the way we live our lives after being afflicted by a disease or trauma.

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

In the 1970s, a small group of leading psychiatrists met behind closed doors and literally rewrote the book on their profession. Revising and greatly expanding the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM for short), they turned what had been a thin, spiral-bound handbook into a hefty tome. Almost overnight the number of diagnoses exploded. The result was a windfall for the pharmaceutical industry and a massive conflict of interest for psychiatry at large.

Why is ancient medicine the best medicine? Simply because it's been around for so long. Most drugs that your doctor will prescribe are produced in a lab and sold by large drug companies. Of course, these drugs have their place and do save some a lot of people from death or chronic illness. However, what is concerning is that so many ailments can be healed and so many symptoms can be eased by merely checking out what is already in your spice cabinet.

As a teenager, Molly Case underwent an operation that saved her life. Nearly a decade later, she finds herself in the operating room again - this time as a trainee nurse. She learns to care for her patients, sharing not only their pain, but also life-affirming moments of hope. In doing so, she offers a compelling account of the processes that keep them alive, from respiratory examinations to surgical prep, and of the extraordinary moments of human connection that sustain both nurse and patient.

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

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

Are you interested in pandemics? Do you have a passion for virology and epidemiology? Learn about the greatest pandemics in history, from the Spanish Flu to the current new pandemic virus crisis. If we are open to learning from history, we can avoid repeating it. There is a dire need for this informative and timely audiobook that carefully and meticulously details the history of the pandemics and elaborates upon a cohesive response and integrated efforts in response to it. Listening and understanding this audiobook will be extremely helpful as we combat the fatal virus together.

For years after graduating from medical school, Dr. Clifton K. Meador assumed that symptoms of the body, when obviously not imaginary, indicate a disease of the body - something to be treated with drugs, surgery, or other traditional means. But, over several decades, as he saw patients with clear symptoms but no discernible disease, he concluded that his own assumptions were too narrow and, indeed, that the underlying basis for much of clinical medicine was severely limited.

Inspired by Homer’s description of the ebb and flow of the “wine dark sea,” the ancient Greeks conceived a back-and-forth movement of blood. That false notion, perpetuated by the influential Roman physician Galen, prevailed for fifteen hundred years until William Harvey proved that blood circulates: the heart pumps blood in one direction through the arteries and it returns through the veins.

In Lost, medical historian Shannon Withycombe weaves together women’s personal writings and doctors’ publications from the 1820s through the 1910s to investigate the transformative changes in how Americans conceptualized pregnancy, understood miscarriage, and interpreted fetal tissue over the course of the 19th century. Withycombe’s pathbreaking research reveals how Americans construed, and continue to understand, miscarriage within a context of reproductive desires, expectations, and abilities.

The steady beating back of infant and child mortality is one of our greatest human achievements. Interweaving her own experiences as a medical student and doctor, Perri Klass pays tribute to groundbreaking women doctors like Rebecca Lee Crumpler, Mary Putnam Jacobi, and Josephine Baker, and to the nurses, public health advocates, and scientists who brought new approaches and scientific ideas about sanitation and vaccination to families.

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

It’s a Darien, Connecticut, tradition: an emergency medical service managed by adolescents. One kid is a varsity soccer captain. There’s a future doctor, a band dork, a theater geek. Theirs is a view of town without the niceties. A drunken spouse turned violent. Lonely old people stuck in the bath. A midlife suicide. How do these kids process the sometimes shocking and violent life-and-death secrets of their community? The answer is a story of high stress and uncommon high school lives, told by a writer who spent his own youth on the night shift. Welcome to Post 53.

Antebellum New Orleans sat at the heart of America's slave and cotton kingdoms. It was also where yellow fever epidemics killed as many as 150,000 people during the nineteenth century. With little understanding of mosquito-borne viruses, a person's only protection against the scourge was to "get acclimated" by surviving the disease. Repeated epidemics bolstered New Orleans's strict racial hierarchy by introducing another hierarchy, what Kathryn Olivarius terms "immunocapital." Whereas immunity conferred privilege on whites, it relegated enslaved people to the most grueling labor.

A crucial component of anti-Black racism is the unconscionable disparity in health outcomes between Black and white Americans. Sickening examines this institutionalized inequality through dramatic, concrete events from the past two decades, revealing how unequal living conditions and inadequate medical care have become routine. From the spike in chronic disease after Hurricane Katrina to the lack of protection for Black residents during the Flint water crisis, author Anne Pollock takes listeners on a journey through the diversity of anti-Black racism operating in healthcare.

The rest of the world had turned its back on South Africa after a controversial massacre in 1960, but seven years later, a pioneering heart surgeon was able to shine a much more positive light on the country when he performed the world's first major organ transplant. A tale about a truly inspirational man who, motivated through losing a brother to heart failure, was able to make this groundbreaking technology a reality that would go on to improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.

This American medical ecological and economic history, a saga of Man, Money, and Medicine or “textbook” of sorts, blossomed primarily for the benefit of Dr. DiLibero's many dear students. He has taught and lectured on the subject of migratory medical ecolo-nomics for many years, and has too often found himself digressing “off on a tangent”, describing particularly interesting moments of historical trivia that have influenced his life.

In the 1970s, Dr. Alan Scott sought to selectively weaken eye muscles to treat strabismus (when one or both eyes are misaligned) without surgery. After failed attempts with other agents, Scott developed a method to stabilize the bacteria that causes botulism, culminating in a drug that eventually became known as Botox.