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The Demon Under The Microscope
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 12 hrs and 14 mins
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very detailed, but very statistical
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Publisher's summary
Sulfa saved millions of lives, among them, Winston Churchill's and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr.'s, but its real effects have been even more far reaching. Sulfa changed the way new drugs were developed, approved, and sold. It transformed the way doctors treated patients. And it ushered in the era of modern medicine. The very concept that chemicals created in a lab could cure disease revolutionized medicine, taking it from the treatment of symptoms and discomfort to the eradication of the root cause of illness.
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Critic reviews
"Highly entertaining." (Publishers Weekly)
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The Secret History of the War on Cancer
- By: Devra Davis Ph.D.
- Narrated by: Pam Ward
- Length: 19 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The War on Cancer was run by leaders of industries that made cancer-causing products and sometimes also profited from drugs and technologies for finding and treating the disease. Filled with compelling personalities and never-before-revealed information, The Secret History of the War on Cancer shows how we began fighting the wrong war, with the wrong weapons, against the wrong enemies, a legacy that persists to this day.
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Silly Book
- By Adam Smith on 12-24-14
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The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl
- How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis
- By: Arthur Allen
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Few diseases are more gruesome than typhus. Transmitted by body lice, it afflicts the dispossessed - refugees, soldiers, and ghettoized peoples - causing hallucinations, terrible headaches, boiling fever, and often death. The disease plagued the German army on the Eastern Front and left the Reich desperate for a vaccine. For this they turned to the brilliant and eccentric Polish zoologist Rudolf Weigl.
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An Unforgettable book
- By Jean on 09-01-14
By: Arthur Allen
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Bellevue
- Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America's Most Storied Hospital
- By: David Oshinsky
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 14 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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David Oshinsky, whose last book, Polio: An American Story, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, chronicles the history of America's oldest hospital and in so doing also charts the rise of New York to the nation's preeminent city, the path of American medicine from butchery and quackery to a professional and scientific endeavor, and the growth of a civic institution.
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Fascinating
- By Jean on 12-14-16
By: David Oshinsky
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Splendid Solution
- Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio
- By: Jeffrey Kluger
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 13 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Salk became a cultural hero and icon for a whole generation. Now, at the fiftieth anniversary of the first national vaccination program, and as humanity is tantalizingly close to eradicating polio worldwide, comes this unforgettable chronicle. Salk's work was an unparalleled achievement, and it makes for a magnificent listen.
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Excellent book
- By Tim on 08-10-06
By: Jeffrey Kluger
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Beating Back the Devil
- By: Maryn McKenna
- Narrated by: Ellen Archer
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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The universal instinct is to run from an outbreak of disease. These doctors run toward it. They always keep a bag packed. They seldom have more than 24 hours before they are dispatched. They are told only their country of destination and the epidemic they will tackle when they get there.
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Interesting Stuff - Only criticism is pacing
- By Tim on 07-23-05
By: Maryn McKenna
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The Pandemic Century
- One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris
- By: Mark Honigsbaum
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. From the Spanish flu to the 1924 outbreak of pneumonic plague in Los Angeles to the 1930 "parrot fever" pandemic, through the more recent SARS, Ebola, and Zika epidemics, the last one hundred years have been marked by a succession of unanticipated pandemic alarms.
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Pretty good
- By Baz 12345 on 04-03-20
By: Mark Honigsbaum
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The Moth in the Iron Lung
- A Biography of Polio
- By: Forrest Maready
- Narrated by: Forrest Maready
- Length: 5 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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A fascinating account of the world’s most famous disease - polio - told as you have never heard it before. Epidemics of paralysis began to rage in the early 1900s, seemingly out of nowhere. Doctors, parents, and health officials were at a loss to explain why this formerly unheard-of disease began paralyzing so many children. Why did this disease start to become such a horrible problem during the late 1800s? Why did it affect children more often than adults? Why was it originally called teething paralysis by mothers and their doctors?
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Root Cause
- By Circlekay1 Gulfport MS on 10-24-19
By: Forrest Maready
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Asleep
- The Forgotten Epidemic That Became Medicine’s Greatest Mystery
- By: Molly Caldwell Crosby
- Narrated by: Christian Rummel
- Length: 6 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1918, a world war raged, and a lethal strain of influenza circled the globe. In the midst of all this death, a bizarre disease appeared in Europe. Eventually known as encephalitis lethargica, or sleeping sickness, it spread worldwide, leaving millions dead or locked in institutions. Then, in 1927, it disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived. Asleep, set in 1920s and '30s New York, follows a group of neurologists through hospitals and asylums as they try to solve this epidemic and treat its victims - who learned the worst fate was not dying of it, but surviving it.
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Scary, and still unsolved, medical mystery
- By joyce on 12-14-14
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The Butchering Art
- Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
- By: Lindsey Fitzharris
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of 19th-century surgery on the eve of profound transformation. She conjures up early operating theaters - no place for the squeamish - and surgeons, working before anesthesia, who were lauded for their speed and brute strength. They were baffled by the persistent infections that kept mortality rates stubbornly high. A young, melancholy Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister would solve the deadly riddle and change the course of history.
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Not one boring moment!
- By WRWF on 12-22-17
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The Emperor of All Maladies
- A Biography of Cancer
- By: Siddhartha Mukherjee
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 22 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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The Emperor of All Maladies reveals the many faces of an iconic, shape-shifting disease that is the defining plague of our generation. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance but also of hubris, arrogance, paternalism, and misperception, all leveraged against a disease that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out "war against cancer".
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Incredible
- By S.R.E. on 03-02-16
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King of Hearts
- The True Story of the Maverick Who Pioneered Open Heart Surgery
- By: G. Wayne Miller
- Narrated by: Patrick Cullen
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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G. Wayne Miller has dramatically and meticulously reconstructed an amazing true story: how a group of renegade Minnesota surgeons, led by Dr. Walt Lillehei, made medical history by becoming the first doctors to operate deep inside the human heart.
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Loved every minute
- By Brian on 02-05-08
By: G. Wayne Miller
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Drawn from historical records and current news headlines, A Taste for Poison weaves together the tales of spurned lovers, shady scientists, medical professionals, and political assassins to show how the precise systems of the body can be impaired to lethal effect through the use of poison. From the deadly origins of the gin and tonic cocktail to the arsenic-laced wallpaper in Napoleon’s bedroom, A Taste for Poison leads listeners on a fascinating tour of the intricate, complex systems that keep us alive - or don’t.
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Author goes on long unnecessary tangents
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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 as immortality in a glass. And when strychnine - yes, that strychnine, the one used in rat poison - was dosed like Viagra. Looking back with fascination, horror, and not a little dash of dark, knowing humor, Quackery recounts the lively, at times unbelievable, history of medical misfires and malpractices.
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Computer-generated Narrator. Dated Humour.
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The Facemaker
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The Facemaker places Gillies’s ingenious surgical innovations alongside the dramatic stories of soldiers whose lives were wrecked and repaired. It also relates the work of the many doctors, nurses, artists, and orderlies who staffed Gillies’s hospital and boldly attempted to balance their obligations to the army, their patients, and science. The result is a vividly absorbing account of how medicine can be an art, and of what courage and imagination can accomplish in the presence of relentless horror.
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The Triumph of Seeds
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We live in a world of seeds. From our morning toast to the cotton in our clothes, they are quite literally the stuff and staff of life, supporting diets, economies, and civilizations around the globe. Just as the search for nutmeg and the humble peppercorn drove the Age of Discovery, so did coffee beans help fuel the Enlightenment and cottonseed help spark the Industrial Revolution. And from the fall of Rome to the Arab Spring, the fate of nations continues to hinge on the seeds of a Middle Eastern grass known as wheat.
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Delightfully simplistic!
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The Billion Dollar Molecule
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Join journalist Barry Werth as he pulls back the curtain on Vertex, a start-up pharmaceutical company, and witness firsthand the intense drama being played out in the pioneering and hugely profitable field of drug research. Founded by Joshua Boger, a dynamic Harvard- and Merck-trained scientific whiz kid, Vertex is dedicated to designing - atom by atom - both a new life-saving immunosuppressant drug and a drug to combat the virus that causes AIDS.
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Book is interesting but narrator is not
- By Anonymous User on 05-05-23
By: Barry Werth
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Viruses, Plagues, and History
- Past, Present, and Future
- By: Michael B. A. Oldstone
- Narrated by: L.J. Ganser
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- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
The story of viruses and humanity is a story of fear and ignorance, of grief and heartbreak, and of great bravery and sacrifice. Michael Oldstone tells all these stories as he illuminates the history of the devastating diseases that have tormented humanity, focusing mostly on the most famous viruses. For this revised edition, Oldstone includes discussions of new viruses like SARS, bird flu, virally caused cancers, chronic wasting disease, and West Nile. Viruses, Plagues, and History paints a sweeping portrait of humanity's long-standing conflict with our unseen viral enemies.
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very detailed, but very statistical
- By ekhensel15 on 01-12-19
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The Demon in the Freezer
- A True Story
- By: Richard Preston
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The first major bioterror event in the United States - the anthrax attacks in October 2001 - was a clarion call for scientists who work with "hot" agents to find ways of protecting civilian populations against biological weapons. In The Demon in the Freezer, his first nonfiction book since The Hot Zone, a number-one New York Times best seller, Richard Preston takes us into the heart of USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
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Pretty interesting listening in a horrific way
- By S A on 09-19-03
By: Richard Preston
What listeners say about The Demon Under The Microscope
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- L. Lagerstedt
- 07-19-16
wow!
glad to know the full antibiotic story! as a teenager in the 80's I was given antibiotics made from sulfa due to an allergy to a form of pennecillan; I ended my relationship to sulfa with nausea and throwing up... hope we can stave off and beat resistance!
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- bettreau
- 06-16-16
Riveting
I found this totally fascinating. The story of the invention of sulpha drugs in the late 1930s is amplified by the rise of the FDA and regulation of drugs and the vanquishing of many heretofore rampant diseases. The author begins with a description of the Pearl Harbpr attack and the miraculous impact of sulpha on wounds that puts the rest of the story in context. Toward the end of the book, he brings in the Nuremberg trials and the horrors at Ravensbruk as well as the gradual overshadowing by penicillin
A thoroughly good read (listen) with considerable insight and interpret for modern readers.
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- Amazon Customer
- 06-10-16
An Enjoyable, Informative Book
I am a high school science teacher and found this book to be an incredibly fascinating read. I especially enjoyed how it walked the reader through various discovery processes. Sometimes discoveries happen through accident, sometimes they happen through diligence and thorough work, sometimes it can be after thousands of unfavorable outcomes, etc. It showed the importance of good record keeping and collaboration with other fields and scientists. I will definitely be using some examples from this book in class. One of the other features I enjoyed about this book was its side stories. I think it did an admirable job of making the reader see the scientists and individuals in the book not as static pieces of history, but as real, individual people. These stories accentuated the points the book was making, and prevented it from becoming dry. My only criticism is that the stories sometimes made me lose focus of the main point, so when the narrator got back to it, I sometimes had to pause it or relisten to certain bits in order to get back on track. That being said, I'm glad the excerpts were there. Overall, it was a thoroughly enjoyable book, and I'm very pleased with it.
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- J Dub
- 05-15-16
Awesome.
The history of science. This book rocks. I wish every book was this good. Buy it, you'll like it.
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- Judy
- 05-02-16
And the Angel Above It
A heartfelt thank you to those dedicated scientists whose efforts have given us a world where we can survive all manner of devastating illnesses or infections.
I would have been dead of peritonitis one month before my 15th birthday had I been born in another time or place.
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- Azad Jalali-jafari
- 02-01-16
Very interesting and gripping.
It was an informative and detailed book, yet managed to excite me and make me cheer for the scientists and other characters that inhabit it's pages. Well read and performed by Mr. Hoye.
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- A. Hill
- 11-25-15
A very worthwhile read.
Prior to the 20th century pathological micro-organisms were the most frequent cause of death in humans and the source of incalculable suffering and sorrow worldwide. People in those days were resigned to the sudden disappearance of friends, associates, and relatives, who seemed well one day and were gone the next, struck down by invisible killers against which medical science offered no defense. Pasteur’s vaccines were a notable exception, but even they could do little against infections, once these had overcome the body’s natural resistance. Around the turn of the century all this began to change with the development of the first effective antimicrobial medications. The advent of these breakthrough drugs signaled the beginning of a new era in medicine, when antibiotics would save countless millions of lives and transform our civilization.
The Demon Under the Microscope tells the story of a German physician and scientist named Gerhard Domagk and his lifelong struggle to develop a safe and effective chemical cure for microbial infections. Domagk’s quest began in the trenches of World War I, where he served as a medic. Horrified by the agony and death surrounding him, he noticed that soldiers whose injuries were not in themselves fatal, often died anyway, when their wounds became contaminated by bacteria. He set out after the war to find an injectable agent that would kill the bacteria without harming the patient. The path to success was long and convoluted, leading Domagk into the corporate jungle of I.G. Farbin, the German chemical giant, and involving him in intense competition with researchers in other countries, all equally intent on gaining credit for the discovery. It’s a fascinating and inspiring story, well told by Thomas Hager, of a man driven by curiosity, compassion, and personal ambition to change the world. Stephen Hoye’s reading of the text is very good too. Even if you’re not especially interested in medicine or its history, the drama of Domagk’s quest and the intense human interest of the people he was determined to help make for compelling listening.
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- Used to be happy customer
- 11-17-15
If you like history and science, you want to read this book
Well written, and well read. A fascinating story of the discovery and history of the first miracle drug.
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- Cathryn
- 09-25-15
Interesting History
Would you listen to The Demon Under The Microscope again? Why?
Yes. There is a lot of interesting history, and I think a second listen would help me to remember more.
Who was your favorite character and why?
The story was fascinating in the way that it connected the history of sulfa drugs with the surrounding geo-political environment.
What about Stephen Hoye’s performance did you like?
He was easy to understand. The pacing and inflection were appropriate to the story.
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- Russ McClelland
- 09-22-15
Great Read!
So many valuable lessons and a great story about the course of scientific research and economics, as well as the human story behind the scenes.
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