Medicine Century

Happy Accidents is a fascinating, entertaining, and highly accessible look at the surprising role serendipity has played in some of the most important medical discoveries in the 20th century. What do penicillin, chemotherapy drugs, X-rays, Valium, the Pap smear, and Viagra have in common? They were each discovered accidentally, stumbled upon in the search for something else. In discussing medical breakthroughs, Dr. Morton Meyers makes a cogent, highly engaging argument for a more creative, rather than purely linear, approach to science. And it may just save our lives!

Once a trailblazer in the field of medicine, Dr. Tucia Hatherley hasn't touched a scalpel or stethoscope since she made a fatal mistake in the operating theater. Instead, she works in a corset factory, striving to earn enough to support her disabled son. When even that livelihood is threatened, Tucia is left with one option-to join a wily, charismatic showman named Huey and become part of his traveling medicine show.

In 1880s Britain, the chemist’s shop stood at the centre of a quiet revolution. Behind its polished counter were the substances that eased pain, soothed nerves, and saved lives — and the same substances that could quietly kill. As pharmacy professionalised and poison laws tightened, Victorian society struggled to balance access with safety, privacy with accountability, and relief with risk. The Victorian Chemist explores the uneasy coexistence of medicine and poison in an age of rapid chemical progress. Through regulation, scandal, courtroom testimony, and everyday trade, this book ...

Today it is known as Roosevelt Island. In 1828, when New York City purchased this narrow, two-mile-long island in the East River, it was called Blackwell's Island. There, over the next hundred years, the city would build a lunatic asylum, prison, hospital, workhouse, and almshouse. Stacy Horn has crafted a compelling and chilling narrative told through the stories of the poor souls sent to Blackwell's, as well as the period's city officials, reformers, and journalists (including the famous Nellie Bly). Damnation Island re-creates what daily life was like on the island....

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian comes a riveting history of New York's iconic public hospital that charts the turbulent rise of American medicine. Bellevue Hospital, on New York City's East Side, occupies a colorful and horrifying place in the public imagination: a den of mangled crime...

Talking about death won't kill you. Yet in today's world, death remains one of our greatest taboos. As religion declines and rituals fade, we are left without much guidance for one of life's only certainties. This is your handbook for death in the 21st century – a compassionate, practical and surprisingly hopeful guide to understanding mortality.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST Frank and April Wheeler are a bright, beautiful, talented couple in the 1950s whose perfect suburban life is about to crumble in this "moving and absorbing story” (The Atlantic Monthly) from one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century. "The Great...

Little more than 100 years ago, maps of the world still boasted white space: places where no human had ever trod. Within a few short decades the most hostile of the world's environments had all been conquered. Likewise, in the 20th century, medicine transformed human life. Doctors took what was routinely fatal and made it survivable. As modernity brought us ever more into different kinds of extremes, doctors pushed the bounds of medical advances and human endurance. Extreme exploration challenged the body in ways that only the vanguard of science could answer.

Since the mid-1990s, a silent epidemic has swept the globe—iron deficiency and micronutrient depletion—undermining immunity, metabolism, cognition, and human vitality. Drawing on HCUP epidemiologic data, CDC nutritional surveys, and the groundbreaking TOBIN Framework (Toxin Overload, Oxidative Stress, Biological Imbalances, Infections, and Nutrient Deficiencies), Dr. Benoît Tano reveals why chronic diseases have exploded in the 21st century and how to reverse them. This authoritative, evidence-based, and revolutionary book shows how environmental toxins, processed foods, endocrine ...

The Longevity Solution explains how to incorporate time-honored wellness traditions while doing away with fads, unnecessary supplements, and unsubstantiated wellness practices. It investigates the dietary habits and other practices of the healthiest, longest-lived humans on the planet, who live in regions known as Blue Zones, as a model for what and how we should eat. It teaches the benefits of intermittent fasting and calorie restriction, which have been shown to slow the aging process, while consuming proper ratios of protein and healthy fats.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! For fans of Hidden Figures and Radium Girls comes the remarkable story of three Victorian women who broke down barriers in the medical field to become the first women doctors, revolutionizing the way women receive health care. In the early 1800s, women were dying in...

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.

Where have all the doctors gone? And why, when I finally see someone, does he or she spend all our time behind the computer instead of examining me? How come my insurance is more and more expensive, and pays for less and less? And why do my medications cost so much? Based on legal cases, patient stories, interviews, hundreds of nonfiction articles and books, and Dr. Sweet's own experience as a physician, Convictions is a fictionalized account of what is really going on in healthcare behind the scenes. Listen to it.

Captain Sean Mulkerin comes home from the sea to find his family home in jeopardy. After the death of his father, Sean’s determined mother, Eileen, took it upon herself to run the sprawling Rancho Malibu—until a fire destroyed her hard-earned profits. Now, on the edge of financial ruin...

The 21st century has brought with it unprecedented challenges. Health and environmental effects of toxins introduced in the last half century have led to reductions in life expectancy, reproductive health, and quality of life and increases in anti-nutrients, loss of quality soil, impaired immune defense and repair, and digestive disorders.

The extraordinary prize-winning debut from Andrew Miller. Winner of the IMPAC Award and James Tait Black Memorial Prize. At the dawn of the Enlightenment, James Dyer is born unable to feel pain. A source of wonder and scientific curiosity as a child, he rises through the ranks of Georgian...

The Plague Rider plunges you into a forgotten chapter of the American Southwest—when deserts were roadless, smallpox was a death sentence, and one unsung doctor dared to gallop straight into the epidemic’s maw. In December 1803, Basque-born surgeon Dr. Cristóbal María de Larrañaga receives a fragile vial of cow-pox lymph and an impossible order: carry living vaccine 1,400 miles from Chihuahua to the edge of the Rocky Mountains before it dies in the cold. With a mule train of orphan “courier” children, a scarred Navajo scout, and a midwife who trusts science more than saints, ...

The riveting story of a dramatic confrontation between Native Americans and white settlers, a compelling conflict that unfolded in the newly created Washington Territory from 1853 to 1857. When appointed Washington’s first governor, Isaac Ingalls Stevens, an ambitious military man turned...

The Infirmary Ward takes readers inside the workhouse infirmaries of 19th-century England and Wales, where sickness and poverty collided under the Poor Law. Drawing on official records, inspection reports, and contemporary accounts, this book explores how care was delivered to the poorest and most vulnerable: the sick, the elderly, women in childbirth, children, and those deemed “incurable.” It examines daily life in the wards, medical treatment, nursing, diet, discipline, and the moral assumptions that shaped who deserved comfort and who did not. More than a history of medicine, The ...

The multi-disciplinary artist and author of Like a Bird and How to Cure a Ghost explores the commodification and appropriation of wellness through the lens of social justice, providing resources to help anyone participate in self-care, regardless of race, identity, socioeconomic status or...