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Good Blood
- A Doctor, a Donor, and the Incredible Breakthrough that Saved Millions of Babies
- Narrated by: Ann Richardson
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
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Publisher's Summary
A remarkable, uplifting story about one of the greatest medical breakthroughs of the 20th century.
In 1951 in Sydney, Australia, a 14-year-old boy named James Harrison was near death when he received a transfusion of blood that saved his life. A few years later, and half a world away, a shy young doctor at Columbia University realized he was more comfortable in the lab than in the examination room. Neither could have imagined how their paths would cross, or how they would change the world.
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.
Good Blood takes us from Australia to America, from research laboratories to hospitals, and even into Sing Sing prison, where experimental blood trials were held. It is a tale of discovery and invention, the progress and pitfalls of medicine, and the everyday heroics that fundamentally changed the health of women and babies.
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What listeners say about Good Blood
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Performance
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- Conor
- 09-28-20
Good Housekeeping version of a medical discovery
Maybe I was expecting too much after reading books like Sue Armstrong's book on cancer, P53, which is truly a gem.
Good Blood was about the discovery of a treatment for Rh disease, where the mother develops antibodies against her baby's blood. The counter-intuitive cure is to inject the mother with antibodies against Rh+ blood from other mothers. The book never tries to come to grips with the question why other mothers' anti-Rh antibodies are better than the birth mother's anti-Rh antibodies. Don't the other mother's antibodies also react with the baby's blood? If not, why not? How come the birth mother's blood doesn't develop antibodies against injected proteins from a stranger? After all, she's reacting against foreign proteins from her own baby, why not against a stranger's proteins? You won't get answers to any of these questions here.
A few minutes on wikipedia hints at an answer - IgM vs IgG antibody classes, but those are terms that are never even mentioned in the book. Instead we get stories of the dresses the doctors' brides wore on their wedding days, where they honeymooned, where they vacationed with their kids, and filler narrative that veers between gushing and maudlin. The men are all "married to the woman of their dreams" (yes, that's a quote) and the babies are all big bouncing blue-eyed and beautiful. Until the men are suddenly and without explanation getting re-married. The medical insight in the book, such as it is, is limited to a couple of paragraphs in the first third of the book, and after that it's all collecting accolades and awards and growing old.
All this, and you get to hear it in the chirpy tones of a morning commute newscaster.
1 person found this helpful
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Adult_US_Male
- 04-20-21
Great story, wonderfully told
Good Blood was a wonderfully told story about a topic that I was completely unaware of, yet has affected countless people throughout history. I love Julian Guthrie’s ability to craft a story, and she did so artfully here.
Audio narration was very well done.
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- By Dr. Micala Darcel on 03-02-23
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Superbugs
- The Race to Stop an Epidemic
- By: Matt McCarthy
- Narrated by: Matt McCarthy
- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Physician, researcher, and ethics professor Matt McCarthy is on the front lines of a groundbreaking clinical trial testing a new antibiotic to fight lethal superbugs, bacteria that have built up resistance to the life-saving drugs in our rapidly dwindling arsenal. This trial serves as the backdrop for the compulsively listenable Superbugs, and the results will impact nothing less than the future of humanity.
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Collection of ho-hum anecdotes
- By Amaze on 10-04-19
By: Matt McCarthy
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Chasing My Cure
- A Doctor's Race to Turn Hope into Action; A Memoir
- By: David Fajgenbaum
- Narrated by: David Fajgenbaum
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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David Fajgenbaum, a former Georgetown quarterback, was nicknamed the Beast in medical school, where he was also known for his unmatched mental stamina. But things changed dramatically when he began suffering from inexplicable fatigue. In a matter of weeks, his organs were failing and he was read his last rites. Doctors were baffled by his condition, which they had yet to even diagnose. Floating in and out of consciousness, Fajgenbaum prayed for a second chance, the equivalent of a dramatic play to second the game into overtime.
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Could have been far better
- By Booklover on 09-13-20
By: David Fajgenbaum
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Hidden Valley Road
- Inside the Mind of an American Family
- By: Robert Kolker
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 13 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their 12 children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins - aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the 10 Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic.
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A story you've never heard before
- By Kelley Cox on 04-19-20
By: Robert Kolker
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Knocking on Heaven's Door
- The Path to a Better Way of Death
- By: Katy Butler
- Narrated by: Katy Butler
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Like so many of us, award-winning writer Katy Butler always assumed her aging parents would experience healthy, active retirements before dying peacefully at home. Then her father suffered a stroke that left him incapable of easily finishing a sentence or showering without assistance. Her mother was thrust into full-time caregiving, and Katy became one of the 24 million Americans who help care for aging parents. In an effort to correct a minor and non - life threatening heart arrhythmia, doctors outfitted her father with a pacemaker.
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A better way to narrate a book about death?
- By MAUREEN on 10-21-13
By: Katy Butler
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Your Heart, My Hands
- An Immigrant's Remarkable Journey to Become One of America's Preeminent Cardiac Surgeons
- By: Arun K. Singh MD, John Hanc - contributor, Delos Cosgrove MD - foreword
- Narrated by: Shridhar Solanki
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Leaving a life marked by crippling setbacks and his father's doubt, in 1967 a 20-something doctor from India arrived in America with only five dollars and the desire to claim his American dream. Faced with an entirely new culture, racism, and the lasting effects of disabling childhood injuries, through hard work and perseverance he overcame all odds. Now having performed over 15,000 open-heart surgeries, more than nearly every surgeon in history, Dr. Singh reflects on his most memorable patients and his incredible personal life.
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Remarkable!
- By Stacey on 12-01-22
By: Arun K. Singh MD, and others
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Letter to a Young Female Physician
- Notes from a Medical Life
- By: Suzanne Koven
- Narrated by: Suzanne Koven
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2017, Dr. Suzanne Koven published an essay describing the challenges faced by female physicians, including her own personal struggle with "imposter syndrome" - a long-held secret belief that she was not smart enough or good enough to be a "real" doctor. Accessed by thousands of listeners around the world, Koven's Letter to a Young Female Physician has evolved into a deeply felt reflection on her career in medicine.
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Must read for anyone in healthcare
- By anonymous on 11-20-22
By: Suzanne Koven
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Carville's Cure
- Leprosy, Stigma, and the Fight for Justice
- By: Pam Fessler
- Narrated by: Pam Ward
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Following the trail of an unexpected family connection, acclaimed journalist Pam Fessler has unearthed the lost world of the patients, nurses, doctors, and researchers at Carville who struggled for over a century to eradicate Hansen's disease, the modern name for leprosy. Amid widespread public anxiety about foreign contamination and contagion, patients were deprived of basic rights - denied the right to vote, restricted from leaving Carville, and often forbidden from contact with their own parents or children.
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Interesting and informative
- By NMwritergal on 07-11-22
By: Pam Fessler
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Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart
- By: Mimi Swartz
- Narrated by: Lydia Mackay
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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It wasn’t supposed to be this hard. If America could send a man to the moon, shouldn’t the best surgeons in the world be able to build an artificial heart? In Ticker, Texas Monthly executive editor and two time National Magazine Award winner Mimi Swartz shows just how complex and difficult it can be to replicate one of nature’s greatest creations. Part investigative journalism, part medical mystery, Ticker is a dazzling story of modern innovation, recounting 50 years of false starts, abysmal failures, and miraculous triumphs.
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Didn’t hate it, didn’t like it.
- By Gotta Tellya on 09-07-18
By: Mimi Swartz
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A Lucky Life Interrupted
- A Memoir of Hope
- By: Tom Brokaw
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 5 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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From Tom Brokaw, the best-selling author of The Greatest Generation, comes a powerful memoir of a year of dramatic change - a year spent battling cancer and reflecting on a long, happy, and lucky life.
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My favorite anchorman faces mortality
- By Fran Murphy on 05-23-15
By: Tom Brokaw
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Mercies in Disguise
- A Story of Hope, a Family's Genetic Destiny, and the Science That Rescued Them
- By: Gina Kolata
- Narrated by: Andrea Gallo
- Length: 8 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In Mercies in Disguise, acclaimed New York Times reporter and best-selling author Gina Kolata tells the story of the Baxleys, an upstanding family in small-town South Carolina. Many of them were doctors, but still, they are struck down by an inscrutable illness. Finally they discover the cause of the disease after a remarkable sequence of providential events. Meanwhile science, progressing for 50 years along a parallel track, handed the Baxleys a question - not a cure but a blood test that would reveal who had the gene for the disease.
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Sappy
- By Amazon Customer on 11-10-22
By: Gina Kolata
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Twelve Patients
- Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital
- By: Eric Manheimer
- Narrated by: Eric Manheimer
- Length: 13 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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In the spirit of Oliver Sacks Awakenings and the TV series House, Dr. Eric Manheimer's Twelve Patients is a memoir from the medical director of Bellevue Hospital that uses the plights of 12 very different patients - from dignitaries at the nearby UN, to supermax prisoners from Riker's Island, to illegal immigrants, and Wall Street tycoons - to illustrate larger societal issues.
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Awesome Book
- By Lynne on 08-06-12
By: Eric Manheimer
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No Apparent Distress
- A Doctor’s Coming-of-Age on the Front Lines of American Medicine
- By: Rachel Pearson MD
- Narrated by: Rebecca Gibel
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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In medical charts, the term "N.A.D." (No Apparent Distress) is used for patients who appear stable. The phrase also aptly describes America's medical system when it comes to treating the underprivileged. Medical students learn on the bodies of the poor - and the poor suffer from their mistakes. Rachel Pearson confronted these harsh realities when she started medical school in Galveston, Texas.
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I loved the candor of this book.
- By Anna on 05-24-18
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Changing the Way We Die
- Compassionate End-of-Life Care and the Hospice Movement
- By: Sheila Himmel, Fran Smith
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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There’s a quiet revolution happening in the way we die. More than 1.5 million Americans a year die in hospice care - nearly 44 percent of all deaths - and a vast industry has sprung up to meet the growing demand. Once viewed as a New Age indulgence, hospice is now a $14 billion business and one of the most successful segments in health care. Changing the Way We Die, by award-winning journalists Fran Smith and Sheila Himmel, is the first book to take a broad, penetrating look at the hospice landscape.
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Sadly, not very engaging.
- By Debra S. Long on 06-16-18
By: Sheila Himmel, and others
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Every Minute Is a Day
- A Doctor, an Emergency Room, and a City Under Siege
- By: Robert Meyer, Dan Koeppel
- Narrated by: Robert Meyer, Dan Koeppel
- Length: 5 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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When former New York Times journalist Dan Koeppel texted his cousin Robert Meyer, a 20-year veteran of the emergency room at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis in the United States, he expected to hear that things were hectic. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being overwhelmed, where do you think you are? Koeppel asked. Meyer’s grave reply - 100 - was merely the cusp of the crisis that would soon touch every part of the globe.
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Thoroughly enjoyable
- By Loretta D. on 02-02-23
By: Robert Meyer, and others