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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacksby Rebecca Skloot
Crown Publishing Group 2010; US$ 9.99Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization,... more...
Mountains Beyond Mountainsby Tracy Kidder
Random House Publishing Group 2003; US$ 11.99Tracy Kidder is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the author of the bestsellers The Soul of a New Machine , House , Among Schoolchildren , and Home Town . He has been described by the Baltimore Sun as the “master of the non-fiction narrative.” This powerful and inspiring new book shows how one person can make a difference, as Kidder tells the true story of a gifted man who is in love with the world and has set out to do all he can to cure it. At the center of Mountains Beyond Mountains stands Paul Farmer. Doctor, Harvard professor, renowned infectious-disease specialist, anthropologist, the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, world-class Robin Hood, Farmer was brought up in a bus and on a boat, and... more...
The Speckled Monsterby Jennifer Lee Carrell
Penguin Group Inc. 2004; US$ 14.99The Speckled Monster tells the dramatic story of two parents who dared to fight back against smallpox. After barely surviving the agony of smallpox themselves, they flouted eighteenth-century medicine by borrowing folk knowledge from African slaves and Eastern women in frantic bids to protect their children. From their heroic struggles stems the modern science of immunology as well as the vaccinations that remain our only hope should the disease ever be unleashed again. Jennifer Lee Carrell transports readers back to the early eighteenth century to tell the tales of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, two iconoclastic figures who helped save London and Boston from the deadliest disease mankind has known.... more...
The Emperor of All Maladiesby Siddhartha Mukherjee
Simon & Schuster 2010; US$ 9.99The Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence. Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but... more...
Plagues and Peoplesby William Mcneill
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 2010; US$ 12.99Upon its original publication, Plagues and Peoples was an immediate critical and popular success, offering a radically new interpretation of world history as seen through the extraordinary impact--political, demographic, ecological, and psychological--of disease on cultures. From the conquest of Mexico by smallpox as much as by the Spanish, to the bubonic plague in China, to the typhoid epidemic in Europe, the history of disease is the history of humankind. With the identification of AIDS in the early 1980s, another chapter has been added to this chronicle of events, which William McNeill explores in his new introduction to this updated editon. Thought-provoking, well-researched, and compulsively readable, Plagues and Peoples is that rare... more...
Explaining Epidemicsby Charles E. Rosenberg
Cambridge University Press 1992; US$ 33.00Medicine until recently remained a history written by and for practitioners, these essays diverge from this tradition. more...
Nursing the Imageby Julia Hallam
Routledge 2000; US$ 51.95Julia Hallam considers the 'image' of nursing and how it has been constructed, contributing to the debates surrounding gender and occupational identity. more...
Greek Rational Medicineby James Longrigg
Routledge 1993; US$ 180.00Greek Rational Medicine examines the important relationship between philosophy and medicine in ancient Greece and beyond and reveals its significance for contemporary western practice and theory. more...
Great Feuds in Medicineby Hal Hellman
John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2001; US$ 19.95"An exciting, well-researched work, which should appeal to anyone with an interest in the nature and progress of the human race." — American Scientist The cataclysmic clash of medical ideas and personalities comes to colorful life In this follow-up to the critically acclaimed Great Feuds in Science (Wiley: 0-471-16980-3), Hal Hellman tells the stories of the ten most heated and important disputes of medical science. Featuring a mix of famous and lesser-known stories, Great Feuds in Medicine includes the fascinating accounts of William Harvey's battle with the medical establishment over his discovery of the circulation of blood; Louis Pasteur's fight over his theory of germs; and the nasty dispute between American Robert Gallo... more...
From Idiocy to Mental Deficiencyby David Wright; Anne Digby
Routledge 1996; US$ 140.00This is the first book devoted to the social history of people with learning disabilities in Britain. Spanning the Medieval period to the establishment of the National Health Service, this volume illuminates and informs current debates. more...