Along the way, he reveals the untold story of Hans Asperger, the father of Asperger’s syndrome, whose “little professors” were targeted by the darkest social-engineering experiment in human history; exposes the covert campaign by child psychiatrist Leo Kanner to suppress knowledge of the autism spectrum for fifty years; and casts light on the growing movement of "neurodiversity" activists seeking respect, support, technological innovation, accommodations in the workplace and in education, and the right to self-determination for those with cognitive differences.

    When death is sudden or unexplained, it falls to Shepherd to establish the cause. Each post-mortem is a detective story in its own right - and Shepherd has performed over 23,000 of them. Through his skill, dedication and insight, Dr Shepherd solves the puzzle to answer our most pressing question: how did this person die?From serial killer to natural disaster, 'perfect murder' to freak accident, Shepherd takes nothing for granted in pursuit of truth. And while he's been involved in some of the most high-profile cases of recent times, it's often the less well known encounters that prove the most perplexing, intriguing and even bizarre. In or out of the public eye, his evidence has put killers behind bars, freed the innocent and turned open-and-shut cases on their heads.But a life in death, bearing witness to some of humanity's darkest corners, exacts a price and Shepherd doesn't flinch from counting the cost to him and his family.

    They speak their own language, they abide by their own rules, and they seem to exist to drive adults crazy. But adolescence is a typical stage of human development that is the essential preparation for success in the adult world. The more you understand about your teen’s brain, the better prepared you will be to handle this turbulent time in your child’s life.Professor Abigail Baird has devoted the majority of her career to studying adolescence, and in this Audible Original, she shares the latest perspectives on this amazing time of cognitive and behavioral growth. The 10 lectures in this series will reveal that adolescent behavior is much easier to understand than most people think. Rather than seeing the teen years as a crucible to be endured by parents and young people alike, this series offers a practical perspective for adults who hope to help teens truly thrive in their personal journeys to adulthood—not merely to survive their adolescence.Whether you are a parent, someone who works with teens, or even a teen yourself, this course will shed new light on a period of human development that is all too often incorrectly described as a time where psychological peril is inevitable.

    The threat of the disease kept ships close to home and doomed those vessels that ventured too far from port. The willful ignorance of the royal medical elite, who endorsed ludicrous medical theories based on speculative research while ignoring the life-saving properties of citrus fruit, cost tens of thousands of lives and altered the course of many battles at sea. The cure for scurvy ranks among the greatest of human accomplishments, yet its impact on history has, until now, been largely ignored.From the earliest recorded appearance of the disease in the sixteenth century, to the eighteenth century, where a man had only half a chance of surviving the scourge, to the early nineteenth century, when the British conquered scurvy and successfully blockaded the French and defeated Napoleon, Scurvy is a medical detective story for the ages, the fascinating true story of how James Lind (the surgeon), James Cook (the mariner), and Gilbert Blane (the gentleman) worked separately to eliminate the dreaded affliction.Scurvy is an evocative journey back to the era of wooden ships and sails, when the disease infiltrated every aspect of seafaring life: press gangs "recruit" mariners on the way home from a late night at the pub; a terrible voyage in search of riches ends with a hobbled fleet and half the crew heaved overboard; Cook majestically travels the South Seas but suffers an unimaginable fate. Brimming with tales of ships, sailors, and baffling bureaucracy, Scurvy is a rare mix of compelling history and classic adventure story.

    But Bravo proved to be a brutal and conniving man, and the marriage was far from happy. Then one night he suddenly collapsed, and three days later died an agonizing death. His doctors immediately determined that he had been poisoned. The graphic and sensational details of the case would capture the public imagination of Victorian England as the investigation dominated the press for weeks, and the list of suspects grew to include Florence, her secret lover the eminent doctor James Gully, her longtime companion the housekeeper Mrs. Cox, and the recently dismissed stableman George Griffiths. But ultimately no murderer could be determined, and despite the efforts of numerous historians, criminologists, and other writers since (including Agatha Christie), the case has never been definitively solved. Now James Ruddick retells this gripping story of love, greed, brutality, and betrayal among the elite -- offering an intimate portrait of Victorian culture and of one woman's struggle to live in this repressive society, while unmasking the true murderer for the first time. Simultaneously a murder mystery, colorful social history, and modern-day detective tale, Death at the Priory is a thrilling read and a window into a fascinating time. "An impressively researched retelling ... Death at the Priory reads as a historical intervention, crime novel, and sensational docudrama." -- Zarena Aslami, Chicago Tribune "A suspenseful and stimulating read." -- Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times "Enjoyable; Ruddick has done much admirable sleuthing." -- Paul Collins, The New York Times Book Review

    The highs, the lows, historic match days and foul play. It’s a celebration of a beloved player, a history maker, and his tragic ending at the final whistle. It’s a story about science and discovery, about the people on the front line of life-changing research. But above all it’s a story about family and about consequence. All of this is wrapped up in three little letters: CTE. An investigative documentary from multi-award-winning producer Hana Walker-Brown [Audio Production Awards Best Documentary (Winner, 2017, 2016), Prix Europa (Nominee, 2018, 2017, 2015), Åke Blomström Prize (Winner, 2015) Hearsay International Audio Arts Award (Nominee, 2014) and Charles Parker Prize Gold Award (Winner, 2013)], The Beautiful Brain looks at the devastating effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) - a degenerative brain disease found in people who’ve suffered severe or repeated blows to the head. Beginning with the story of FA Cup winner Jeff Astle, the audiobook expands outwards looking at the widows, daughters and families who are left fighting for answers following the death of their loved ones. As the documentary progresses, Hana’s investigation leads her from Britain’s football pitches to support groups for victims of domestic violence and beyond, sparking a vital discussion about accountability and the urgent need for further scientific studies into CTE.Running time: 3 hrs and 42 mins©2019 Audible, Ltd (P)2019 Audible, Ltd

    In June 1962, a young biologist in Philadelphia, using tissue extracted from an aborted fetus from Sweden, produced safe, clean cells that allowed the creation of vaccines against rubella and other common childhood diseases. Two years later, in the midst of a devastating German measles epidemic, his colleague developed the vaccine that would one day wipe out homegrown rubella. The rubella vaccine and others made with those fetal cells have protected more than 150 million people in the United States, the vast majority of them preschoolers. The new cells and the method of making them also led to vaccines that have protected billions of people around the world from polio, rabies, chicken pox, measles, hepatitis A, shingles and adenovirus. Meredith Wadman’s masterful account recovers not only the science of this urgent race, but also the political roadblocks that nearly stopped the scientists. She describes the terrible dilemmas of pregnant women exposed to German measles and recounts testing on infants, prisoners, orphans, and the intellectually disabled, which was common in the era. These events take place at the dawn of the battle over using human fetal tissue in research, during the arrival of big commerce in campus labs, and as huge changes take place in the laws and practices governing who “owns” research cells and the profits made from biological inventions. It is also the story of yet one more unrecognized woman whose cells have been used to save countless lives. With another frightening virus imperiling pregnant women on the rise today, no medical story could have more human drama, impact, or urgency today than The Vaccine Race.

    From Sarajevo under siege in 1993 to clandestine hospitals in rebel-held eastern Aleppo, he has carried out lifesaving operations in the most challenging conditions, and with none of the resources of a major metropolitan hospital. He is now widely acknowledged as the most experienced trauma surgeon in the world.War Doctor is his extraordinary story, encompassing his surgeries in nearly every major conflict zone since the end of the Cold War, as well as his struggles to return to a “normal” life and routine after each trip. Culminating in his recent trips to war-torn Syria—and the untold story of his efforts to help secure a humanitarian corridor out of besieged Aleppo to evacuate some 50,000 people—War Doctor is a blend of medical memoir, personal journey, and nonfiction thriller that provides unforgettable, at times raw, insight into the human toll of war.

    But now Inukuns only exist in rumors and whispers. Until an actor-turned-fugitive named Teddy Kyle Smith had an encounter that brought Iñukuns from myth to reality. Smith was an aspiring actor with a promising career, but it all came crashing down one night in September with a gunshot, followed by a manhunt, bloodshed, and then stranger things. This story has long haunted James Dommek Jr., the great-grandson of the last of the Inupiaq storytellers. Midnight Son is his journey to who Teddy Kyle Smith was, what he did, and what he really saw. It’s a true story that takes listeners from the Alaskan wilderness to Hollywood and to the courtroom. A story that pits Inupiaq folklore against American justice in a battle over the nature of reality and the soul of the real Alaska.

    By focusing on the experiences of ordinary villagers as they lived-and died-during the Black Death (1345-50), Hatcher vividly places the reader directly inside those tumultuous times and describes in fascinating detail the day-to-day existence of people struggling with the tragic effects of the plague. Dramatic scenes portray how contemporaries must have felt and thought about these momentous events: what they knew and didn't know about the horrors of the disease, what they believed about death and God's vengeance, and how they tried to make sense of it all despite frantic rumors, frightening tales, and fearful sermons.

    In addition to offering a clear-eyed explanation of the root causes of this insidious and entrenched bias and laying out its effects, she suggests concrete steps we can take to cure it.

    But which one? And how?Over the past fifty years, more than three hundred infectious diseases have either newly emerged or reemerged, appearing in territories where they’ve never been seen before. Ninety percent of epidemiologists expect that one of them will cause a deadly pandemic sometime in the next two generations. It could be Ebola, avian flu, a drug-resistant superbug, or something completely new. While we can’t know which pathogen will cause the next pandemic, by unraveling the story of how pathogens have caused pandemics in the past, we can make predictions about the future. In Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, the prizewinning journalist Sonia Shah—whose book on malaria, The Fever, was called a “tour-de-force history” (The New York Times) and “revelatory” (The New Republic)—interweaves history, original reportage, and personal narrative to explore the origins of contagions, drawing parallels between cholera, one of history’s most deadly and disruptive pandemic-causing pathogens, and the new diseases that stalk humankind today.To reveal how a new pandemic might develop, Sonia Shah tracks each stage of cholera’s dramatic journey, from its emergence in the South Asian hinterlands as a harmless microbe to its rapid dispersal across the nineteenth-century world, all the way to its latest beachhead in Haiti. Along the way she reports on the pathogens now following in cholera’s footsteps, from the MRSA bacterium that besieges her own family to the never-before-seen killers coming out of China’s wet markets, the surgical wards of New Delhi, and the suburban backyards of the East Coast.By delving into the convoluted science, strange politics, and checkered history of one of the world’s deadliest diseases, Pandemic reveals what the next global contagion might look like— and what we can do to prevent it.

    One of his high school classmates, Danny Corwin, was a vicious serial killer who had raped and mutilated six women, murdering three of them. Yet the town had denied all early signs of the radical evil that was growing within Corwin. What had led the local media to ignore his early rapes? Why had the local Presbyterian Church tried to shield him from prison? Why had local law enforcement been unable to solve and prosecute his murders as they continued? Burrough is widely admired as a master storyteller, and this chilling tale raises important questions of whether serial killers can be recognized before they kill or rehabilitated after they do. It is also a story of Texas politics and power that led the good citizens of the town of Temple to enable a demon who was their worst nightmare. This title contains mature themes, including physical and sexual violence, that some listeners may find unsettling.

    Women, on the other hand, have often been discussed on the peripheries of sweeping historical narratives, including the era of the American Revolution and the early decades of the nation’s founding. But the work of gender historians over the past 50 years has brought the stories of women out of the shadows and into the light. As you will see through the women that you will meet in this course—including Elizabeth Oliver Watson, Abigail Adams, Nancy Ward, Dolley Madison, Elizabeth Freeman, and many others—they were actually at the very center of the major events of early American history.In the 10 lessons of America’s Founding Women, you will uncover the very real stories of the women who helped shape the United States as it underwent its transformation from a British colony to a fledgling nation. Professor Cassandra Good will help you understand what life was like for women during the American Revolution, and beyond, and how these women balanced the rigid social expectations of the late 18th and early 19th centuries with their own talents and desires. You will examine the ways they used the power that was granted to them in the home and in their communities and how they forged their own paths in opposition to the limitations imposed on them.As you study the lives and contributions of these influential women, you will trace the gains and losses toward acquiring women’s rights that they experienced in the early decades of U.S. history. You will better understand how these complex and remarkable women played a vital role in the creation of a nation.

    We ignore this reality most of the time, but when a new threat (Ebola, SARS, Zika) seems imminent, we send our best and bravest doctors to contain it--people like Dr. Ali S. Khan.In his long career as a public health first responder—protected by a thin mask from infected patients, napping under nets to keep out scorpions, making life-and-death decisions on limited, suspect information—Khan has found that rogue microbes will always be a problem, but outbreaks are often caused by people. We make mistakes, politicize emergencies, and, too often, fail to imagine the consequences of our actions.The Next Pandemic is a firsthand account of disasters like anthrax, bird flu, and others and how we could do more to prevent their return. It's both a gripping story of our brushes with fate and an urgent lesson on how we can keep ourselves safe from the inevitable next pandemic.