Book picks similar to
Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America by E. Richard Brown
non-fiction
history
medicine
health
War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race
Edwin Black - 2003
Based on selective breeding of human beings, eugenics began in laboratories on Long Island but ended in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Cruel and racist laws were enacted in 27 U.S. states, while the supporters of eugenics included progressive thinkers like Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Ultimately, over 60,000 "unfit" Americans were coercively sterilized, a third of them after Nuremberg had declared such practices crimes against humanity. This is a timely and shocking chronicle of bad science at its worst—with many important lessons for the genetic age in which an interest in eugenics has been dangerously revived.
Pandemic 1918: The Story of the Deadliest Influenza in History
Catharine Arnold - 2018
In three successive waves, from 1918 to 1919, influenza killed more than 50 million people. German soldiers termed it Blitzkatarrh, British soldiers referred to it as Flanders Grippe, but world-wide, the pandemic gained the notorious title of “Spanish Flu." Nowhere on earth escaped: the United States recorded 550,000 deaths (five times its total military fatalities in the war), while European deaths totaled more than two million.Amid the war, some governments suppressed news of the outbreak. Even as entire battalions were decimated, with both the Allies and the Germans suffering massive casualties, the details of many servicemen’s deaths were hidden to protect public morale. Meanwhile, civilian families were being struck down in their homes. Philadelphia ran out of gravediggers and coffins, and mass burial trenches had to be excavated with steam shovels. Spanish flu conjured up the specter of the Black Death of 1348 and the great plague of 1665, while the medical profession, shattered after five terrible years of conflict, lacked the resources to contain and defeat this new enemy. Through primary and archival sources, historian Catharine Arnold gives readers the first truly global account of this terrible epidemic.
Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Health and Our Food
Geoff Bond - 2007
But what if our foods were doing more harm than good, and fad diets made matters worse? Deadly Harvest examines how the foods we eat today have little in common with those of our ancestors, and why this fact is important to our health. It also offers a proven program to enhance health and improve longevity.Using the latest scientific research and studies of primitive lifestyles, the author first explains the diet that our ancestors followed—one in harmony with the human species. He then describes how our present diets affect our health, leading to disorders such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and more. Most important, he details measures we can take to improve our diet, our health, and our quality of life.
The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - 2021
Anthony Fauci is a hero. He is anything but. As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Anthony Fauci dispenses $6.1 billion in annual taxpayer-provided funding for scientific research, allowing him to dictate the subject, content, and outcome of scientific health research across the globe. Fauci uses the financial clout at his disposal to wield extraordinary influence over hospitals, universities, journals, and thousands of influential doctors and scientists—whose careers and institutions he has the power to ruin, advance, or reward. During more than a year of painstaking and meticulous research, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unearthed a shocking story that obliterates media spin on Dr. Fauci . . . and that will alarm every American—Democrat or Republican—who cares about democracy, our Constitution, and the future of our children’s health. The Real Anthony Fauci reveals how “America’s Doctor” launched his career during the early AIDS crisis by partnering with pharmaceutical companies to sabotage safe and effective off-patent therapeutic treatments for AIDS. Fauci orchestrated fraudulent studies, and then pressured US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulators into approving a deadly chemotherapy treatment he had good reason to know was worthless against AIDS. Fauci repeatedly violated federal laws to allow his Pharma partners to use impoverished and dark-skinned children as lab rats in deadly experiments with toxic AIDS and cancer chemotherapies. In early 2000, Fauci shook hands with Bill Gates in the library of Gates’ $147 million Seattle mansion, cementing a partnership that would aim to control an increasingly profitable $60 billion global vaccine enterprise with unlimited growth potential. Through funding leverage and carefully cultivated personal relationships with heads of state and leading media and social media institutions, the Pharma-Fauci-Gates alliance exercises dominion over global health policy. The Real Anthony Fauci details how Fauci, Gates, and their cohorts use their control of media outlets, scientific journals, key government and quasi-governmental agencies, global intelligence agencies, and influential scientists and physicians to flood the public with fearful propaganda about COVID-19 virulence and pathogenesis, and to muzzle debate and ruthlessly censor dissent.
White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine
Carl Elliott - 2010
A writer for The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, Carl Elliott ventures into the uncharted dark side of medicine, shining a light on the series of social and legislative changes that have sacrificed old-style doctoring to the values of consumer capitalism. Along the way, he introduces us to the often shifty characters who work the production line in Big Pharma: from the professional guinea pigs who test-pilot new drugs and the ghostwriters who pen “scientific” articles for drug manufacturers to the PR specialists who manufacture “news” bulletins. We meet the drug reps who will do practically anything to make quota in an ever-expanding arms race of pharmaceutical gift-giving; the “thought leaders” who travel the world to enlighten the medical community about the wonders of the latest release; even, finally, the ethicists who oversee all that commercialized medicine has to offer from their pharma-funded perches. Taking the pulse of the medical community today, Elliott discovers the culture of deception that has become so institutionalized many people do not even see it as a problem. Head-turning stories and a rogue’s gallery of colorful characters become his springboard for exploring larger ethical issues surrounding money. Are there certain things that should not be bought and sold? In what ways do the ethics of business clash with the ethics of medical care? And what is wrong with medical consumerism anyway? Elliott asks all these questions and more as he examines the underbelly of medicine.
Adventures of a Surgical Resident
Philip B. Dobrin - 2010
This is the story of a surgeon in training and his adventures during the years of his residency.
The Prison Doctor
Amanda Brown - 2019
From miraculous pregnancies to dirty protests, and from violent attacks on prisoners to heartbreaking acts of self-harm, she has witnessed it all. In this memoir, Amanda reveals the stories, the patients and the cases that have shaped a career helping those most of us would rather forget.
The Remarkable Life of the Skin: An Intimate Journey Across Our Largest Organ
Monty Lyman - 2020
We see it, touch it, and live in it every day. It is a habitat for a mesmerizingly complex world of micro-organisms and physical functions that are vital to our health and our survival. It is also a waste removal plant, a warning system for underlying disease and a dynamic immune barrier to infection. One of the first things people see about us, skin is crucial to our sense of identity, providing us with social significance and psychological meaning. And yet our skin and the fascinating way it functions is largely unknown to us. In prose as lucid as his research underlying it is rigorous, blending in memorable stories from the past and from his own medical experience, Monty Lyman has written a revelatory book exploring our outer surface that will surprise and enlighten in equal measure. Through the lenses of science, sociology, and history--on topics as diverse as the mechanics and magic of touch (how much goes on in the simple act of taking keys out of a pocket and unlocking a door is astounding), the close connection between the skin and the gut, what happens instantly when one gets a paper cut, and how a midnight snack can lead to sunburn--Lyman leads us on a journey across our most underrated and unexplored organ and reveals how our skin is far stranger, more wondrous, and more complex than we have ever imagined.
State of the Heart: Exploring the History, Science, and Future of Cardiac Disease
Haider Warraich - 2019
A caring and thoughtful doctor, he also writes beautifully.” —Siddhartha Mukherjee, New York Times bestselling author on Modern Death
In Heart of the Matter, Dr. Haider Warraich takes readers inside the ER, inside patients' rooms, and inside the history and technology of heart disease.More people die of heart disease than any other disease in the world, including even cancer. In fact, deaths from heart disease are on the rise around the world and in the United States. When any heart disease becomes advanced enough, it results in the development of heart failure. In the United States, heart failure is the most common reason for admission to the hospital. Heart failure strikes both the abject and the affluent. And yet, even the most basic facts about heart failure remain known by few who don’t work in medicine for a living. Many patients develop heart failure without having any problems with their coronary arteries. Heart failure can affect anyone at any time: a child recovering from a viral infection, a woman who has just given birth, a cancer patient who received chemotherapy or anyone with any number of common conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes, or sleep apnea.Warraich's signature blend of lucid writing and compelling narrative explores the complex discussion about heart failure with accessibility and compassion.
The Finest Traditions of My Calling: One Physician’s Search for the Renewal of Medicine
Abraham M. Nussbaum - 2016
We live in an era of continuous healthcare reforms, many of which focus on high volume, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. This compelling, thoughtful book is the response of a practicing psychiatrist who explains how population-based reforms have diminished the relationship between doctors and patients, to the detriment of both. As an antidote to failed reforms and an alternative to stubbornly held traditions, Dr. Abraham M. Nussbaum suggests ways that doctors and patients can learn what it means to be ill and to seek medical assistance. Using a variety of riveting stories from his own and others’ experiences, the author develops a series of metaphors to explore a doctor’s role in different healthcare reform scenarios: scientist, technician, author, gardener, teacher, servant, and witness. Each role influences what a physician sees when examining a person as a patient. Dr. Nussbaum cautions that true healthcare reform can happen only when those who practice medicine can see, and be seen by, their patients as fellow creatures. His memoir makes a hopeful appeal for change, and his insights reveal the direction that change must take.
Positive: One Doctor's Personal Encounters with Death, Life, and the US Healthcare System
Michael Saag - 2014
Saag, MD, an internationally known expert on the virus that causes AIDS, but the book is more than a memoir: through his story, Dr. Saag also shines a light on the dysfunctional US healthcare system, proposing optimistic yet realistic remedies drawn from his distinguished medical career.Mike Saag began his medical residency in 1981, within days of the Centers for Disease Control’s first report of a mysterious “gay cancer” killing young men. Soon, the young doctor’s career was yoked to the epidemic. His life’s work became turning the most deadly virus in human history into a chronic, manageable disease.In the lab at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Dr. Saag and colleagues made seminal early discoveries about the elusive virus. And at the AIDS clinic he founded, Dr. Saag met people whose fight against a virtual death sentence touched his heart and inspired him to work even harder. As his career stretched across three decades, Dr. Saag found himself battling another foe, this one almost as pernicious as AIDS itself: a broken healthcare system shaped more by politicians, insurers, and lobbyists than by patients’ needs.Positive is Dr. Saag’s tribute to the unforgettable patients he has known and an urgent call to create a comprehensive, compassionate, accessible healthcare system in the name of those we can save today.
Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice
Willie Parker - 2017
Willie Parker grew up in the Deep South, lived in a Christian household, and converted to an even more fundamentalist form of Christianity as a young man. But upon reading an interpretation of the Good Samaritan in a sermon by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he realized that in order to be a true Christian, he must show compassion for all women regardless of their needs. In 2009, he stopped practicing obstetrics to focus entirely on providing safe abortions for the women who need help the most—often women in poverty and women of color—and in the hot bed of the pro-choice debate: the South. He soon thereafter traded in his private practice and his penthouse apartment in Hawaii for the life of an itinerant abortion provider, focusing most recently on women in the Deep South. In Life’s Work, Dr. Willie Parker tells a deeply personal and thought-provoking narrative that illuminates the complex societal, political, religious, and personal realities of abortion in the United States from the unique perspective of someone who performs them and defends the right to do so every day. He also looks at how a new wave of anti-abortion activism, aimed at making incremental changes in laws and regulations state by state, are slowly chipping away at the rights of women to control their own lives. In revealing his daily battle against mandatory waiting periods and bogus rules governing the width of hallways, Dr. Parker uncovers the growing number of strings attached to the right to choose and makes a powerful Christian case for championing reproductive rights.
The COVID-19 Catastrophe: What's Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again
Richard Horton - 2020
Black Death at the Golden Gate: The Race to Save America from the Bubonic Plague
David K. Randall - 2019
His passing on March 6, 1900, would have been unremarkable if a city health officer hadn’t noticed a swollen black lymph node on his groin—a sign of bubonic plague. Empowered by racist pseudoscience, officials rushed to quarantine Chinatown while doctors examined Wong’s tissue for telltale bacteria. If the devastating disease was not contained, San Francisco would become the American epicenter of an outbreak that had already claimed ten million lives worldwide.To local press, railroad barons, and elected officials, such a possibility was inconceivable—or inconvenient. As they mounted a cover-up to obscure the threat, ending the career of one of the most brilliant scientists in the nation in the process, it fell to federal health officer Rupert Blue to save a city that refused to be rescued. Spearheading a relentless crusade for sanitation, Blue and his men patrolled the squalid streets of fast-growing San Francisco, examined gory black buboes, and dissected diseased rats that put the fate of the entire country at risk.In the tradition of Erik Larson and Steven Johnson, Randall spins a spellbinding account of Blue’s race to understand the disease and contain its spread—the only hope of saving San Francisco, and the nation, from a gruesome fate.