Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not


Florence Nightingale - 1858
    What? Is the bed already saturated with somebody else's damp before my patient comes to exhale in it his own damp? Has it not had a single chance to be aired? No, not one. It has been slept in every night."From the best known work of Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), the originator and founder of modern nursing, comes a collection of notes that played an important part in the much needed revolution in the field of nursing. For the first time it was brought to the attention of those caring for the sick that their responsibilities covered not only the administration of medicines and the application of poultices, but the proper use of fresh air, light, warmth, cleanliness, quiet, and the proper selection and administration of diet. Miss Nightingale is outspoken on these subjects as well as on other factors that she considers essential to good nursing. But, whatever her topic, her main concern and attention is always on the patient and his needs.One is impressed with the fact that the fundamental needs of the sick as observed by Miss Nightingale are amazingly similar today (even though they are generally taken for granted now) to what they were over 100 years ago when this book was written. For this reason, this little volume is as practical as it is interesting and entertaining. It will be an inspiration to the student nurse, refreshing and stimulating to the experienced nurse, and immensely helpful to anyone caring for the sick.

Killer Germs: Microbes and Diseases That Threaten Humanity


Barry E. Zimmerman - 2002
    From biblical plagues, to the AIDS crisis, to supergerms of the future, this updated and revised edition of the original covers the whole gamut of diseases that have threatened humanity since its origins.It also includes a new chapter on the history of bioterrorism and the deplorable role it has played and is likely to play in the phenomenal diversity of diseases.

The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics


Richard Davenport-Hines - 2001
    Richard Davenport-Hines, an eminent, prize-winning historian, uncovers the centrality of drug abuse in our modern industrial society, from the drug habits of Charles Dickens and John F. Kennedy to today's $400 billion annual worldwide trade in illicit drugs (the same volume as the oil industry). A vivid portrayal of the people and events that have shaped the history of narcotics, The Pursuit of Oblivion reveals that, contrary to the assumption underlying current drug policies, our need to escape reality and our body's need for physical pleasure are both ineradicable aspects of our humanity, unchangeable by government initiative.

Migraine; Inside a World of Invisible Pain


Maria Konnikova - 2021
    alone: Migraine, a disease that is still little understood, yet debilitating to its sufferers. Konnikova takes a clear-eyed look at migraine’s history, diving into current theories and more recent approaches—and offers a deeply personal account of what it’s like to experience migraine, usually with little warning and always to a level that is devastating to a degree.Eighteen percent of women are thought to suffer from migraine, and Konnikova thinks that it’s not a coincidence that the ailment has not gotten the medical investigation that it deserves. It is unfortunately far too common to see medical data gaps where a predominantly female patient population is concerned.Informative and entertaining, Migraine is an Audible Original for those who suffer from migraine and those with sufferers in their lives—which would amount to just about everyone.

Sleeping with David Baddiel


Geoff Jein - 2020
    The secret? Harnessing the incredible power of sleep.Over six episodes, a world expert on sleep will act as a guru to an insomniac comedian, transforming their nocturnal habits and showing how you can do the same. In our hectic modern lives, sleep can often feel like a luxury - studies have found that 52% of Britons struggle to sleep, while around 70 million Americans suffer from a chronic sleep disorder. However, our sleep guru and their celebrity apprentice will reveal that everything we thought we knew about sleep was wrong, and teach us how to capitalize on one of the most often neglected resources for transforming our lives.Over the course of a journey to improve the star’s sleep quality, they will demystify the science behind how and why we sleep so that we can use it to make concrete improvements to our health, wellbeing, and productivity.A TBI Media production for Audible Originals.This is an Audible Original Podcast. Free for members. You can download all 6 episodes to your Library now.©2020 Audible, Ltd. (P)2020 Audible, Ltd.

The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity—and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race


Daniel Z. Lieberman - 2018
    In pursuit of these things, it is undeterred by emotion, fear, or morality. Dopamine is the source of our every urge, that little bit of biology that makes an ambitious business professional sacrifice everything in pursuit of success, or that drives a satisfied spouse to risk it all for the thrill of someone new. Simply put, it is why we seek and succeed; it is why we discover and prosper. Yet, at the same time, it’s why we gamble and squander. From dopamine’s point of view, it’s not the having that matters. It’s getting something—anything—that’s new. From this understanding—the difference between possessing something versus anticipating it—we can understand in a revolutionary new way why we behave as we do in love, business, addiction, politics, religion – and we can even predict those behaviors in ourselves and others. In The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity—and will Determine the Fate of the Human Race, George Washington University professor and psychiatrist Daniel Z. Lieberman, MD, and Georgetown University lecturer Michael E. Long present a potentially life-changing proposal: Much of human life has an unconsidered component that explains an array of behaviors previously thought to be unrelated, including why winners cheat, why geniuses often suffer with mental illness, why nearly all diets fail, and why the brains of liberals and conservatives really are different.

American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970


Thomas P. Hughes - 1989
    Hughes his reputation as one of the foremost historians of technology of our age and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1990, American Genesis tells the sweeping story of America's technological revolution. Unlike other histories of technology, which focus on particular inventions like the light bulb or the automobile, American Genesis makes these inventions characters in a broad chronicle, both shaped by and shaping a culture. By weaving scientific and technological advancement into other cultural trends, Hughes demonstrates here the myriad ways in which the two are inexorably linked, and in a new preface, he recounts his earlier missteps in predicting the future of technology and follows its move into the information age.

Jet Man: The Making and Breaking of Frank Whittle, Genius of the Jet Revolution


Duncan Campbell-Smith - 2020
    In 1985 Hans von Ohain, the scientist who pioneered Nazi Germany's efforts to build a jet plane, posed the question: 'Would World War II have occured if the Luftwaffe knew it faced operational British jets instead of Spitfires?' He immediately answered, 'I, for one, think not.'Frank Whittle, working-class outsider and self-taught enthusiast, had worked out the blueprint of a completely new type of engine in 1929, only for his ideas to be blocked by bureaucratic opposition until the outbreak of war in 1939. The importance of his work was recognized too late by the government for his revolutionary engine to play a major part in World War II. After the war Whittle's dream of civilian jet-powered aircraft became a reality and Britain enjoyed a golden age of 1950's jet-powered flight.Drawing on Whittle's extensive private papers, Campbell-Smith tells the story of a stoic and overlooked British hero, a tantalizing tale of 'what might have been'.

The Spanish Flu Epidemic and Its Influence on History


Jaime Breitnauer - 2019
    What seemed like a harmless cold morphed into a global pandemic that would wipe out as many as a hundred-million people - ten times as many as the Great War. German troops faltered lending the allies the winning advantage, India turned its sights to independence while South Africa turned to God. In Western Samoa a quarter of the population died; in some parts of Alaska, whole villages were wiped out. Civil unrest sparked by influenza shaped nations and heralded a new era of public health where people were no longer blamed for contracting disease. Using real case histories, we take a journey through the world in 1918, and look at the impact of Spanish flu on populations from America, to France, to the Arctic, and the scientific legacy this deadly virus has left behind.

Six Modern Plagues and How We Are Causing Them


Mark Jerome Walters - 2003
    Lyme disease, and SARS. According to Walters, we are not only victims of these emerging diseases; we are helping exacerbate their creation and spread.

The Science of Mindfulness: A Research-Based Path to Well-Being


Ronald D. Siegel - 2014
    Modern science demonstrates that this mental hardwiring, traceable to the survival needs of our earliest ancestors, is at the root of many of the psychological and behavioral problems that we face today.For thousands of years, people have used mindfulness practices—techniques to develop awareness of present experience with acceptance—to deal effectively with a wide range of life challenges. And, a large and fascinating body of scientific research now validates the remarkable benefits of mindfulness practice for psychological as well as physical health.But how exactly does mindfulness work, in scientific terms? How can understanding the science and practice of mindfulness improve everyday life? And how can the human brain, whose very functioning gives rise to so many of the problems we struggle with, actually provide a solution?Now, in the 24 fascinating lectures of The Science of Mindfulness, Professor Ronald D. Siegel, a clinical psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, reveals the science behind mindfulness in compelling detail and demonstrates its application to an extraordinary range of human problems—psychological, social, and medical. You’ll closely examine the neurobiology involved, leaving you with a clear knowledge of the science underlying ancient practices that are now profoundly influencing the contemporary world. And you’ll learn many practical ways you can use mindfulness techniques in your own life.

The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America


Allan M. Brandt - 2007
    It is hard to find a photo of Humphrey Bogart or Lauren Bacall without a cigarette. No product has been so heavily promoted or has become so deeply entrenched in American consciousness.And no product has received such sustained scientific scrutiny. The development of new medical knowledge demonstrating the dire harms of smoking ultimately shaped the evolution of evidence-based medicine. In response, the tobacco industry engineered a campaign of scientific disinformation seeking to delay, disrupt, and suppress these studies. Using a massive archive of previously secret documents, historian Allan Brandt shows how the industry pioneered these campaigns, particularly using special interest lobbying and largesse to elude regulation.But even as the cultural dominance of the cigarette has waned and consumption has fallen dramatically in the U.S., Big Tobacco remains securely positioned to expand into new global markets. The implications for the future are vast: 100 million people died of smoking-related diseases in the 20th century; in the next 100 years, we expect 1 billion deaths worldwide.

ADHD Nation: Children, Doctors, Big Pharma, and the Making of an American Epidemic


Alan Schwarz - 2016
    The numbers rise every year. And still, many experts and drug companies deny any cause for concern. In fact, they say that adults and the rest of the world should embrace ADHD and that its medications will transform their lives. In ADHD Nation, Alan Schwarz examines the roots and the rise of this cultural and medical phenomenon: The father of ADHD, Dr. Keith Conners, spends fifty years advocating drugs like Ritalin before realizing his role in what he now calls “a national disaster of dangerous proportions”; a troubled young girl and a studious teenage boy get entangled in the growing ADHD machine and take medications that backfire horribly; and big Pharma egregiously over-promotes the disorder and earns billions from the mishandling of children (and now adults). While demonstrating that ADHD is real and can be medicated when appropriate, Schwarz sounds a long-overdue alarm and urges America to address this growing national health crisis.

Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice


Rupa Marya - 2021
    The surge in inflammatory illnesses such as gastrointestinal disorders and asthma. Mass uprisings around the world in response to systemic racism and violence. Rising numbers of climate refugees. Our bodies, societies, and planet are inflamed.Boldly original, Inflamed takes us on a medical tour through the human body--our digestive, endocrine, circulatory, respiratory, reproductive, immune, and nervous systems. Unlike a traditional anatomy book, this groundbreaking work illuminates the hidden relationships between our biological systems and the profound injustices of our political and economic systems. Inflammation is connected to the food we eat, the air we breathe, and the diversity of the microbes living inside us, which regulate everything from our brain's development to our immune system's functioning. It's connected to the number of traumatic events we experienced as children and to the traumas endured by our ancestors. It's connected not only to access to health care but to the very models of health that physicians practice.Raj Patel, the renowned political economist and New York Times bestselling author of The Value of Nothing, teams up with the physician Rupa Marya to offer a radical new cure: the deep medicine of decolonization. Decolonizing heals what has been divided, reestablishing our relationships with the Earth and one another. Combining the latest scientific research and scholarship on globalization with the stories of Marya's work with patients in marginalized communities, activist passion, and the wisdom of Indigenous groups, Inflamed points the way toward a deep medicine that has the potential to heal not only our bodies, but the world.

Lifelines: A Doctor's Journey in the Fight for Public Health


Leana Wen - 2021
    Leana Wen likes to use. You don’t know it because good public health is invisible. It becomes visible only in its absence, when it is underfunded and ignored, a bitter truth laid bare as never before by the devastation of COVID-19.Leana Wen—emergency physician, former Baltimore health commissioner, CNN medical analyst, and Washington Post contributing columnist—has lived on the front lines of public health, leading the fight against the opioid epidemic, outbreaks of infectious disease, maternal and infant mortality, and COVID-19 disinformation. Here, in gripping detail, Wen lays bare the lifesaving work of public health and its innovative approach to social ills, treating gun violence as a contagious disease, for example, and racism as a threat to health.Wen also tells her own uniquely American story: an immigrant from China, she and her family received food stamps and were at times homeless despite her parents working multiple jobs. That child went on to attend college at thirteen, become a Rhodes scholar, and turn to public health as the way to make a difference in the country that had offered her such possibilities.Ultimately, she insists, it is public health that ensures citizens are not robbed of decades of life, and that where children live does not determine whether they live.