New Books in Medicine

The average person produces about four hundred pounds of excrement a year. More than seven billion people live on this planet. Holy crap! Because of the diseases it spreads, we have learned to distance ourselves from our waste, but the long line of engineering marvels we've created to do so--from Roman sewage systems and medieval latrines to the immense, computerized treatment plants we use today-...

"Quarantine, as an invention of man, is the most primitive and universal instrument of defense against contagious disease epidemics. Almost universally maligned or ignored by historians, quarantine is like an iceberg with 90 percent of its secrets hidden from view in inaccessible archives of the government."  In Germs at Bay: Politics, Public Health, and American Quarantine (Praeger/ABC-Clio, 2021...

Kenneth Anderson is the author of Strychnine and Gold, a two-volume history of the “untold story of addiction treatment in the United States.” Anderson knows what he’s talking about when he discusses substance use and treatment–he holds multiple master’s degrees, including one in psychology and substance use disorders, and has worked in the field of addiction treatment for over twenty years as the...

In the United States, tens of thousands of children are conceived every year with donated gametes. When people decide to create a child with donated gametes, they’ll typically have to make a moral decision about whether the identity of the donor will be available to the resulting person. This quickly raises additional moral and even existential questions about the value of knowing about the circum...

Elaborately conceived, grandly constructed insane asylums—ranging in appearance from classical temples to Gothic castles—were once a common sight looming on the outskirts of American towns and cities. Many of these buildings were razed long ago, and those that remain stand as grim reminders of an often cruel system. For much of the nineteenth century, however, these asylums epitomized the widely h...

Inside our heads we carry around an infinite and endlessly unfolding map of the world. Navigation is one of the most ancient neural abilities we have―older than language. In Dark and Magical Places: The Neuroscience of Navigation (Norton, 2022), Christopher Kemp embarks on a journey to discover the remarkable extent of what our minds can do. Fueled by his own spatial shortcomings, Kemp describes t...

From mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue to chronic bacterial infections such as yaws, Southeast Asia is home to a wide range of tropical diseases. For a long time, the arrival in the region of these and other dangerous tropical diseases was believed to be connected to the introduction of agriculture. But how long have these diseases really been around for? How are they connected to...

Societies all over the world are getting older, the result of the fact that we are living longer and having fewer children. At some point in the near future, much of the developed world will have at least twenty percent of their national populations over the age of sixty-five. Bradley Schurman calls this the Super Age. Today, Italy, Japan, and Germany have already reached the Super Age, and anothe...

In Health, Healing and Illness in African History (Bloomsbury, 2021), Rebekah Lee makes an overall assessment of the history and historiography and health, healing and illness in the African context. This unique text is divided in two parts. In the first half of the book, Lee presents a chronological survey and analysis of the ideas and literature that multiple disciplines have produced while stud...

In 1948, the World Health Organization began to prepare its social psychiatry project, which aimed to discover the epidemiology and arrive at a classification of mental disorders. In Mad by the Millions: Mental Disorders and the Early Years of the World Health Organization (MIT Press, 2021), Harry Y-Jui Wu examines the WHO's ambitious project, arguing that it was shaped by the postwar faith in tec...

Heroic science. Chaotic politics. Billionaire entrepreneurs. Award-winning journalist Brendan Borrell brings the defining story of our times alive through compulsively readable, first-time reporting on the players leading the fight against a vicious virus. The First Shots: The Epic Rivalries and Heroic Science Behind the Race to the Coronavirus Vaccine (Mariner Books, 2021), soon to be the subject...

Tracing the dramatic conflicts both inside organized medicine and between the medical profession and the larger society over quality, equality, and economy in health care, Peter A. Swenson illuminates the history of American medical politics from the late nineteenth century to the present. Disorder: A History of Reform, Reaction, and Money in American Medicine (Yale UP, 2021) chronicles the role o...

Tune in to hear Prof. Talya Miron Shatz, author of Your Life Depends on It: What You Can Do to Make Better Choices About Your Health (Basic Books, 2021) discuss her surprising decision to publish her book with a non-academic publisher and how her writing and revision were driven by her desire to get her book into thousands of homes around the world. Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic L...

Amy C. Sullivan explores the complexity of America’s opioid epidemic through firsthand accounts of people grappling with the reverberating effects of stigma, treatment, and recovery. Taking a clear-eyed, nonjudgmental perspective of every aspect of these issues—drug use, parenting, harm reduction, medication, abstinence, and stigma—Opioid Reckoning: Love, Loss, and Redemption in the Rehab State (U...

Anti-vaccination movements pose an increasing threat to global public health, but what of vaccine hesitancy? Join us for a discussion on the effects of vaccine hesitancy in Japan during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. University of Turku's Centre for East Asian Studies University Teacher Dr. Yoko Demelius and University Lecturer Dr. Kamila Szczepanska discuss historical, cultural, and legal factors...

It is one of the most extraordinary cases in the history of science: the mating calls of insects were mistaken for a “sonic weapon” that led to a major diplomatic row. Since August 2017, the world media has been absorbed in the “attack” on diplomats from the American and Canadian Embassies in Cuba. While physicians treating victims have described it as a novel and perplexing condition that involve...

For decades, some of our best and brightest medical scientists have dedicated themselves to finding a cure for Alzheimer's disease. What happened? Where is the cure? The biggest breakthroughs occurred twenty-five years ago, with little progress since. In How Not to Study a Disease: The Story of Alzheimer's (MIT Press, 2021), neurobiologist Karl Herrup explains why the Alzheimer's discoveries of th...

Aro Velmet's Pasteur's Empire: Bacteriology in France, Its Colonies, and the World (Oxford UP, 2020) is a complex history of the Pasteur Institutes, a network of scientific laboratories established in France and throughout the French empire, beginning in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The book examines the crucial roles Pastorians and Pasteurization played in the imperial project in an...

In this lively, unexpected look at the hearts of animals—from fish to bats to humans—American Museum of Natural History zoologist Bill Schutt tells an incredible story of evolution and scientific progress. We join Schutt on a tour from the origins of circulation, still evident in microorganisms today, to the tiny hardworking pumps of worms, to the golf-cart-size hearts of blue whales. We visit bea...

Dr. Paul Steinberg, Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, returns to New Books Network to discuss his latest book, Applying Psychoanalytic Thought to Contemporary Mental Health Practice (Routledge, 2021). In this latest work, a “sister” publication his prior Psychoanalysis in Medicine (Routledge, 2020), Dr. Steinberg describes the potential for p...

Minds and Machines is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Miguel Nicolelis, Professor of Neurobiology, Neurology, Neurosurgery, Biomedical Engineering, Psychology and Neuroscience and Orthopaedic Surgery and Co-Director of the Center for Neuroengineering at Duke University. This thought-provoking conversation dives into Miguel Nicolelis’ extensive and important resea...

The idea that a woman may leave a biological trace on her gestating offspring has long been a commonplace folk intuition and a matter of scientific intrigue, but the form of that idea has changed dramatically over time. Beginning with the advent of modern genetics at the turn of the twentieth century, biomedical scientists dismissed any notion that a mother--except in cases of extreme deprivation...

When Rebecca Lester was eleven years old--and again when she was eighteen--she almost died from anorexia nervosa. Now both a tenured professor in anthropology and a licensed social worker, she turns her ethnographic and clinical gaze to the world of eating disorders--their history, diagnosis, lived realities, treatment, and place in the American cultural imagination. Famished: Eating Disorders and...

Timothy Yang’s A Medicated Empire: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Modern Japan (Cornell 2021) is a case study of Hoshi Pharmaceutical, a Japanese drug company that exemplified the push for a modern “culture of self-medication.” The history of Hoshi is tightly intertwined with state promotion of Western biomedicine beginning in the late nineteenth century, but also reveals tensions between pharmac...

Today I talked to Thom Hartmann about his new book The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich (Berrett-Koehler, 2021). To hear Thom Hartmann tell it, the battle over whether healthcare should be seen as a right or a privilege has two phases in American history. From the 1880’s to the 1980’s the idea of universal American healthcare was oppo...