Inspired by Homer's description of the ebb and flow of the "wine dark sea," the ancient Greeks conceived a back-and-forth movement of blood. That false notion, perpetuated by the influential Roman physician Galen, prevailed for fifteen hundred years until William Harvey proved that blood circulates: the heart pumps blood in one direction through the arteries and it returns through the veins. Harvey's discovery revolutionized the life sciences by making possible an entirely new quantitative understanding of the cardiovascular system, a way of thinking on which many of our lifesaving medical interventions today depend. In The Wine-Dark Sea Within, cardiologist Dhun Sethna argues that Harvey's revelation inaugurated modern medicine and paved the way for groundbreaking advances from intravenous therapy, cardiac imaging, and stent insertions to bypass surgery, dialysis, and heart-lung machines. Weaving together three thousand years of global history, following bitter feuds and epic alliances, tragic failures and extraordinary advancements, this is a provocative history by a fresh voice in popular science.

Though First Nations communities in Canada have historically lacked access to clean water, affordable food, and equitable healthcare, they have never lacked access to well-funded scientists seeking to study them. The Science of Settler Colonialism examines the relationship between science and settler colonialism through the lens of "Aboriginal diabetes" and the thrifty gene hypothesis, which posits that Indigenous peoples are genetically predisposed to type-II diabetes and obesity due to their alleged hunter-gatherer genes. Hay's study begins with Charles Darwin's travels and his observations on the Indigenous peoples he encountered to set the context for Canadian histories of medicine and colonialism, which are rooted in Victorian science and empire. It continues in the mid-twentieth century with a look at nutritional experimentation during the long career of Percy Moore, the medical director of Indian Affairs (1946-1965). Hay then turns to James Neel's invention of the thrifty gene hypothesis in 1962 and Robert Hegele's reinvention and application of the hypothesis to Sandy Lake First Nation in northern Ontario in the 1990s. Finally, Hay demonstrates the way in which settler colonial science was responded to and resisted by Indigenous leadership in Sandy Lake First Nation, who used monies from the thrifty gene study to fund wellness programs in their community. The Science of Settler Colonialism exposes the exploitative nature of settler science with Indigenous subjects, the flawed scientific theories stemming from faulty assumptions of Indigenous decline and disappearance, as well as the severe inequities in Canadian healthcare that persist even today.

The Covid-19 pandemic has presented the world with unprecedented challenges. The effects on society have been comprehensive and affected every walk of life. In Pandemic Heroes and Heroines, Marguerite Bouvard offers the first book-length study of the pandemic's impact on one of the most vulnerable groups, front line medical workers charged with caring for the sick and providing general health and welfare.

Contrary to what Simone de Beauvoir famously argued in 1949, men have not lived without knowing the burdens of their sex. Though men may have been elevated to cultural positions of strength and privilege, it has not been without intense scrutiny of their biological functions. Investigations of male potency and the 'ability to perform' have long been mainstays of social, political, and artistic discourse and have often provoked spirited and partisan declarations on what it means to be a man. This interdisciplinary collection considers the tensions that have developed between the historical privilege often ascribed to the male and the vulnerabilities to which his body is prone. Andrew Mangham and Daniel Lea's introduction illustrates how with the dawn of modern medicine during the Renaissance there emerged a complex set of languages for describing the male body not only as a symbol of strength, but as flesh and bone prone to illness, injury and dysfunction. Using a variety of historical and literary approaches, the essays consider the critical ways in which medicine's interactions with literature reveal vital clues about the ways sex, gender, and identity are constructed through treatments of a range of 'pathologies' including deformity, venereal disease, injury, nervousness, and sexual difference. The relationships between male medicine and ideals of potency and masculinity are searchingly explored through a broad range of sources including African American slave fictions, southern gothic, early modern poetry, Victorian literature, and the Modern novel.

Weill Cornell Medicine is a story of continuity and transformation. Throughout its colorful history, Cornell's medical school has been a leader in education, patient care, and research-from its founding as Cornell University Medical College in 1898, to its renaming as Weill Cornell Medical College in 1998, and now in its current incarnation as Weill Cornell Medicine.In this insightful and nuanced book, dean emeritus Antonio M. Gotto Jr., MD, and Jennifer Moon situate the history of Cornell's medical school in the context of the development of modern medicine and health care. The book examines the triumphs, struggles, and controversies the medical college has undergone. It recounts events surrounding the medical school's beginnings as one of the first to accept female students, its pioneering efforts to provide health care to patients in the emerging middle class, wartime and the creation of overseas military hospitals, medical research ranging from the effects of alcohol during Prohibition to classified partnerships with the Central Intelligence Agency, and the impact of the Depression, 1960s counterculture, and the Vietnam War on the institution. The authors describe how the medical school built itself back up after nearing the brink of financial ruin in the late 1970s, with philanthropic support and a renewal of its longstanding commitments to biomedical innovation and discovery.Central to this story is the closely intertwined, and at times tumultuous, relationship between Weill Cornell and its hospital affiliate, now known as New York-Presbyterian. Today the medical school's reach extends from its home base in Manhattan to a branch campus in Qatar and to partnerships with institutions in Houston, Tanzania, and Haiti. As Weill Cornell Medicine relates, the medical college has never been better poised to improve health around the globe than it is now.

The riveting true story of John and Aileen Crowley's race to find a cure for Pompe disease that inspired the movie Extraordinary Measures

With three beautiful children, a new house, and financial security, John and Aileen Crowley were on top of the world--until their two youngest children, fifteen-month-old Megan and five-month-old Patrick, were diagnosed with Pompe disease and given only months to live. Refusing to accept a death sentence, John quit his financial consultant job and invested his life savings in a biotechnology start-up to research the disease and find a cure. Battling scientific setbacks, conflict of interest accusations, and business troubles, John and Aileen would be tested to their limits as they valiantly fought, and succeeded, in finding revolutionary new treatment for the disease--offering hope to Megan, Patrick, and the many children and families affected by Pompe disease around the world.

The inspiration for the captivating film Extraordinary Measures, starring Brendan Fraser and Harrison Ford, The Cure is a remarkable true story of cutting-edge science, business acumen and daring, and one family's indomitable spirit.

It is 1919 and Elizabeth Hughes, the eleven-year-old daughter of America's most-distinguished jurist and politician, Charles Evans Hughes, has been diagnosed with juvenile diabetes. It is essentially a death sentence. The only accepted form of treatment - starvation - whittles her down to forty-five pounds skin and bones. Miles away, Canadian researchers Frederick Banting and Charles Best manage to identify and purify insulin from animal pancreases - a miracle soon marred by scientific jealousy, intense business competition and fistfights. In a race against time and a ravaging disease, Elizabeth becomes one of the first diabetics to receive insulin injections - all while its discoverers and a little known pharmaceutical company struggle to make it available to the rest of the world.

Relive the heartwarming true story of the discovery of insulin as it's never been told before. Written with authentic detail and suspense, and featuring walk-ons by William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Eli Lilly himself, among many others.

'Fascinating and compassionate' Horatio Clare The King of France - thinking he was made of glass - was terrified he might shatter...and he wasn't alone. After the Emperor met his end at Waterloo, an epidemic of Napoleons piled into France's asylums. Throughout the nineteenth century, dozens of middle-aged women tried to convince their physicians that they were, in fact, dead. For centuries we've dismissed delusions as something for doctors to sort out behind locked doors. But delusions are more than just bizarre quirks - they hold the key to collective anxieties and traumas. In this groundbreaking history, Victoria Shepherd uncovers stories of delusions from medieval times to the present day and implores us to identify reason in apparent madness.

IN THE WAR AGAINST DISEASES, THEY ARE THE SPECIAL FORCES.

They always keep a bag packed. They seldom have more than twenty-four hours' notice before they are dispatched. The phone calls that tell them to head to the airport, sometimes in the middle of the night, may give them no more information than the country they are traveling to and the epidemic they will tackle when they get there.

The universal human instinct is to run from an outbreak of disease. These doctors run toward it.

They are the disease detective corps of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the federal agency that tracks and tries to prevent disease outbreaks and bioterrorist attacks around the world. They are formally called the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) -- a group founded more than fifty years ago out of fear that the Korean War might bring the use of biological weapons -- and, like intelligence operatives in the traditional sense, they perform their work largely in anonymity. They are not household names, but over the years they were first to confront the outbreaks that became known as hantavirus, Ebola virus, and AIDS. Now they hunt down the deadly threats that dominate our headlines: West Nile virus, anthrax, and SARS.

In this riveting narrative, Maryn McKenna -- the only journalist ever given full access to the EIS in its fifty-three-year history -- follows the first class of disease detectives to come to the CDC after September 11, the first to confront not just naturally occurring outbreaks but the man-made threat of bioterrorism. They are talented researchers -- many with young families -- who trade two years of low pay and extremely long hours for the chance to be part of the group that has helped eradicate smallpox, push back polio, and solve the first major outbreaks of Legionnaires' disease, toxic shock syndrome, and "E. coli" O157.

Urgent, exhilarating, and compelling, "Beating Back the Devil" goes with the EIS as they try to stop epidemics -- before the epidemics stop us.

Investigative reporter Brian Deer exposes a conspiracy of fraud and betrayal behind attacks on a mainstay of medicine: vaccinations. 2021 IPPY Book Award Winner (Gold) in Health/Medicine/Nutrition, Recipient of the Eric Hoffer Award for Nonfiction in the Culture Category. From San Francisco to Shanghai, from Vancouver to Venice, controversy over vaccines is erupting around the globe. Fear is spreading. Banished diseases have returned. And a militant "anti-vax" movement has surfaced to campaign against children's shots. But why? In The Doctor Who Fooled the World, award-winning investigative reporter Brian Deer exposes the truth behind the crisis. Writing with the page-turning tension of a detective story, he unmasks the players and unearths the facts. Where it began. Who was responsible. How they pulled it off. Who paid. At the heart of this dark narrative is the rise of the so-called "father of the anti-vaccine movement": a British-born doctor, Andrew Wakefield. Banned from medicine, thanks to Deer's discoveries, he fled to the United States to pursue his ambitions, and now claims to be winning a "war." In an epic investigation spread across fifteen years, Deer battles medical secrecy and insider cover-ups, smear campaigns and gagging lawsuits, to uncover rigged research and moneymaking schemes, the heartbreaking plight of families struggling with disability, and the scientific scandal of our time.

From contraception to cloning and pregnancy to populations, reproduction presents urgent challenges today. This field-defining history synthesizes a vast amount of scholarship to take the long view. Spanning from antiquity to the present day, the book focuses on the Mediterranean, western Europe, North America and their empires. It combines history of science, technology and medicine with social, cultural and demographic accounts. Ranging from the most intimate experiences to planetary policy, it tells new stories and revises received ideas. An international team of scholars asks how modern 'reproduction' - an abstract process of perpetuating living organisms - replaced the old 'generation' - the active making of humans and beasts, plants and even minerals. Striking illustrations invite readers to explore artefacts, from an ancient Egyptian fertility figurine to the announcement of the first test-tube baby. Authoritative and accessible, Reproduction offers students and non-specialists an essential starting point and sets fresh agendas for research.

Medicine finally has discovered fatigue. Recent articles about various diseases conclude that fatigue has been underrecognized, underdiagnosed, and undertreated. Scholars in the social sciences and humanities have also ignored the phenomenon. As a result, we know little about what it means to live with this condition, especially given its diverse symptoms and causes. Emily K. Abel offers the first history of fatigue, one that is scrupulously researched but also informed by her own experiences as a cancer survivor. Abel reveals how the limits of medicine and the American cultural emphasis on productivity intersect to stigmatize those with fatigue. Without an agreed-upon approach to confirm the problem through medical diagnosis, it is difficult to convince others that it is real. When fatigue limits our ability to work, our society sees us as burdens or worse. With her engaging and informative style, Abel gives us a synthetic history of fatigue and elucidates how it has been ignored or misunderstood, not only by medical professionals but also by American society as a whole.

Ranging from the Egypt of the Pharaohs to the present day, Historical Atlas of Dermatology and Dermatologists offers a unique insight into the history of dermatology and the influences that led to present practice. It sheds new light on the emergence of dermatology as a separate medical speciality and on some of the key players who have contributed to its development.

Arranged as an illustrated time-line this volume features an exceptional range of historical plates such as 'Molluscum contagiosum', from Thomas Bateman's Delineations of Cutaneous Diseases, 1817, an 1869 painting of ichthyosis hystrix by Carl Heitzmann, and early experiments in ultraviolet therapy by Finsen and colleagues in 1903. The authors have selected individuals representative of each era, workers who dealt seriously with the dermatologic concerns of the day, or who through their opinions or behavior project the color and ambience of the period in which they lived. They have included typical examples of the books, journals, instruments, and devices that made up the annals and paraphernalia of the speciality as it evolved.

In order to know where you are going, you have to know where you've been. The field of dermatology has been fragmented in the last 30 years. It is becoming increasingly difficult to answer the simple questions: What is dermatology and what is a dermatologist? Research dermatology, dermato-histopathology, pediatric dermatology, and the explosion of surgical techniques have all made their mark on how dermatology is practiced. Historical Atlas of Dermatology and Dermatologists explores the development of this field and where it may be going in the future.

Pioneer Science and the Great Plagues covers the century when infectious plagues - anthrax, tuberculosis, tetanus, plague, smallpox, and polio - were conquered, and details the important role that veterinary scientists played. The narrative is driven by astonishing events that centered on animal disease: the influenza pandemic of 1872, discovery of the causes of anthrax and tuberculosis in the 1880s, conquest of Texas cattle fever and then yellow fever, German anthrax attacks on the United States during World War I, the tuberculin war of 1931, Japanese biological warfare in the 1940s, and today's bioterror dangers. Veterinary science in the rural Midwest arose from agriculture, but in urban Philadelphia it came from medicine; similar differences occurred in Canada between Toronto and Montreal. As land-grant colleges were established after the American Civil War, individual states followed divergent pathways in supporting veterinary science. Some employed a trade school curriculum that taught agriculturalists to empirically treat animal diseases and others emphasized a curriculum tied to science. This pattern continued for a century, but today some institutions have moved back to the trade school philosophy. Avoiding lessons of the 1910 Flexner Report on medical education reform, university-associated veterinary schools are being approved that do not have control of their own veterinary hospitals, diagnostic laboratories, and research institutes - components that are critical for training students in science. Underlying this change were twin idiosyncrasies of culture - disbelief in science and distrust of government - that spawned scientology, creationism, anti-vaccination movements, and other anti-science scams. As new infectious plagues continue to arise, Pioneer Science and the Great Plagues details the strategies we learned defeating plagues from 1860 to 1960 - and the essential role veterinary science played. To defeat the plagues of today it is essential we avoid the digital cocoon of disbelief in science and cultural stasis now threatening progress.

Pioneer Science and the Great Plagues covers the century when infectious plagues - anthrax, tuberculosis, tetanus, plague, smallpox, and polio - were conquered, and details the important role that veterinary scientists played. The narrative is driven by astonishing events that centered on animal disease: the influenza pandemic of 1872, discovery of the causes of anthrax and tuberculosis in the 1880s, conquest of Texas cattle fever and then yellow fever, German anthrax attacks on the United States during World War I, the tuberculin war of 1931, Japanese biological warfare in the 1940s, and today's bioterror dangers. Veterinary science in the rural Midwest arose from agriculture, but in urban Philadelphia it came from medicine; similar differences occurred in Canada between Toronto and Montreal. As land-grant colleges were established after the American Civil War, individual states followed divergent pathways in supporting veterinary science. Some employed a trade school curriculum that taught agriculturalists to empirically treat animal diseases and others emphasized a curriculum tied to science. This pattern continued for a century, but today some institutions have moved back to the trade school philosophy. Avoiding lessons of the 1910 Flexner Report on medical education reform, university-associated veterinary schools are being approved that do not have control of their own veterinary hospitals, diagnostic laboratories, and research institutes - components that are critical for training students in science. Underlying this change were twin idiosyncrasies of culture - disbelief in science and distrust of government - that spawned scientology, creationism, anti-vaccination movements, and other anti-science scams. As new infectious plagues continue to arise, Pioneer Science and the Great Plagues details the strategies we learned defeating plagues from 1860 to 1960 - and the essential role veterinary science played. To defeat the plagues of today it is essential we avoid the digital cocoon of disbelief in science and cultural stasis now threatening progress.

Powerfully involving narrative and incisive detail, clarity and inherent drama: Blood offers in abundance the qualities that define the best popular science writing. Here is the sweeping story of a substance that has been feared, revered, mythologized, and used in magic and medicine from earliest times--a substance that has become the center of a huge, secretive, and often dangerous worldwide commerce.

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Blood was described by judges as "a gripping page-turner, a significant contribution to the history of medicine and technology and a cautionary tale. Meticulously reported and exhaustively documented."

Provides a comprehensive survey of the medical world of the European sixteenth century and clearly explains to students what medicine was and the impact of changes in society such as the print revolution, the Reformation, and the opening-up of new worlds had on medical ideas and practices allowing them to see how the history of medicine (and early modern Europe) was shaped over the course of the century. The chapters in the book explore topics such as new worlds, new drugs and new diseases, urban health, different roles in medicine for men and women, medical communication, the recovery of ancient medicine, religion and medicine and the patient experience providing students with a fascinating overview of medicine, in the broadest sense, in the sixteenth century By including material from Germany and Spain, as well as from a large range of unfamiliar authors, this book offers many new insights into the way in which European medicine was studied, practised and challenged in the age of Leonardo, Vesalius and Paracelsus.

In the first comprehensive exploration of the history and practice of folk medicine in the Appalachian region, Anthony Cavender melds folklore, medical anthropology, and Appalachian history and draws extensively on oral histories and archival sources from the nineteenth century to the present. He provides a complete tour of ailments and folk treatments organized by body systems, as well as information on medicinal plants, patent medicines, and magico-religious beliefs and practices. He investigates folk healers and their methods, profiling three living practitioners: an herbalist, a faith healer, and a Native American healer. The book also includes an appendix of botanicals and a glossary of folk medical terms. Demonstrating the ongoing interplay between mainstream scientific medicine and folk medicine, Cavender challenges the conventional view of southern Appalachia as an exceptional region isolated from outside contact. His thorough and accessible study reveals how Appalachian folk medicine encompasses such diverse and important influences as European and Native American culture and America's changing medical and health-care environment. In doing so, he offers a compelling representation of the cultural history of the region as seen through its health practices. |A comprehensive account of the history and practice of folk medicine in the Appalachian region. Anthony Cavender provides a tour of ailments and treatments organized by body systems and covers medicinal plans, patent medicines, and magico-religious practices. He also profiles three living practitioners: an herbalist, a faith healer, and a Native American healer. Includes an appendix of botanicals and a glossary of folk medical terms.

The maintenance of human health and the mechanisms by which this is achieved - through medicine, medical intervention and care-giving - are fundamentals of human societies. However, archaeological investigations of medicine and care have tended to examine the obvious and explicit manifestations of medical treatment as discrete practices that take place within specific settings, rather than as broader indicators of medical worldviews and health beliefs. This volume highlights the importance of medical worldviews as a means of understanding healthcare and medical practice in the past. The volume brings together ten chapters, with themes ranging from a bioarchaeology of Neanderthal healthcare, to Roman air quality, decontamination strategies at Australian quarantine centres, to local resistance to colonial medical structures in South America. Within their chapters the contributors argue for greater integration between archaeology and both the medical and environmental humanities, while the Introduction presents suggestions for future engagement with emerging discourse in community and public health, environmental and planetary health, genetic and epigenetic medicine, 'exposome' studies and ecological public health, microbiome studies and historical disability studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of World Archaeology.

A sweeping global history that looks beyond European urban centers to show how slavery, colonialism, and war propelled the development of modern medicine. Most stories of medical progress come with ready-made heroes. John Snow traced the origins of London's 1854 cholera outbreak to a water pump, leading to the birth of epidemiology. Florence Nightingale's contributions to the care of soldiers in the Crimean War revolutionized medical hygiene, transforming hospitals from crucibles of infection to sanctuaries of recuperation. Yet histories of individual innovators ignore many key sources of medical knowledge, especially when it comes to the science of infectious disease. Reexamining the foundations of modern medicine, Jim Downs shows that the study of infectious disease depended crucially on the unrecognized contributions of nonconsenting subjects-conscripted soldiers, enslaved people, and subjects of empire. Plantations, slave ships, and battlefields were the laboratories in which physicians came to understand the spread of disease. Military doctors learned about the importance of air quality by monitoring Africans confined to the bottom of slave ships. Statisticians charted cholera outbreaks by surveilling Muslims in British-dominated territories returning from their annual pilgrimage. The field hospitals of the Crimean War and the US Civil War were carefully observed experiments in disease transmission. The scientific knowledge derived from discarding and exploiting human life is now the basis of our ability to protect humanity from epidemics. Boldly argued and eye-opening, Maladies of Empire gives a full account of the true price of medical progress.

"Healing with Herbs and Rituals" is an herbal remedy-based understanding of "curanderismo" and the practice of "yerberas, " or herbalists, as found in the American Southwest and northern Mexico.

Part One, "Folk Healers and Folk Healing," focuses on individual healers and their procedures. Part Two, "Green Medicine: Traditional Mexican-American Herbs and Remedies," details traditional Mexican-American herbs and cures. These remedies are the product of centuries of experience in Mexico, heavily influenced by the Moors, Judeo-Christians, and Aztecs, and include everyday items such as lemon, egg, fire, aromatic oil, and prepared water. Symbolic objects such as keys, candles, brooms, and Trouble Dolls are also used.

Dedicated, in part, to curanderos throughout Mexico and the American Southwest, "Healing with Herbs and Rituals" shows us these practitioners are humble, sincere people who have given themselves to improving lives for many decades. Today's holistic health movement has rediscovered the timeless merits of the curanderos' uses of medicinal plants, rituals, and practical advice.

J Martin Littlejohn was a person who stood literally and figuratively shoulder to shoulder with the founder of osteopathy, A T Still. A proud presbyterian Scot who made his career and reputation in the USA, only to have it questioned and discredited after returning to pursue his osteopathic practice in London, Littlejohn was a controversial character. Undoubtedly a pioneer in establishing osteopathic medicine both in the USA and in the UK, he was also a fraud, using contentious qualifications to promote his academic and scientific credibility. No one has been able to write a comprehensive study of Littlejohn until now. John O'Brien has spent years researching the man. Using the objective eye of a professional historian, he has visited the institutions of Littlejohn's life and career, in Northern Ireland, Chicago, Illinois and Kirksville, Missouri, and the National Osteopathic Archive in London, as well as holding interviews with Littlejohn's family in the UK. He was granted access to previously unseen historic material as well as personal family mementos and photographs. This book will be read by anyone with an interest in the history of osteopathy. It gives a thorough description of the life and work of J Martin Littlejohn, with a broad analysis of how and why he took the major decisions to affect his career, for good or bad. And of course the consequences of those decisions, which had a major influence on the development of osteopathy in the 20th century. Key points: * 30 photographs, some previously unseen * Author access to previously unseen archives * Contributions from Littlejohn's family

Through an unprecedented multidisciplinary and global approach, this book documents the dramatic several-thousand-year history of leprosy using bioarchaeological, clinical, and historical information from a wide variety of contexts, dispelling many long-standing myths about the disease. Drawing on her 30 years of research on the infection, Charlotte Roberts begins by outlining its bacterial causes, how it spreads, and how it affects the body. She then considers its diagnosis and treatment, both historically and in the present. She also looks at the methods and tools used by paleopathologists to identify signs of leprosy in skeletons. Examining evidence in human remains from many countries, particularly in Europe and including Britain, Hungary, and Sweden, Roberts demonstrates that those affected were usually buried in the same cemeteries as their communities, contrary to the popular belief that they were all ostracized or isolated from society into leprosy hospitals. Other myths addressed by Roberts include the assumptions that leprosy can't be cured, that leprosy is no longer a problem today, and that what is called "leprosy" in the Bible is the same illness as the disease with that name now. Roberts concludes by projecting the future of leprosy, arguing that researchers need to study the disease through an ethically grounded evolutionary perspective. Importantly, she advises against use of the word "leper" to avoid perpetuating stigma today surrounding people with the infection and resulting disabilities. Leprosy will stand as the authoritative source on the subject for years to come. A volume in the series Bioarchaeological Interpretations of the Human Past: Local, Regional, and Global Perspectives, edited by Clark Spencer Larsen.