"‘Dirty! Don’t touch! Yuck! Feh! You don’t know where it’s been!’ These admonitions ring in our ears–for some of us our earliest memories of parental exhortation, for others the indelible mark of our deepest fears. Germs, as we know, are everywhere, lying in wait to attack the inadequately vigilant or insufficiently armed, gangs of serial killers on a random search for their next victim. We do not mock. Well, maybe we mock a little, but in fact, mother (or father) does sometimes know best–some germs can be very nasty invaders indeed. Yet we live in a world of microbes–some dreadful, some harmless, some essential to our continued life on earth. Knowing which to avoid, which to eliminate, and which just to live happily with can turn fearful warnings into reasoned discourse, and trembling terror into intelligent action."
––From the Preface

What do microbes have to do with your pets, your kids, your supermarket, your laundry, your sex life, your vacation at the beach, and your dinner plans for Saturday night? Plenty, as it turns out, and you’ll learn all about it in Where the Germs Are.

This doesn’t mean you have to panic, run out and buy every one of the more than 700 antibacterial products now on the market, dress in surgical scrubs, or live in a plastic bubble. In fact, most of the germs we live with are harmless, and some are positively delightful–like the ones that make grapes into wine, give yogurt its tang and cheeses their multitude of flavors, and lend sourdough bread its satisfying bite and aroma. But of course there are a nasty few that it would be good to avoid, and avoiding them means knowing something of the way they behave. Where the Germs Are is an intelligent, well-informed, scientifically accurate, and often delightfully funny guide to microbe country. Why not stop by for a spell–after all, you’re already there.

Delightful doses of medical miscellany about wacky doctors and their curious patients, from their smallest bones (the stapes) to their heaviest organs (the liver) In this addictive collection of trivia, Nicholas Bakalar, the Vital Signs columnist for The New York Times, spoons out the things you never realized you really want to know about your body and your health. Bakalar shares the wonders of medicine, from medical firsts (in 1667, the first survivor of a blood transfusion received sheep's blood) to medical onlys (rabies is the only infectious disease that is 100 percent curable when treated and 100 percent fatal if not). He takes a tour of diseases that belong in horror movies: liquefying organs, flesh-eating bacteria, mushrooms sprouting in the throat. He notes remarkable remedies, such as dark chocolate, which can stand in for blood-pressure pills. And he dissects the chemistry of the human body (including the 0.0000000000000015259 percent that is radium). With a specialist's attention to the funny bone as well as the gray matter, Bakalar's The Medicine Cabinet of Curiosities tickles the curiosity of both the healthy and the hypochondriac, following Voltaire's dictum that the art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

While HIV spreads among people with severe mental illness for the same reasons it does in the general population, there are specific ways in which mental illness is associated with elevated HIV risk. Every mental health institution or program has to deal with the consequences of increased HIV rates, but until now there has been no single book that could tell them how to do so. AIDS and People with Severe Mental Illness covers the entire range of information essential for those who work with these patients: epidemiological, medical, psychological, legal, ethical, and policy issues are all examined by eminent authorities in those areas. Nurses, social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health administrators, forensic specialists, and others involved in the care of people with severe mental illness will find here exactly what they have been looking for: one handbook that can help them deal with the challenges the AIDS epidemic has set before them.