Multcolib Research Picks - Medical Nonfiction that Reads Like Fiction-Medical History
Annotation:Malaria still infects 500 million people every year, killing nearly 1 million of them. Journalist Sonia Shah delivers a timely, inquisitive chronicle of the illness and its influence on human lives, tracing it through the centuries.
Annotation:Only a century ago, allergies as we know them didn't exist. Ailments such as hay fever, asthma, and food intolerance were considered rare and non-fatal diseases that affected only the upper classes of Western society.
Annotation:With rivalries, reversals, and a race against time, the struggle to eradicate polio is one of the great tales of modern history.
Annotation:More than four hundred abandoned suitcases filled with patients' belongings were found when Willard Psychiatric Center closed in 1995 after 125 years of operation. They are skillfully examined here and compared to the written record to create a moving--and devastating--group portrait of twentieth-century American psychiatric care.
Annotation:A riveting page-turner with a real-life historical hero that brilliantly illuminates the intertwined histories of the spread of viruses, rise of cities, and the nature of scientific inquiry.
Annotation:Diseases have significantly shaped the course of the world's history. From the fourteenth-century plague to HIV/AIDS today, diseases have fundamentally altered the shape of society, politics, and culture.
Annotation:A sharp-eyed expose of the deadly politics, murderous plots, and cutthroat rivalries behind the first blood transfusions in seventeenth-century Europe.
Annotation:Charts the history, science, and cultural mythology of rabies, documenting how before its vaccine the disease caused fatal brain infections and sparked the creations of monsters, including werewolves, vampires and zombies.
Annotation:In 1831, an unknown, horrifying, and deadly disease from Asia swept across continental Europe and North America, killing millions and throwing the medical profession into confusion. A killer with little respect for class or wealth, cholera ravaged the squalid streets of Soho and rocked the great centers of Victorian power. This is the story of how John Snow, a reclusive doctor without money or social position, had the genius to look beyond the conventional wisdom of his day and uncover the truth behind the pandemic.
Annotation:An engrossing fusion of erudition and anecdote, Clean considers the bizarre prescriptions of history'sdoctors, the hygienic peccadilloes of great authors, and the historic twists and turns that have brought us to a place Ashenburg considers hedonistic yet oversanitized.
Annotation:Over the last one hundred years, depending on the latest prevailing advice, women have taken morphine, practiced Lamaze, relied on ultrasound images, sampled fertility drugs, and shopped at sperm banks. In Get Me Out, the insatiably curious Randi Hutter Epstein journeys through history, fads, and fables, and to the fringe of science, where audacious researchers have gone to extreme measures to get healthy babies out of mothers.