New Books In Medicine

Drawing on interviews with approximately sixty advocates, drug users, former users, friends, families, witnesses, clinicians, and scientists; Nancy D. Campbell has drawn together a history of a defining tragedy of contemporary life; the overdose. I ask her about the reality of drug overdoses and one of the tools being used by activists to prevent more deaths--Naloxone. For years, drug overdose was unmentionable in polite society. OD was understood to be something that took place in dark alleys--an ugly death awaiting social deviants--neither scientifically nor clinically interesting. But over the last several years, overdose prevention has become the unlikely object of a social movement, powered by the miracle drug naloxone. In OD, Nancy Campbell charts the emergence of naloxone as a technological fix for overdose and describes the remaking of overdose into an experience recognized as common, predictable, patterned--and, above all, preventable. Naloxone, which made resuscitation, rescue, and "reversal" after

Rapid Reviews: COVID-19 brings together urgency and scientific rigor so the world’s researchers can quickly disseminate new discoveries that the public can trust. Amy Brand (Director, The MIT Press) and Vilas Dhar (Trustee, The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation) discuss this new overlay journal, its innovative goals, and its role as a proof-of-concept for new models of peer-review and rapid publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

How do we approach a "deeply forgetful" loved one so as to notice and affirm their continuing self-identity? For three decades, Stephen G. Post has worked around the world encouraging caregivers to become more aware of--and find renewed hope in--surprising expressions of selfhood despite the challenges of cognitive decline. In Dignity for Deeply Forgetful People: How Caregivers Can Meet the Challenges of Alzheimer's Disease (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022), Post offers new perspectives on the worth and dignity of people with Alzheimer's and related disorders despite the negative influence of "hypercognitive" values that place an ethically unacceptable emphasis on human dignity as based on linear rationality and strength of memory. This bias, Post argues, is responsible for the abusive exclusion of this population from our shared humanity. With vignettes and narratives, he argues for a deeper dignity grounded in consciousness, emotional presence, creativity, interdependence, music, and a self that is not

In Break On Through, Lucas Richert explores Anti-psychiatry, psychedelics, and radical challenges to psychiatry and the conventional treatment of mental health in the 1970s. In this interview Lucas discusses the issues that run through the sixties and seventies and how they're forming debates about mental health today. "Antipsychiatry," Esalen, psychedelics, and DSM III: Radical challenges to psychiatry and the conventional treatment of mental health in the 1970s. The upheavals of the 1960s gave way to a decade of disruptions in the 1970s, and among the rattled fixtures of American society was mainstream psychiatry. A "Radical Caucus" formed within the psychiatric profession and the "antipsychiatry" movement arose. Critics charged that the mental health establishment was complicit with the military-industrial complex, patients were released from mental institutions, and powerful antipsychotic drugs became available. Meanwhile, practitioners and patients experimented with new approaches to mental health, from

Medical treatments designed to help people can also be harmful or fatal. Around 2.5 million people die this way each year. So if any kind of medicine makes someone unwell, they or their doctor should report it. Those reports, from nearly every country in the world, go to the Uppsala Monitoring Centre (UMC) in Sweden. As the Centre’s first director, Professor Ivor Ralph Edwards transformed it from a tiny operation with limited horizons into an internationally acclaimed scientific organization at the heart of the World Health Organization’s Programme for International Drug Monitoring. He was then succeeded by his wife, Dr Marie Lindquist. Ian Hembrow's Ralph Edwards: Rare Events--The Inside Story of a Worldwide Quest for Safer Medicines (Springer, 2023) is the story of how a new science developed and a passionate and dedicated pursuit of worldwide medicines safety, with an unerring focus on the welfare of patients. The pioneering work of Ralph, Marie and their collaborators on every continent protected the live

I was very excited to chat with Maurits Bastiaan Meerwijk as we share some obsessions, namely rats and plague in colonial Southeast Asia. His A History of Plague in Java, 1911-1942 (Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2022) is an engaging study of a massive public health campaign in the Dutch East Indies. As he records the most invasive colonial policy in Indonesian history, his work ties together the histories of disease, imperialism, and modernity. A History of Plague in Java, 1911-1942 will be of interest to Southeast Asianists, scholars of disease, and anyone interested the origins of modern state systems. Dr. Meerwijk earned his Ph.D in History at the University of Hong Kong with a dissertation entitled Dengue Fever in Modern Asia. He has been a Research Associate at the University of St. Andrews and a Lecturer at the University of Hong Kong. He is currently a postdoc researcher at the University of Leiden and the scientific secretary at the Health Council of the Netherlands. A History of Plague in Java

Have germs or humans done the most to shape the world’s history? Did Homo Sapiens get the better of the Neanderthals because of superior brainpower or because of better resistance to some infectious disease? And are germs part of the story behind the fall of Rome and rise of Islam? Owen Bennett Jones talks germs with Jonathan Kennedy of London University. Kennedy is the author of Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues (Crown Publishing, 2023). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

An interview with Donna J. Drucker, author of Contraception, from The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series. We discuss reproductive justice, the history of contraceptive technology and how the future of contraception can offer more choice and more freedom for every kind of person. The development, manufacturing, and use of contraceptive methods from the late nineteenth century to the present, viewed from the perspective of reproductive justice. The beginning of the modern contraceptive era began in 1882, when Dr. Aletta Jacobs opened the first birth control clinic in Amsterdam. The founding of this facility, and the clinical provision of contraception that it enabled, marked the moment when physicians started to take the prevention of pregnancy seriously as a medical concern. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Donna Drucker traces the history of modern contraception, outlining the development, manufacturing, and use of contraceptive methods from the opening of Dr. Jacobs's clinic to t

Toward the end of World War II, Hitler's many health complications became even more pronounced, making an evil man yet more erratic and dangerous. While the subject of Hitler's health has been catalogued previously, never has it been done so this thoroughly or with this level of up-to-date medical expertise. Tom Hutton's Hitler's Maladies and Their Impact on World War II (Texas Tech UP, 2023) draws from a lifetime of medical research and clinical experience to understand how the dictator's particular medical history further warped a deformed personality and altered Hitler's decision making. Dr. Hutton trained under the world-renowned neuropsychologist and father of modern neuropsychological assessment, Dr. Alexander Luria, giving him a uniquely qualified eye to undertake this most difficult assessment. While many books on the subject thumb through the annals of popular psychology to understand history's most famous monsters, Dr. Hutton's latest book uses contemporary clinical knowledge, lucidly synthesizing m

Arleen Marcia Tuchman’s book, Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease (Yale UP, 2020), tells the American history of a disease that continues to defy categorizations. Researchers for more than a century have worked to create distinctions between “types” of diabetes to parse people who all share the trait of high levels of sugar in their blood. Tuchman shows how efforts to divide diabetes into types tracked efforts to divide people into different types—specifically by race. For Tuchman, this move reflects an American obsession with race that too often overlooks racism as a fundamental cause of disease. The book won the 2022 Rosen Prize from the American Association for the History of Medicine and will be of immediate interest to readers interested in Science & Technology Studies, American History, and social justice. This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and graduate students at Vanderbilt University in the course, “American Medicine & the World.” Please email Laura with any fee

Between 1902 and 1934, the United States confined hundreds of adults and children from dozens of Native nations at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, a federal psychiatric hospital in South Dakota. But detention at the Indian Asylum, as families experienced it, was not the beginning or end of the story. For them, Canton Asylum was one of many places of imposed removal and confinement, including reservations, boarding schools, orphanages, and prison-hospitals. Despite the long reach of institutionalization for those forcibly held at the Asylum, the tenacity of relationships extended within and beyond institutional walls. In Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and Beyond Institutions (UNC Press, 2021), Susan Burch tells the story of the Indigenous people—families, communities, and nations, across generations to the present day—who have experienced the impact of this history. Drawing on oral history interviews, correspondence, material objects, and archival sources, Burch reframes the histories of instit

An abolitionist approach to STS and the history of the life sciences: this is the model that Cristina Mejia Visperas offers in her book, Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory (NYU 2022). By now, scientists’ experiments on captive men at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison are well known, thanks to the brave and important testimony of former captive-subjects in books like Allen Hornblum’s Acres of Skin. Building on this documentary work, Visperas turns attention to the prison experiments’ “optical rationality,” the way of seeing images that came out of a space that was simultaneously prison and laboratory. For Visperas, skin is a scientific apparatus and a metaphor for what science makes visible—and what it leaves as a void, namely, the endurance of anti-Black racism in the US, from slavery to mass incarceration. At its core, the book asks “What is the relationship between science and the project of freedom?”—and it hopes towards a reparative bioethics that dismantles scientific racism and

How the way we perceive our bodies plays a critical role in the way we perceive ourselves: stories of phantom limbs, rubber hands, anorexia, and other phenomena. The body is central to our sense of identity. It can be a canvas for self-expression, decorated with clothing, jewelry, cosmetics, tattoos, and piercings. But the body is more than that. Bodily awareness, says scientist-writer Moheb Costandi, is key to self-consciousness. In Body Am I: The New Science of Self-Consciousness (MIT Press, 2022), Costandi examines how the brain perceives the body, how that perception translates into our conscious experience of the body, and how that experience contributes to our sense of self. Along the way, he explores what can happen when the mechanisms of bodily awareness are disturbed, leading to such phenomena as phantom limbs, alien hands, and amputee fetishes. Costandi explains that the brain generates maps and models of the body that guide how we perceive and use it, and that these maps and models are repeatedly m

The aging of America will reshape how we live and will transform nearly every aspect of contemporary society. Renowned life course sociologist Deborah Carr provides a lively, nuanced, and timely portrait of aging in the United States. The US population is older than ever before, raising new challenges for families, caregivers, health care systems, and social programs like Social Security and Medicare. Organized in seven chapters, Aging in America (U California Press, 2023) covers these topics: the history of aging and the development of theoretical approaches how cultural changes shape our views on aging the demographic characteristics of older adults today older adults' family lives and social relationships the health of older adults and social disparities in who gets sick how public policies affect the well-being of older adults and their families how baby boomers, Gen Xers, and millennials will experience old age Drawing on state-of-the-art data, current events, and pop culture, this portrait of a

Mike Jay's Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind (Yale UP, 2023) is a provocative and original history of the scientists and writers, artists and philosophers who took drugs to explore the hidden regions of the mind. Until the twentieth century, scientists investigating the effects of drugs on the mind did so by experimenting on themselves. Vivid descriptions of drug experiences sparked insights across the mind sciences, pharmacology, medicine, and philosophy. Accounts in journals and literary fiction inspired a fascinated public to make their own experiments--in scientific demonstrations, on exotic travels, at literary salons, and in occult rituals. But after 1900 drugs were increasingly viewed as a social problem, and the long tradition of self-experimentation began to disappear. From Sigmund Freud's experiments with cocaine to William James's epiphany on nitrous oxide, Mike Jay brilliantly recovers a lost intellectual tradition of drug-taking that fed the birth of psychology, the discovery o

The story of the Fountain of Youth is as old as history itself. Herodotus, the father of ancient Greek history, wrote of a mythical spring that extended the life of its bathers. Today, biotech entrepreneurs, scientists, and health influencers are still searching for that mythical spring. Longevity and anti-aging research has recently blossomed, with a number of tantalizing discoveries. Still, this research hasn't delivered any magic bullets. Yet, that hasn't stopped a cottage industry of folks hawking a plethora of dubious supplements and bizarre health regimens. Jay Cockburn tries to make sense of what's real, what's hype, who could benefit, and who would pay. Do we even want to live in the world the longevity researchers are looking for? Should we keep looking for that fountain? We'll hear from: CEO of BioViva, Liz Parish, who has stepped outside of the regular drug approval process and experimented on herself; Dr. Charles Brenner, a scientist and vocal critic of the claims of life extension; and Dr. Keisha

The discovery of anaesthesia which could be administered safely to eliminate the pain of surgery and other medical and dental procedures is widely considered to be one of the greatest developments of the nineteenth century. Yet, until now few studies have focused on anaesthesia in Ireland.  Safety As We Watch: Anaesthesia in Ireland 1847-1998 (Wordwell Books, 2022), written by three Irish anaesthetists, is the first published study of the history of anaesthesia in Ireland. Featuring fascinating vignettes of the personalities and innovators who led the development of anaesthesia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book leads readers through the history of the practice over 150 years, sketching global networks of exchange between medical practitioners and researchers. Beginning with the administration of the first general anaesthetic in Ireland on 1 January 1847, when ether was given to an 18-year-old girl undergoing an amputation under the care of Dr John MacDonnell, the book traces the debates and

Vaccine reluctance and refusal are no longer limited to the margins of society. Debates around vaccines' necessity -- along with questions around their side effects -- have gone mainstream, blending with geopolitical conflicts, political campaigns, celebrity causes, and "natural" lifestyles to win a growing number of hearts and minds. Today's anti-vaccine positions find audiences where they've never existed previously. Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start--and Why They Don't Go Away (Oxford UP, 2020) examines how the issues surrounding vaccine hesitancy are, more than anything, about people feeling left out of the conversation. A new dialogue is long overdue, one that addresses the many types of vaccine hesitancy and the social factors that perpetuate them. To do this, Stuck provides a clear-eyed examination of the social vectors that transmit vaccine rumors, their manifestations around the globe, and how these individual threads are all connected. Heidi J. Larson, PhD, is Professor of Anthropology, Risk and Decis

Congenital Heart Disease (CHD) is the most commonly diagnosed birth abnormality in the US. With great advances in surgery and medicine, however, survival rates have improved by 75% since the 1940s. Welcome news, of course, as only a few decades ago these birth defects were considered a death sentence, but as with any chronic condition, survival does not mean the issue is cured. With better medical care, babies born today with CHD have a good chance of surviving, but throughout their entire lives they can face surgeries, invasive treatments, lifelong monitoring, frequent medical check-ups, and significant limitations on physical activity, in addition to poor public awareness which can have an impact on social inclusion and understanding. Much attention has rightly been focused on the medical needs of these children and on providing their parents and caretakers with resources and information to navigate the complexities of this chronic condition. Little attention, however, has been paid to the psychosocial impa

Photos from the Front Lines follows medics from Falck Alameda County ambulance during one of the most tumultuous years in recent collective memory - 2020. From a global pandemic to demonstrations to wildfires and mass vaccinations, Photos from the Front Lines provides unequalled coverage of this year and beyond from the perspective of those on the front lines every day of the crisis, with a colossal 500 original photos! The use of the term "front line" came about this year to describe personnel who were putting their lives on the line every day during the global COVID-19 pandemic, and medics were at the absolute forefront of this fight; Photos from the Front Lines takes you there with them.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine