History & Commentary

John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest infectious disease.

As a war raged across the world, young American women flocked to work, painting watches, clocks, and military dials with a special luminous substance made from radium....

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells - taken without her knowledge - became one of the most important tools in medicine....

Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans....

The Emperor of All Maladies reveals the many faces of an iconic, shape-shifting disease that is the defining plague of our generation....

Author Cory Franklin, MD, who headed the hospital's intensive care unit from the 1970s through the 1990s, shares his most unique and bizarre experiences....

James A. Garfield may have been the most extraordinary man ever elected president....

From the author of The Emperor of All Maladies, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and The Gene, a #1 New York Times bestseller, comes his most spectacular book yet, an exploration of medicine and our radical new ability to manipulate cells....

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is essential listening for understanding the history, philosophy, and evolution of science....

Mukherjee animates the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices....

An inspiring collection of essays based on Dr. Erin Nance’s popular TikTok account @littlemissdiagnosed, detailing Dr. Nance’s journey as a young female orthopedic surgeon navigating challenging cases and ethical dilemmas in the high-stakes, cutthroat world of medicine.

Considered the definitive history of the American healthcare system, The Social Transformation of American Medicine examines how the roles of doctors, hospitals, health plans, and government programs have evolved over the last two and a half centuries....

With honesty, humility, and a commitment to the health and well-being of all children, Between a Shot and a Hard Place challenges the polarizing rhetoric and offers a path forward—one that respects individual choices while fostering informed, thoughtful dialogue.

Atul Gawande explores how doctors strive for best performance in the face of obstacles that sometimes seem insurmountable - in Boston, India, Iraq, and in malpractice courtrooms....

And the Band Played On is both a tribute to these heroic people and a stinging indictment of the institutions that failed the nation so badly....

In the winter of 1918, at the height of World War I, history's most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide....

Beginning with opium, the “joy plant,” which has been used for 10,000 years, Thomas Hager tells a captivating story of medicine. His subjects include the largely forgotten female pioneer who introduced smallpox inoculation to Britain, the infamous knockout drops, and much more....

A fascinating account of the world’s most famous disease - polio - told as you have never heard it before. Epidemics of paralysis began to rage in the early 1900s, seemingly out of nowhere....

Neurosurgeon and professor of neurosurgery Theodore H. Schwartz explores what it’s like to hold the scalpel, wield the drill, extract a tumor, fix a bullet hole, and remove a blood clot—when every second can mean life or death.

A girl believes she has been struck blind for stealing a kiss. A mother watches helplessly as each of her children is replaced by a changeling. A woman is haunted each month by the same four chords of a single song.

This is a thrilling historical account of the worst cholera outbreak in Victorian London and a brilliant exploration of how Dr. John Snow's solution revolutionized the way we think about disease....

From the host of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown and bestselling author of Kitchen Confidential comes the true, thrilling story of Mary Mallon, otherwise known as the infamous Typhoid Mary.

The extraordinary story of an unjustly forgotten group of Black men in Pittsburgh who became the first paramedics in America, saving lives and changing the course of emergency medicine around the world....

The Great Plague is one of the most compelling events in human history—even more so now, when the notion of plague has never loomed larger as a contemporary public concern....

In this astonishing and startling book, award-winning science and history writer Robert Whitaker investigates a medical mystery....