History & Commentary

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....

This audiobook explores big questions like these, explaining the breakthroughs and discoveries that have shaped our modern-day understanding of medicine and helped us protect and promote our health....

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

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....

An oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem....

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....

A pediatrician and infectious disease specialist warns of the resurgence of measles, the antivaccine movement, and how we can prepare for the next pandemic.

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

In this eyewitness story of how the anti-vaccine movement grew into a dangerous and prominent anti-science element in American politics, Dr. Peter J. Hotez describes the devastating impacts it has had on Americans’ health and lives....

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks meets Get Out in this “startling...powerful” (Kirkus Reviews) investigation of racial inequality at the core of the heart transplant race....

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

David Oshinsky chronicles the history of America's oldest hospital and in so doing also charts the rise of New York to the nation's preeminent city, the path of American medicine....

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....

Over the past 50 years, rates of autoimmunity and chronic disease have exploded. In this provocative book, Dr. Thomas Cowan argues for a direct causal relationship to a corresponding increase in the number of vaccines American children typically receive....

Whether you're a seasoned herbalist or just starting your journey, Herbalism—Powerful Lost Remedies is your ultimate guide to harnessing the power of nature for your health and well-being.

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....

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....

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....

Medical Bondage moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how 19th-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals....