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.

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....

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

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....

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

In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of 19th-century surgery on the eve of profound transformation....

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....

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

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....

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

Drawing on the latest research in history, virology, epidemiology, psychology, and economics, Pale Rider masterfully recounts the little-known catastrophe that forever changed humanity.

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

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....

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

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....

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....

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.

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.

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.

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

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....

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....

A puzzling series of dental explosions beginning in the 19th century is just one of many strange tales that have long lain undiscovered in the pages of old medical journals. Award-winning medical historian Thomas Morris delivers a remarkable, cringe-inducing collection of stories....

Sometimes in medicine the only way to know what is truly going on in a patient is to operate...

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 autumn of 1347, twelve Genoese galleys drifted into the port of Messina, Sicily. They were not crewed by boisterous sailors, but by specters ravaged by a mysterious illness, their bodies covered in dark swellings and their minds lost to a feverish delirium . Within days, an invisible killer was unleashed, beginning a reign of terror that would bring Medieval Europe to its knees and erase nearly half its population. Medical Mysteries – The Bubonic Plague chronicles the history of the world’s most devastating pandemic. Journey back to a time of unimaginable horror and confusion, ...

Dr. Melody Glenn didn’t expect to find herself working with addiction patients when she started out in medicine. Like most physicians she’s encountered, she harbored a set of conscious and unconscious beliefs about addicts—she even sometimes resented them. Once she realized how effective harm reduction treatments like methadone could be, she set out to discover why these treatments weren’t used more broadly. This led her to Dr. Marie Nyswander.

In The Product of Medicine, Caitjan Gainty traces the history of the early twentieth-century medical efficiency movement in the United States, restoring it as a significant driver of medicine’s modernization while also revealing its broader significance as a cultural force shaping modern American life. Covering a range of efficiency’s uses in medicine—from the assembly-line structure of the early Mayo Clinic and Henry Ford Hospital to the landmark Flexner Report and the prosecution of the American Medical Association as a monopoly.

A Virus. A War Zone. A Love Story Born in PPE. Pandemic! is a powerful work of medical fiction rooted in truth, written by Dr. Donald Elton, a pulmonary and critical care physician who served on the front lines of COVID-19 in Central Florida. Drawing from firsthand experience during the harrowing early months of the pandemic, this novel brings unmatched realism, emotional depth, and ethical complexity to the story of two healthcare professionals swept into the fight of their lives. Roger Jackson, a newly arrived cardiologist, and Isabel Melendez, an ICU nurse reassigned from the cath lab, ...

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