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.

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

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....

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....

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

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

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

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

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....

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.

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.

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....

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....

In The Black Death: New Lessons from Recent Research, celebrated medievalist Dorsey Armstrong shares the fascinating new story of this old pandemic....

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.

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....

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....

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.

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....

A brilliant and courageous doctor reveals, in gripping accounts of true cases, the power and limits of modern medicine....

This audiobook gives a dramatic account of the Antonine plague, the mysterious disease that struck the Roman Empire at its pinnacle....

How Victorian male doctors used false science to argue that women were unfit for anything but motherhood—and the brilliant doctor who defied them.

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....

A pioneering and groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction that offers a dramatic new perspective on the history of humankind, showing how through millennia, the mosquito has been the single most powerful force in determining humanity’s fate....

At the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Joshua Mezrich creates life from loss, transplanting organs from one body to another. In this intimate, profoundly moving work, he illuminates the extraordinary field of transplantation that enables this kind of miracle to happen every day....

From the real-life Meredith Grey, comes 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.

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. In neurology, illness is inextricably linked with narrative, the clues to unraveling these mysteries hidden in both the details of a patient's story and the tells of their body.

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.

Through its unforgettable characters and immersive storytelling, The Intermediaries charts the relationships between nascent sexual science, queer civil rights, and the fight against fascism. It tells riveting stories of LGBTQ pioneers and offers a cautionary tale in the face of today's oppressive anti-trans legislation.

Sara Ahmed, a seasoned healthcare provider and administrator, delves into the pressing issue of burnout among healthcare professionals. Drawing from her extensive experience in internal medicine, Ahmed sheds light on the detrimental effects of stress on healthcare providers, which can lead to severe consequences such as collapse and even suicide.