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Typhoid Mary
- Narrated by: Laura Orlando
- Length: 55 mins
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Publisher's summary
George Soper (1870-1948) was a sanitation engineer who tracked down Mary Mallon, or Typhoid Mary (1869-1938), a cook who was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid responsible for at least 54 cases with four deaths in nine different epidemics. Soper was called in when a landlord in Long Island struggled to trace the source of an outbreak in 1906. Soper’s every attempt to reason with Mary was met by denial and a refusal to cooperate. She was arrested by the New York Health Department and placed in a detention hospital on March 19, 1907. In 1910, she disappeared. Five years later - following outbreaks at the Sloane Hospital for Women - she was arrested again and placed in forcible detention at the Riverside Hospital of the New York City Department of Health, where she remained until her death in 1938. Although the courts refused to order her release, there was a good deal of sympathy for Typhoid Mary. She became a minor celebrity and was occasionally interviewed by the media.
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A Predilection for Those in the Prime of Life
- By Cynthia on 02-12-18
By: Laura Spinney
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The Ghost Map
- By: Steven Johnson
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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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, cities, science, and the modern world.
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It was okay until the end
- By Matthew Groom on 12-04-08
By: Steven Johnson
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Jack the Ripper and the Case for Scotland Yard's Prime Suspect
- By: Robert House, Roy Hazelwood - foreword
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Dozens of theories have attempted to resolve the mystery of the identity of Jack the Ripper, the world's most famous serial killer. Ripperologist Robert House contends that we may have known the answer all along. The head of Scotland Yard's Criminal Investigation Department at the time of the murders thought Aaron Kozminski was guilty, but he lacked the legal proof to convict him. By exploring Kozminski's life, Robert House here builds a strong circumstantial case against him.
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A restrained and humane account
- By Tad Davis on 01-08-13
By: Robert House, and others
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The Knife Man
- The Extraordinary Life and Times of John Hunter, Father of Modern Surgery
- By: Wendy Moore
- Narrated by: Steve West
- Length: 13 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Knife Man, Wendy Moore unveils John Hunter's murky and macabre world - a world characterized by public hangings, secret expeditions to dank churchyards, and gruesome human dissections in pungent attic rooms. This is a fascinating portrait of a remarkable pioneer and his determined struggle to haul surgery out of the realms of meaningless superstitious ritual and into the dawn of modern medicine.
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Brilliant
- By Bird on 12-02-15
By: Wendy Moore
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Pox
- An American History
- By: Michael Willrich
- Narrated by: K. Todd Freeman
- Length: 14 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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At the turn of the last century, a smallpox epidemic swept the United States. The age-old disease spread swiftly through an increasingly interconnected American landscape: from southern plantations to the immigrant neighborhoods of northern cities to far-flung villages on the edges of the American empire. In Pox, historian Michael Willrich offers a gripping chronicle of how the nation's continent-wide fight against smallpox launched one of the most important civil liberties struggles of the 20th century.
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Best book on smallpox
- By Chris M. White on 09-07-21
By: Michael Willrich
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The Panic Virus
- A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear
- By: Seth Mnookin
- Narrated by: Dan John Miller
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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The Panic Virus is a gripping scientific detective story about how grassroots radicals, snake-oil salesmen, and cynical journalists have perpetrated the biggest health-scare hoax of all time. It explores what happens when the media treats all viewpoints as equally valid, regardless of facts, from parents who are convinced that vaccines caused their children's autism to right-wing radicals who believe that climate change is a myth
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Incredible thorough journey
- By Rachel Dewald on 03-22-11
By: Seth Mnookin
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The Lives They Left Behind
- Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic
- By: Peter Stastny, Darby Penney
- Narrated by: Alex Paul
- Length: 8 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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More than four hundred abandoned suitcases filled with patients’ belongings were found when Willard Psychiatric Center closed in 1995 after 125 years of operation. They are skillfully examined here and compared to the written record to create a moving—and devastating—group portrait of twentieth-century American psychiatric care.
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Not really the book I expected
- By B. Shaff on 11-09-17
By: Peter Stastny, and others
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Damnation Island
- Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century New York
- By: Stacy Horn
- Narrated by: Pam Ward
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Today it is known as Roosevelt Island. In 1828, when New York City purchased this narrow, two-mile-long island in the East River, it was called Blackwell's Island. There, over the next hundred years, the city would build a lunatic asylum, prison, hospital, workhouse, and almshouse. Stacy Horn has crafted a compelling and chilling narrative told through the stories of the poor souls sent to Blackwell's, as well as the period's city officials, reformers, and journalists (including the famous Nellie Bly). Damnation Island re-creates what daily life was like on the island....
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Fascinating!
- By tamborine on 08-06-18
By: Stacy Horn
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The Famine Plot
- England's Role in Ireland's Greatest Tragedy
- By: Tim Pat Coogan
- Narrated by: Roger Clark
- Length: 11 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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In this sweeping history, Ireland's best-known historian, Tim Pat Coogan, tackles the dark history of the Irish Famine and argues that it constituted one of the first acts of genocide. In what the Boston Globe calls "his greatest achievement", Coogan shows how the British government hid behind the smoke screen of laissez faire economics, the invocation of divine providence, and a carefully orchestrated publicity campaign, allowing more than a million people to die agonizing deaths and driving a further million into emigration.
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Atrocities abound.
- By GMJ on 06-05-18
By: Tim Pat Coogan
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The Prince of Medicine
- Galen in the Roman Empire
- By: Susan P. Mattern
- Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Galen of Pergamum (A.D. 129-ca. 216) began his remarkable career tending to wounded gladiators in provincial Asia Minor. Later in life he achieved great distinction as one of a small circle of court physicians to the family of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, at the very heart of Roman society. Susan Mattern's The Prince of Medicine offers the first authoritative biography in English of this brilliant, audacious, and profoundly influential figure.
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history of medicine
- By Jean on 07-27-14
By: Susan P. Mattern
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The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl
- How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis
- By: Arthur Allen
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Few diseases are more gruesome than typhus. Transmitted by body lice, it afflicts the dispossessed - refugees, soldiers, and ghettoized peoples - causing hallucinations, terrible headaches, boiling fever, and often death. The disease plagued the German army on the Eastern Front and left the Reich desperate for a vaccine. For this they turned to the brilliant and eccentric Polish zoologist Rudolf Weigl.
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An Unforgettable book
- By Jean on 09-01-14
By: Arthur Allen