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You Bet Your Life
- From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation
- Narrated by: James Noel Hoban
- Length: 6 hrs and 36 mins
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Publisher's summary
One of America’s top physicians traces the history of risk in medicine - with powerful lessons for today.
Every medical decision - whether to have chemotherapy, an X-ray, or surgery - is a risk, no matter which way you choose. In You Bet Your Life, physician Paul A. Offit argues that, from the first blood transfusions 400 years ago to the hunt for a COVID-19 vaccine, risk has been essential to the discovery of new treatments. More importantly, understanding the risks is crucial to whether, as a society or as individuals, we accept them.
Told in Offit’s vigorous and rigorous style, You Bet Your Life is an entertaining history of medicine. But it also lays bare the tortured relationships between intellectual breakthroughs, political realities, and human foibles. Our pandemic year has shown us, with its debates over lockdowns, masks, and vaccines, how easy it is to get everything wrong. You Bet Your Life is an essential listen for getting the future a bit more right.
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Critic reviews
“In You Bet Your Life, Offit elucidates, using compelling case studies, how we come to know what we know in science and medicine: through a mix of imagination, experimentation, successes, misses and tragedies. It's a riveting story of what is possible when confidence and humility meet, and what seems inevitable when hubris dominates. Illuminating the Covid-19 pandemic and how we got to safe and effective vaccines so quickly, it is also a timeless read for anyone interested in science, ethics, discovery and how we can better prevent the next pandemic.” (Chelsea Clinton, vice chair of the Clinton Foundation)
"What makes Paul Offit so special, beyond his extraordinary talents as a physician, vaccine-developer, and children’s advocate, is his ability to bring complicated scientific subjects to life. You Bet Your Life is the latest example - a thoughtful, beautifully written account of the risks and rewards of medical technology told through the eyes of the inventors and their patients. Tragedy is an inevitable part of the process; breakthroughs come at a human cost, even those that have saved untold millions of lives. To read this elegant book is grasp these ethical complexities - with a masterful medical writer as our guide." (David Oshinsky, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History for Polio: An American Story)
“Offit is a fluid storyteller armed with decades of knowledge, and he provides an educative...reading experience.” (Kirkus)
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Performance
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Happy Accidents is a fascinating, entertaining, and highly accessible look at the surprising role serendipity has played in some of the most important medical discoveries in the 20th century. What do penicillin, chemotherapy drugs, X-rays, Valium, the Pap smear, and Viagra have in common? They were each discovered accidentally, stumbled upon in the search for something else. In discussing medical breakthroughs, Dr. Morton Meyers makes a cogent, highly engaging argument for a more creative, rather than purely linear, approach to science. And it may just save our lives!
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Don't waste your money!
- By Amazon Customer on 03-20-16
By: Morton A. Meyers
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Influenza
- The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic
- By: Dr. Jeremy Brown
- Narrated by: Holter Graham
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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On the 100th anniversary of the devastating pandemic of 1918, Jeremy Brown, a veteran ER doctor, explores the troubling, terrifying, and complex history of the flu virus, from the origins of the Great Flu that killed millions, to vexing questions such as: are we prepared for the next epidemic, should you get a flu shot, and how close are we to finding a cure?
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Important read
- By Kathryn C. on 12-21-18
By: Dr. Jeremy Brown
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Heart
- A History
- By: Sandeep Jauhar
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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For centuries, the human heart seemed beyond our understanding: an inscrutable shuddering mass that was somehow the driver of emotion and the seat of the soul. As cardiologist and best-selling author Sandeep Jauhar tells in The Heart, it was only recently that we demolished age-old taboos and devised the transformative procedures that changed the way we live. Deftly alternating between historical episodes and his own work, Jauhar tells the colorful and little known story of the doctors who risked their careers and the patients who risked their lives to know and heal our most vital organ.
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Fascinating Insight
- By Ironcharles on 10-27-18
By: Sandeep Jauhar
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The Demon Under The Microscope
- By: Thomas Hager
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 12 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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The Nazis discovered it. The Allies won the war with it. It conquered diseases, changed laws, and single-handedly launched the era of antibiotics. This incredible discovery was sulfa, the first antibiotic medication. In The Demon Under the Microscope, Thomas Hager chronicles the dramatic history of the drug that shaped modern medicine.
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Great Book!!!!!
- By Amazon Customer on 05-21-08
By: Thomas Hager
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Ten Drugs
- How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine
- By: Thomas Hager
- Narrated by: Angelo Di Loreto
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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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, the first antibiotic, which saved countless lives, the first antipsychotic, which helped empty public mental hospitals, Viagra, statins, and the new frontier of monoclonal antibodies. This is a deep, wide-ranging, and wildly entertaining book.
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Engrossing to physicians & lay persons alike
- By C. White on 03-08-19
By: Thomas Hager
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Under the Knife
- A History of Surgery in 28 Remarkable Operations
- By: Arnold van de Laar, Andy Brown - translator
- Narrated by: Rich Keeble
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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From the story of the desperate man from 17th-century Amsterdam who grimly cut a stone out of his own bladder to Bob Marley's deadly toe, Under the Knife offers a wealth of fascinating and unforgettable insights into medicine and history via the operating room. What happens during an operation? How does the human body respond to being attacked by a knife, a bacterium, a cancer cell, or a bullet? And, as medical advances continuously push the boundaries of what medicine can cure, what are the limits of surgery?
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Why did a surgeon need a fast horse?
- By India Clamp on 10-18-18
By: Arnold van de Laar, and others
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Missing Microbes
- How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues
- By: Martin J. Blaser
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In Missing Microbes, Dr. Martin J. Blaser invites us into the wilds of the human microbiome, where for hundreds of thousands of years bacterial and human cells have existed in a peaceful symbiosis that is responsible for the health and equilibrium of our body. Now this invisible eden is being irrevocably damaged by some of our most revered medical advances-antibiotics-threatening the extinction of our irreplaceable microbes with terrible health consequences.
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Very enlightening and information well supported
- By James on 05-03-15
By: Martin J. Blaser
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Between Hope and Fear
- A History of Vaccines and Human Immunity
- By: Michael Kinch
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 15 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Between Hope and Fear tells the remarkable story of vaccine-preventable infectious diseases and their social and political implications. While detailing the history of vaccine invention, Michael Kinch reveals the ominous reality that our victories against vaccine-preventable diseases are not permanent - and could easily be undone. Between Hope and Fear relates the remarkable intersection of science, technology, and disease that has helped eradicate many of the deadliest plagues known to man.
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Enjoyed
- By Minsi Zhang on 05-03-20
By: Michael Kinch
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Viruses, Plagues, and History
- Past, Present, and Future
- By: Michael B. A. Oldstone
- Narrated by: L.J. Ganser
- Length: 13 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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The story of viruses and humanity is a story of fear and ignorance, of grief and heartbreak, and of great bravery and sacrifice. Michael Oldstone tells all these stories as he illuminates the history of the devastating diseases that have tormented humanity, focusing mostly on the most famous viruses. For this revised edition, Oldstone includes discussions of new viruses like SARS, bird flu, virally caused cancers, chronic wasting disease, and West Nile. Viruses, Plagues, and History paints a sweeping portrait of humanity's long-standing conflict with our unseen viral enemies.
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very detailed, but very statistical
- By ekhensel15 on 01-12-19
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King of Hearts
- The True Story of the Maverick Who Pioneered Open Heart Surgery
- By: G. Wayne Miller
- Narrated by: Patrick Cullen
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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G. Wayne Miller has dramatically and meticulously reconstructed an amazing true story: how a group of renegade Minnesota surgeons, led by Dr. Walt Lillehei, made medical history by becoming the first doctors to operate deep inside the human heart.
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Loved every minute
- By Brian on 02-05-08
By: G. Wayne Miller
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Less Medicine, More Health
- 7 Assumptions That Drive Too Much Medical Care
- By: H. Gilbert Welch
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 8 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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The author of the highly acclaimed Overdiagnosed describes seven widespread assumptions that encourage excessive, often ineffective, and sometimes harmful medical care. You might think the biggest problem in medical care is that it costs too much. Or that health insurance is too expensive, too uneven, too complicated - and gives you too many forms to fill out. But the central problem is that too much medical care has too little value.
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The truth will set you free
- By Rene B Milner on 04-01-16
By: H. Gilbert Welch
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Editing Humanity
- The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing
- By: Kevin Davies
- Narrated by: Kevin Davies
- Length: 16 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Engrossing and captivating, Editing Humanity takes listeners inside the fascinating world of a new gene editing technology called CRISPR, a high-powered genetic toolkit that enables scientists to not only engineer but to edit the DNA of any organism down to the individual building blocks of the genetic code. Davies introduces listeners to arguably the most profound scientific breakthrough of our time. He tracks the scientists on the front lines of its research to the patients whose powerful stories bring the narrative movingly to human scale.
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Excellent content, solid execution
- By Samuel Finlayson on 01-25-21
By: Kevin Davies
What listeners say about You Bet Your Life
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Christopher
- 11-03-21
A doctor makes an argument for vaccine choice.
this book is so important during these times of government overreach and forced vaccination. we all have the right to make a choice with our health and experimental drugs
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- Don
- 03-05-22
Balanced presentations until the end
While each novel medical technique or therapy was conscientiously presented in a balanced format, reminding the reader of what was and was not known at the time, the social and societal setting, and the emphasis of these investigators to help humanity, I felt this format became very cursory as the last topic--Covid-19--was addressed. The vaccine technologies are in use in targeted therapy synthesis, long-term studies are not available as they are occurring along side the daily need to treat infected patients, over 400 Million cases worldwide and nearly 6 Million deaths. "Watchful waiting" has a significant cost.
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- chetyarbrough.blog
- 02-23-23
SKEPTICAL OR STUPID
Like Siddhartha Mukherjee’s “The Emperor of All Maladies”, Paul Offit reflects on patients who risk their lives based on medical treatment and prescribed drugs by educated scientists, physicians, and drug manufacturers. Both Mukherjee and Offit write of the medical causes of death and attempts made by the medical profession to save lives. What both books have in common is that the medical industry, just as in all life’s work, is influenced by money, power, and prestige. Those influences carry risks and rewards.
Doctors, scientists, drug manufacturers, and medical employees make good and bad decisions based on educational achievement, hands-on medical experience, and personal motivation. That is true in all forms of work employment. The difference is we who are not part of the medical industry are intimately and mortally affected by its practice and advertisement. Bad medical decisions can end a life; good medical decisions can save a life. Government oversight, like the FDA, CDC, USDA, and the World Health Organization work on minimizing risk to society but risk reduction is a work in progress.
The lesson one draws from these two physicians is that the public has a right to be skeptical but there is no right to be stupid. Dying will always be a part of our lives, whether mistakes are made or not.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Amazon customer
- 10-30-21
Enjoyable and informative
If you are interested in the history of medicine and medical ethics, you will find this book fascinating. Offit focuses on major advances in medicine and discusses the human cost that led to these advances. History can be dry, but the best histories are the opposite when they bring persons and personalities back to life--this is true here. It is difficult not to be invested in the human dramas Offit describes. After the first chapter or two you begin to anticipate the plot: Oh no! Here is another person I am being introduced to, and if they are in this book, things almost certainly won't end well for them! Impending medical tragedy! But despite that, the book includes details that make you really care about these people and get sucked into what happened to them. Another thing I appreciated was how fresh the material was for me. I am a medical ethicist, a philosopher by training, and although I had studied the Jesse Gelsinger case before, most of the other episodes were partially or entirely new to me. I finished the book feeling like I had learned a lot about important moments in medical history and details that will enrich my understanding of medical advancements and how they affect people. So it wasn't just the human drama from the book I enjoyed, I also liked the book because I felt I learned so much. I had to give a couple of presentations this week and I found myself referring to something I had learned about in the book both times.
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- Andrew
- 12-14-23
A great detailed book.
I enjoyed every chapter and its details.
The reader was great. I highly recommend this title to All.
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- Lara
- 10-21-21
Flat and Dull
I love books about medical history, but I had a hard time following this one. The author jumped around so much I found myself losing the point he was trying to make. The delivery of the narrator never varied in tone, which made it tough to pay attention.
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2 people found this helpful