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The Knife Man: Blood, Body-Snatching and the Birth of Modern Surgery
Wendy Moore · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot · 381 pages
Blood and Guts A History of Surgery by Hollingham, Richard
Richard Hollingham · 320 pages
'Blood and Guts' tells the remarkable history of surgery from ancient times onwards. It's an extraordinary story of stolen corpses, medical fraud, lobotomised patients - and every now and then courageous advances that have saved the lives of millions around the world.
Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (Bloomsbury Sigma)
Kathryn Harkup · 305 pages
A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities
Jan Bondeson · 250 pages
Before museums there were cabinets of medical curiosities: a dried mermaid might sit next to a giant's shinbone; the skeletons of conjoined twins beside an Egyptian mummy. In this well-illustrated book, the author uses his medical expertise to explore some of these medical freaks, outright frauds and popular myths. He debunks some as mere superstition and offers medical diagnoses for other cases.
Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital
Sheri Fink · 558 pages
Fink provides a landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina-- and a suspenseful portrayal of the quest for truth and justice. After Katrina struck and the floodwaters rose, the power failed, and the heat climbed, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients last for rescue. Months later, several health professionals faced criminal all
The American Plague
Molly Caldwell Crosby · 320 pages
In this account, a journalist traces the course of yellow fever, stopping in 1878 Memphis to "vividly [evoke] the Faulkner-meets-'Dawn of the Dead' horrors,"*-and moving on to today's strain of the killer virus.Over the course of history, yellow fever has paralyzed governments, halted commerce, quarantined cities, moved the U.S. capital, and altered the outcome of wars. During a single summer in M
The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History
John M. Barry · 546 pages
At the height of WWI, 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. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collisio
An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine
Howard Markel · 325 pages
The astonishing account of the decades-long cocaine use of Sigmund Freud and William Halsted. The author discusses the physical and emotional damage caused by the constant use of the then-heralded wonder drug, and of how each man ultimately changed the world in spite of it--or because of it.
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women
Kate Moore · 480 pages
As World War I raged across the globe, hundreds of young women toiled away at the radium-dial factories, where they painted clock faces with a mysterious new substance called radium. Assured by their bosses that the luminous material was safe, the women themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered from head to toe with the glowing dust. With such a coveted job, these "shining girls" were conside
Dr. Feelgood: The Story of the Doctor Who Influenced History by Treating and Drugging Prominent Figures Including President Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley
Richard A. Lertzman, William J. Birnes · 199 pages
Doctor Max Jacobson, whom the Secret Service under President John F. Kennedy code-named "Dr. Feelgood," developed a unique "energy formula" that altered the paths of some of the twentieth-century's most iconic figures, including President and Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Elvis. JFK received his first injection (a special mix of "vitamins and hormones," according to Jacobson)
The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray's Anatomy
Bill Hayes · 250 pages
"Hayes's history of the illustrated medical text "Gray's Anatomy" coincides with the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of its first publication. Fascinated by the fact that little was known about the famous book's genesis, Hayes combed through nineteenth-century letters and medical-school records, learning that, besides Henry Gray, the brilliant scholar and surgeon who wrote the text, another anato
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Siddhartha Mukherjee · 571 pages
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer is a book written by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-born American physician and oncologist. Published on 16 November 2010 by Scribner, it won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam
Pope Brock · 330 pages
In 1917, after years of selling worthless patent remedies throughout the Southeast, John R. Brinkley--America's most brazen young con man--arrived in the tiny town of Milford, Kansas. He set up a medical practice and introduced an outlandish surgical method using goat glands to restore the fading virility of local farmers.It was all nonsense, of course, but thousands of paying customers quickly tu
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Mary Roach · 304 pages
A hilarious and witty look into the history of using cadavers for science, grave diggers, and options to consider about your burial plan. A dark and uncomfortable subject made more palatable and downright funny.
The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug
Thomas Hager · 340 pages
The Nazis discovered it. The Allies won the war with it. It conquered diseases, changed laws, and single-handedly launched the era of antibiotics. It was sulfa, the first synthetic antibiotic. Science writer Hager chronicles the history of the drug that shaped modern medicine. Sulfa saved millions of lives--among them those of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr.--but even more, it
Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case
Debbie Nathan · 297 pages
The true story of the three women behind Sybil, the famous multiple-personality case.
Terrible Typhoid Mary: A True Story of the Deadliest Cook in America
Susan Campbell Bartoletti · 236 pages
With archival photographs and text among other primary sources, provides a biography of Mary Mallon that goes beyond the typhoid scandal of her controversial life, and explores issues such as her treatment by medical and legal officials, human and constitutional rights, and the science of pathology. Discusses her later years, and her death in 1938.
Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter
Kate Clifford Larson · 319 pages
The revelatory, poignant story of Rosemary Kennedy, the eldest and eventually secreted-away Kennedy daughter, and how her life transformed her family, its women especially, and an entire nation.
The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox
Jennifer Lee Carrell · 474 pages
A timely book about history's first desperate efforts to conquer smallpoxThe Speckled Monster tells the dramatic story of two parents who dared to fight back against smallpox. After barely surviving the agony of smallpox themselves, they flouted eighteenth-century medicine by borrowing folk knowledge from African slaves and Eastern women in frantic bids to protect their children. From their hero
Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle
Fiona Carnarvon · 298 pages
Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey tells the story behind Highclere Castle, the real-life inspiration for the hit PBS show Downton Abbey, and the life of one of its most famous inhabitants, Lady Almina, the 5th Countess of Carnarvon and the basis of the fictional character Lady Cora Crawley. Drawing on a rich store of materials from the archives of Highclere Castle, including diaries, letters
Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster
Adam Higginbotham · 538 pages
The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis
Thomas Goetz · 298 pages
"The riveting history of tuberculosis, the world's most lethal disease, the two men whose lives it tragically intertwined, and the birth of medical science. In 1875, tuberculosis was the deadliest disease in the world, accountable for a third of all deaths. A diagnosis of TB-often called consumption-was a death sentence. Then, in triumph of medical science, a German doctor named Robert Koch deploy