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A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities

Jan Bondeson · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

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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

MedicineHistoryGraphic Medical ContentNonfiction
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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.

MedicineHistoryGraphic Medical ContentNonfiction
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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

MedicineHistoryGraphic Medical ContentNonfiction
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MedicineHistoryGraphic Medical ContentNonfiction
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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

MedicineHistoryNonfictionGraphic Medical Content
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Rebecca Skloot · 381 pages

MedicineHistoryGraphic Medical ContentNonfiction
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Doctors From Hell

Vivien Spitz · 316 pages

MedicineHistoryGraphic Medical ContentNonfiction
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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

MedicineHistoryNonfictionGraphic Medical Content
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MedicineHistoryNonfictionGraphic Medical Content
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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.

MedicineHistoryNonfictionGraphic Medical Content
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The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years

Sonia Shah · 307 pages

Traces the centuries-long battle to treat and prevent malaria in numerous regions of the world while revealing how hundreds of millions of people are infected annually in spite of available preventions.

MedicineHistoryNonfiction
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Flu: The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It

Gina Kolata · 338 pages

The fascinating, true story of the world's deadliest disease. In 1918, the Great Flu Epidemic felled the young and healthy virtually overnight. An estimated forty million people died as the epidemic raged. Children were left orphaned and families were devastated. As many American soldiers were killed by the 1918 flu as were killed in battle during World War I. And no area of the globe was safe. Es

MedicineHistoryNonfiction
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Red Madness: How a Medical Mystery Changed What We Eat

Gail Jarrow · 192 pages

One hundred years ago, a mysterious disease called pellagra spread across the American South - "one of the most horrible, pitiful afflictions mankind has ever suffered." No one knew what caused it or how to treat it. Millions of men, women, and children were left weak, disfigured, insane, and, in some cases, dead. Many were also left to worry -- would they be pellagra's next victims? Author Gail J

MedicineHistoryNonfiction
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Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill

Robert Whitaker · 341 pages

In Mad in America, medical journalist Robert Whitaker reveals an astounding truth: Schizophrenics in the United States currently fare worse than patients in the world's poorest countries, and quite possibly worse than asylum patients did in the early nineteenth century. With a muckraker's passion, Whitaker argues that modern treatments for the severely mentally ill are just old medicine in new bot

MedicineHistoryNonfiction
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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

MedicineHistoryNonfiction
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The Century of the Surgeon

Jurgen Thorwald · 424 pages

MedicineHistoryNonfiction
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And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

Randy Shilts · 651 pages

The blueprint of 20th century investigative journalism. Tracing the course of HIV/AIDS through society; from its earliest as then unknown incarnation, to the height of this 1980s hysteria – the death of Rock Hudson: Shilts's book should be in every High School's final academic examinations coursework reading list, as a compulsory item. An unregrettable read.

MedicineHistoryNonfiction
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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

MedicineHistoryNonfiction
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Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine

Roy Porter · 224 pages

Mankind's battle to stay alive is the greatest of all subjects. This brief, witty and unusual book by Britain's greatest medical historian compresses into a tiny span a lifetime spent thinking about millennia of human ingenuity in the quest to cheat death. Each chapter sums up one of these battlefields (surgery, doctors, disease, hospitals, laboratories and the human body) in a way that is both fr

MedicineHistoryNonfiction
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Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus

Bill Wasik, Monica Murphy · 288 pages

Charts the history, science, and cultural mythology of rabies, documenting how before its vaccine the disease caused fatal brain infections and sparked the creations of monsters, including werewolves, vampires and zombies.

MedicineHistoryNonfiction
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Polio: An American Story

David M. Oshinsky · 342 pages

[This book] tells the ... story of the polio terror and of the intense effort to find a cure, from the March of Dimes to the discovery of the Salk and Sabin vaccines--and beyond.-Dust jacket.

MedicineHistoryNonfiction
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Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation

Dan Fagin · 538 pages

Recounts the decades-long saga of the New Jersey seaside town plagued by childhood cancers caused by air and water pollution due to the indiscriminate dumping of toxic chemicals.

MedicineHistoryNonfiction
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