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Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce

Douglas Starr · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

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.

MedicineScience WritingHistoryNonfiction
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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.

MedicineScience WritingHistoryNonfiction
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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

MedicineScience WritingHistoryNonfiction
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Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution

Holly Tucker · 304 pages

A sharp-eyed expose of the deadly politics, murderous plots, and cutthroat rivalries behind the first blood transfusions in seventeenth-century Europe.

MedicineScience WritingHistoryNonfiction
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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

MedicineScience WritingHistoryNonfiction
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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.

MedicineScience WritingHistoryNonfiction
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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.

MedicineScience WritingHistoryNonfiction
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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

MedicineScience WritingHistoryNonfiction
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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

MedicineScience WritingHistoryNonfiction
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Phineas Gage: A Gruesome but True Story About Brain Science

John Fleischman · 96 pages

Phineas Gage was truly a man with a hole in his head. Phineas, a railroad construction foreman, was blasting rock near Cavendish, Vermont, in 1848 when a thirteen-pound iron rod was shot through his brain. Miraculously, he survived to live another eleven years and become a textbook case in brain science. At the time, Phineas Gage seemed to completely recover from his accident. He could walk, ta

MedicineScience WritingHistoryNonfiction
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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

MedicineScience WritingHistoryNonfiction
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Viruses, Plagues and History

Michael B.A. Oldstone · 305 pages

"Nearly 300 million people were killed by smallpox over the course of the twentieth century. During the years 1918 and 1919, a deadly variant of the influenza strain claimed over 20 million lives. And today we face new viral threats: mad cow disease, the Hantavirus, and of course, AIDS. As Michael Oldstone illustrates here, the story of viruses and the story of humanity have overlapped since the d

MedicineScience WritingHistoryNonfiction
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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.

MedicineScience WritingHistoryNonfiction
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The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

Steven Johnson · 299 pages

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.From the dynamic thinker routinely compared to Malcolm Gladwell, E. O. Wilson, and James Gleick, The Ghost Map is a riveting page-turner with a real-life historical hero that

MedicineScience WritingHistoryNonfiction
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The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

Deborah Blum · 327 pages

The untold story of how poison rocked Jazz Age New York City. A pair of forensic scientists began their trailblazing chemical detective work, fighting to end an era when untraceable poisons offered an easy path to the perfect crime. Chief medical examiner Charles Norris and toxicologist Alexander Gettler investigate a family mysteriously stricken bald, factory workers with crumbling bones, a diner

MedicineHistoryScience WritingNonfiction
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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.

MedicineScience WritingHistoryNonfiction
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Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

Paul A. Offit · 287 pages

What happens when ideas presented as science lead us in the wrong direction? History is filled with brilliant ideas that gave rise to disaster, and this book explores some of these missteps: from opium's heyday as the pain reliever of choice to recognition of opioids as a major cause of death in the U.S.; from the rise of trans fats as the golden ingredient for tastier, cheaper food to the heart d

MedicineScience WritingHistoryNonfiction
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Rebecca Skloot · 381 pages

MedicineScience WritingHistoryNonfiction
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MedicineScience WritingHistoryNonfiction
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Napoleon's Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History

Penny Le Couteur, Jay Burreson · 384 pages

Napoleon's Buttons is the fascinating account of seventeen groups of molecules that have greatly influenced the course of history. These molecules provided the impetus for early exploration, and made possible the voyages of discovery that ensued. The molecules resulted in grand feats of engineering and spurred advances in medicine and law; they determined what we now eat, drink, and wear. A change

Science WritingHistoryMedicineNonfiction
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Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition

Owen Beattie, John Geiger · 182 pages

xvii, 285 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : 22 cm

Science WritingHistoryMedicineNonfiction
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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.

MedicineScience WritingHistoryNonfiction
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Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

Atul Gawande · 280 pages

Explores the efforts of physicians to close the gap between best intentions and best performance in the face of insurmountable obstacles, discussing such topics as the ethical considerations of lethal injections, malpractice, and surgical errors.

MedicineScience WritingNonfiction
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