History, Medicine, and Science: Nonfiction and Fiction discussion

Have any good recommendations?? Add your favorites to our bookshelf! :)

Oh, definitely The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson about the famous Broad Street Cholera outbreak comes to mind. I loved that one.

I've heard good things about The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks but have not read it yet. I should put it in my to-read. :)

It is not really about medicine but Before the Dawn about genetics and human pre-history and history engagned and enlightened me.

Ghost Map was a fantastic read. And the Immortal Life...I promise you'll love it.

Did you ever read Margaret Atwood's Oryx & Crake. Great book, but gave me nightmares...

Holly wrote: "Ghost Map was a fantastic read. And the Immortal Life...I promise you'll love it.

Did you ever read Margaret Atwood's Oryx & Crake. Great book, but gave me nightmares..."

Oh, yes. Acutally, I listened to it on audiobook. The image of Snowman watching the Children of Crake on the beach has stuck with me. Excellent book.

I don't remember that scene. I do remember all of the wild creatures that were, it seemed at the time, a good idea. Funny, I think Oryx & Crake disturbed and fascinated me so much that I think I've repressed much of the story.

Here are a few I'd recommend:
Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Microcosm by Carl Zimmer
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Death by Black Hole by Neil Tyson deGrasse

Holly wrote: "I don't remember that scene. I do remember all of the wild creatures that were, it seemed at the time, a good idea. Funny, I think Oryx & Crake disturbed and fascinated me so much that I think I'..."

Yeah, "Snats." *Shiver* Now, the idea of THOSE is definitely disturbing.

One book on my to-read list that I'm thinking of right now is The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery, which looks very good.

Hi Kate. I -loved- that one. In fact, Wendy's book is what got me thinking about writing Blood Work for a broader audience. She's also a really generous person. She did a Skype interview with my students last spring--and blurbed my book. :) Adding to the group's shelves.

I loved The Knife Man, and Digging up the Dead about the life of surgeon Sir Astley Cooper is similar. Age of Wonders by Richard Holmes is brilliant about Enlightenment science. I would endorse what people have said about The Ghost Map. So accessible - read like a thriller in places.

I've never read Digging Up the Dead. Adding it to the TBR list now.

Want to head over and add a few titles to our book group wish list? Really looking forward to kicking things off in May!

I recently read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks -- it was an excellent book. I would also really recommend it.

Red wrote: "Here are a few I'd recommend:
Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Microcosm by Carl Zimmer
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Death by Black Hole by Neil Tyson deGrasse"

I'd like to read Emperor of All Maladies! And I love Neil DeGrasse Tyson - I'd like to give his book a try.

How Doctors Think
I liked this book because the Physician Author who also was teaching residents started questioning "How He thinks". By doing so, he starts questioning his own medical errors and what went wrong with his thought process. He follows up on difficult cases where he had missed the diagnosis or treatment -- and interviewed the Physician who eventually had a successful outcome. He asks why some other MD found the REAL medical situation - and what could be learned to improve his thinking.

I found the book less about clinical or medical education -- and more about critical thinking. He also tells patients what questions might help assure that their own Physicians don't fall into the same traps.

One of his pitfalls is one that I became aware that I sometimes am guilty.

After all, aren't we all human and we all try to find thinking shortcuts that have potential for wrong decisions? How often does a frank discussion of thinking -- which I found helpful for my non-medical processing.

I loved The Great Influenza by John Barry. Totally readable, lots of great science about the flu (which can come in handy since the media goes nuts with the subject every year). I reviewed it on my blog: http://www.whatbookshouldireadtoday.c...

I'm going to read Polio: An American Story by David Oshinsky at some point soon - I bought it and have heard great things. Ditto on The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

I highly recommend A Land, a geological history of Britain by the late archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes. Sounds dry, I know, but the writing is sublime; Hawkes was a niece of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and clearly inherited his gift.

Looks like a great book. Would never have known about it unless you'd shared the information. Thanks!

I recently finished Pox Americana by Elizabeth A. Fenn. A very readable, if itchy, account of smallpox in the Americas.

Feeling scratchy already! I told you that I caught the MEASLES in France, didn't I? Pox à la française! oui oui.

Did they quarantine you?

Ha, no! They released me from the hospital with a prescription (!) for a mask. My university DID quarantine a few friends who returned to campus after visiting me when I fell ill. And student health sounded the alarm far and wide--even the CDC was alerted apparently.

Holly wrote: "Feeling scratchy already! I told you that I caught the MEASLES in France, didn't I? Pox à la française! oui oui."

Ooh, careful. I believe that historically the French pox referred to syphilis...

You are TOTALLY right! YIKES! And early syphilis sure wasn't pretty...

http://www.wondersandmarvels.com/2008...

I think the French called it the Italian disease. Everyone wants to pass the buck.

Holly wrote: "You are TOTALLY right! YIKES! And early syphilis sure wasn't pretty...

http://www.wondersandmarvels.com/2008..."

Yeah and they treated it with mercury. Gah. The book I just finished, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, is a novel, though an excellent one. I mention it here because there is some trading of mercury and mention of syphillis in it. Also, it opens with a rather graphic description of a birth in 1799 Japan. The main female character is a midwife and one of the supporting characters is a doctor.

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston is very very good. Scared the heck out of me.

Hot zone totally freaked me out too

I quite enjoyed The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly. One of the better plague books I've come across. It is very comprehensive and well balanced in the information it presents.

The American Plague by Molly Caldwell Crosby was a great book on the yellow fever epidemic in the Americas at the turn of the century.

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett was exhaustively comprehensive and somewhat terrifying. Be prepared for a good long sit down as it's a 768 pages.

Lastly an interesting but not a well known work, The Case of the Frozen Addicts by J. William Langston and Jon Palfreman was a fascinating read about six patients who arrived at San Francisco area emergency rooms after using a synthetic analogue of heroin. Fully conscious but unable to move or speak, they were soon diagnosed as having advanced Parkinson's disease.

Of course Ghost Map was awesome and I've got The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in my stack of TBR books.

Jenn,

What a great list! Did you read Caldwell Crosby's latest, Asleep? It's been on my list for awhile.

Curious...what fascinates you most about plague and plague studies? (I am also fascinated. I worked a lot with the Black Death in London 17th century for my book...it's a morbid fascination, to be sure!)

All best, Holly

No I haven't even heard of Asleep.... that looks fantastic! I'll definitely be adding that to my wish list.

Ah, THE plague. I think it's just the unimaginable horrific scale of the thing that makes it so compulsively fascinating.... and the lethality. The closest we can come today to even getting a glimpse of the horror of that age was the tsunami that struck Thailand in '04. Of course the death and destruction of the wave lasted a few minutes and was over... imagine decades of death slowly sweeping toward you with no escape....

Not to say that later incarnations of the plague weren't just as horrific but it's my understanding that your chances of survival were a bit better then those of the 14th century.

What fascinates you about the Black Death?

At any rate, I'm glad I'm alive now and not then to be sure!

For me, I think I'm fascinated by how epidemics are reminders of how fragile human life is. I'm mesmerized by the social dynamics of disease, fear and panic. (Though I certainly hope never to have to experience it directly.)

But I do remember the anthrax and small pox scares after 9/11. I felt that same all-consuming fear. And I remember thinking about history and how other people at other times must have felt. It was comforting, actually.

And then I also felt that same vulnerability when I caught the measles (yes, the measles) in France. The person I caught if from was a good distance from me in the Marseille metro. All it took was one random moment. And I was very very sick not long after. How fragile we are...

(and yes, I had been vaccinated. But there was, apparently, a high fail rate in the first several years the MMR was administered...) Sigh.

enjoyed
The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity
and
The Scientists: A History of Science Told Through the Lives of Its Greatest Inventors
recently

Love, love LOVE Roy Porter's stuff.

Holly wrote: "Love, love LOVE Roy Porter's stuff."

I agree aiming to read Enlightenment next month

Has anyone read The Family That Couldn't Sleep? Is it recommended? I've had it in my Amazon basket for ages but have not got around to purchasing it yet. I admit the setting in Venice attracts me as much as the story of the family's medical condition!

Another book I just remembered that I enjoyed wasThe Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World. The constant curiosity of the men was engaging, as was their(in some cases) lifelong friendships.

Haven't read Lunar Men, but it makes me think aboutThe Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York. The cover alone is worth a peek. It's really a fascinating book!

I just received The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World by Edward Dolnick It bears no relationship to my current research, but I can't wait to read it.

Great suggestions, Duntay -- The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery looks terrific!

Hi, I am compiling a big TBR list from this thread. I also have a couple of recommendations:
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Toach is not really a medical book, but fits the theme, I hope.
Anything by Oliver sacks, but particularly The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
Quite enjoyed Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates though it was a little over-critical of the progress of medicine, to my mind.
Another neurologist who can write well about his work is V I Ramachandran, for example The Emerging Mind
I enjoy Jay Ingram's popular science writing too.
I also read the great influenza, and found it fascinating.

Great suggestions, Aileen!
What are your favorite Jay Ingram books?
xoxox,
Yvonne

I don't know if this would be one of the reading material in this group but I found it very interesting.
As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl
Very interesting history of John Money at Johns Hopkins. They now try to down play his connection to the university but he did have his spotlight years.

1. Women's Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus's De Secretis Mulierum With Commentaries (Suny Series in Medieval Studies) by Albertus Magnus

This work dates from at least the 13th century and was an intended study on female sexuality and obstetrics. Did you know that if a woman swallowed a live bee that she wouldn't get pregnant for a year? I did enjoy this book, just when it would start to get dry and tedious they would throw in a gem like ... milk is really cooked sperm, that traveled from the womb to the mother's breast.

2. I'm about to start : The Trotula: An English Translation of the Medieval Compendium of Women's Medicine (The Middle Ages Series) by Monica Helen Green

3. I also have a book sitting on my bookcase that sounds very interesting which is titled, "A time To Dance, A Time To Die" by John Waller.

In July 1518, a strange plague struck the medieval city of Strasbourg, Germany. Hundreds of men and women were seized by a compulsion to dance non-stop for days until they collapsed in the summer heat ... causing many to perish. They still don't have a clear answer to this puzzling behavior.

kate wrote: "One book on my to-read list that I'm thinking of right now is The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery, which looks very good."

kate,
i loved knife man--it shows how lucky we are to be living today--the old days weren't so great--the way they treated the patients was absolutely horrifying--
good reads on surgeons and medicine is Harvey Cushing by Michael Bliss and any book that Sherwin Nuland writes

Yvonne wrote: "Great suggestions, Aileen!
What are your favorite Jay Ingram books?
xoxox,
Yvonne"

Hi Yvonne, I only have a couple because they are hard to find in Australia. I liked The Science of Everyday Life and Talk, Talk, Talk: Decoding the Mysteries of Speech. I also liked The Barmaid's Brain: And Other Strange Tales from Science. When I bought the latter, the girl serving in the bookstore said 'that's a bit sexist isn't it?'. I was totally flummoxed. In fact, she was being se ist in assuming the authors point was that barmaids are dumb. In fact, the point of that chapter was that barmaids develop an amazing intuition about balancing glasses so they don't spill, which is quite hard to do.

RE The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery: Wendy Moore is simply wonderful. She did a Skype interview with students in my history of medicine class last spring.

Actually, a funny story about that. My mom just had major surgery (not funny, but she's fine now) and I was in the hospital with her in Chicago. My students were in Nashville. And Wendy was in London.

Thanks to Skype we had class all of us. Me, from a quiet hospital room. The students in our classroom. And Wendy from across the ocean.

Isn't that amazing?

Thank you so much, Aileen -- you're making my job as group librarian incredibly easy!

You should have asked that sales lady if she wanted to borrow the book from you -- she sounds like she could have used some "enlightening"! :-)

Glad you mom's ok Holly!

Well, in promotional mode, I can recommend Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion by ... me. It won some awards, was warmly reviewed, and I sure had fun writing it ... :-)