Books

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read - Abraham Lincoln

Books
Books

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HWN Recommends

The Passing of a Legend: Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton, one of the most prolific medical writers didn’t win a Pulitzer or a national book award for his writings, however, his books sold as many as 150 million copies around the globe. His movie and TV credits were equally as impressive including Jurassic Park and the successful television series ER.

The New York Times said, “Reviewers often complained that Mr. Crichton’s characters were wooden, that his ear for dialogue was tin and that his science was suspect. Environmentalists raged against his skeptical views on climate change, first expressed in the 2004 novel, “State of Fear,” and subsequently in various public forums. Even…

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 The Passing of a Legend: Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton didn’t win a Pulitzer or a national book award for his writings, however, his books sold as many as 150 million copies around the globe. There is no doubt that Crichton contributed to a healthier world in more ways than one!

The 23 best health and science books to read this summer

Read on for recommendations from CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna and CDC Director Robert Redfield. Plus, STAT readers from Boston to Ireland to Australia share their picks, in addition to our staff. Enjoy!

The Best Books of 2017 About Healthy Aging

Great reads for keeping the mind, body and spirit engaged. And maybe making a little money as well.

Three Books That Track Diseases, Drugs and the World They Made

Each time the specter of bird flu arises, so too do grim references to the global pandemic that killed tens of millions of people in 1918.

Contagion

After he loses first his midwestern ophthalmology practice to a for-profit medical giant and then his family to a commuter airline tragedy, Dr. John Stapleton's life is transformed to ashes. Feeling less the golden boy than a jaded cynic, Stapleton retrains in forensic pathology and relocates to find an uneasy niche for himself...

Courage To Heal

Set in a world of iron lungs and the Great Depression, when women and babies are dying in poorly run charity hospitals, Courage to Heal is based on the true story of a young surgeon, Sidney Garfield, who along with the twentieth century's boldest industrialist, Henry Kaiser, changes the face of American medicine. Garfield is brought to life in this story of an intransigent physician, his fight to provide health care to all.

Fast Food Nation

Given my distaste for fast food and the general knowledge of its detrimental effect on the American diet, I didn’t expect to find any revelations in Fast Food Nation. But journalist Eric Schlosser’s thoroughly researched and well-written probe into the industry that has transformed American roadsides, eating patterns, and agriculture was actually an eye-opener.

Flesh and Blood

Organ transplantation is one of the most dramatic interventions in modern medicine. Since the 1950s thousands of people have lived with 'new' hearts, kidneys, lungs, corneas, and other organs and tissues transplanted into their bodies. From the beginning, though, there was simply a problem: surgeons often encountered shortages of people willing and able to give their organs and tissues.

Living ‘With the End in Mind’

Palliative care is an alternative to the relentless and costly treatment that is so common toward the end of life. Laura Landro reviews ‘With the End in Mind’ by Kathryn Mannix.

Medical Miracles

Modern culture tends to separate medicine and miracles, but their histories are closely intertwined. The Roman Catholic Church recognizes saints through canonization based on evidence that they worked miracles, as signs of their proximity to God. Jacalyn Duffin has examined Vatican sources on 1400 miracles from six continents and spanning four centuries.

Mending Bodies, Saving Souls

By chronicling the transformations of hospitals from houses of mercy to tools of confinement, from dwellings of rehabilitation to spaces for clinical teaching and research, from rooms for birthing and dying to institutions of science and technology, this book provides a historical approach to understanding of today's hospitals.

Miracle Cure

Miracle Cure was inspired by several highly publicized cases of cheating in academic research, one of them in the lab of a Nobel Prize winner here in Boston.

Natural Causes

Natural Causes was a breakthrough book for me in that it was the first of my novels to make it into the top five of The New York Times Best-Seller List.

Nature Cures

This is the first comprehensive history of alternative medicine in America, examining the major systems that have emerged from 1800 to the present. Writing with wit and with fairness to all sides, Whorton offers a fascinating look at alternative health systems.

Polio: An American Story

All who lived in the early 1950s remember the fear of polio and the elation felt when a successful vaccine was found. Now David Oshinsky tells the gripping 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.

Suicide in the Middle Ages

"Suicide" and "the Middle Ages" sounds like a contradiction. Was life not too short anyway, and the Church too disapproving, to admit suicide? And how is the historian supposed to find out?

The Big Thirst

"The Big Thirst" offers a cataract of statistics. The average American flushes the toilet five times a day, the author says, using 18.5 gallons of water. That comes to "5.7 billion gallons of clean drinking water down the toilet." An Australian rice farmer with 10,450 acres uses six gigaliters of water—that's six billion liters, or enough to hand almost everyone on the planet a bottle of Evian.

The Blue Zones

One of the first things Buettner was quick to establish was that your longevity is mostly up to you. Yes, genes play a part, but only a small part compared to what most people give them credit for. How healthy you are into your old age is 80% your lifestyle choices and only 20% your genetics. And it would make sense that if you want to live the longest, you would take advice from the people who have lived the longest and simply do as they did.

The Disagreement: A Novel

In 1862, at age 17, John Muro is packed off from Lynchburg to the University of Virginia Medical School, a berth that exempts him from the Confederate draft. Thanks to a flood of casualties, he's soon promoted to full-fledged doctor at the local military hospital, where his sense of detachment helps him deal with the carnage of war''and spills over into the rest of his life.

The First Miracle Drugs

In the decade from 1935-1945, while the Second World War raged in Europe, a new class of medicines capable of controlling bacterial infections launched a therapeutic revolution that continues today. The new medicines were not penicillin and antibiotics, but sulfonamides, or sulfa drugs. The sulfa drugs preceded penicillin by almost a decade...

The First Patient

Gabe Singleton and Andrew Stoddard were once roommates. Today, Gabe is a doctor and his friend Andrew has gone from war hero to governor to President of the United States. One day, while the United States is embroiled in a bitter presidential election campaign, Marine One lands on Gabe's Wyoming ranch, and President Stoddard announces that his personal physician has suddenly and mysteriously disappeared -- and he desperately needs Gabe to take the man's place.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

What should we have for dinner? The question has confronted us since man discovered fire, but according to Michael Pollan, the bestselling author of The Botany of Desire, how we answer it today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, may well determine our very survival as a species. Should we eat a fast-food hamburger? Something organic?

The Second Opinion

Two novelists excel in writing medical mysteries. Both are physicians who write best sellers. One is Robin Cook and the second is Michael Palmer. Both write thrillers that involve medical conspiracies, generally headed by hospital personnel who are more interested in money than in their patients’ health. Even people who are unable to watch medical shows or hear about medical procedures or visit hospitals or see blood flow are able to read and enjoy the twists and turns in their books.

The Terminal Man

Certainly The Terminal Man is eminently readable – I tore through it in a couple of days during my holiday – but it's also curiously colourless. The central idea is compelling: Harold Benson, a computer engineer suffering from blackouts and concurrent violent episodes following an accident, elects to undergo experimental surgery to have an electronic mood stabilizer hooked up to his brain – a kind of pacemaker for the mind.

This Side of Doctoring

Here, in This Side of Doctoring Eliza Lo Chin offers a penetrating analysis of what it's like to be a woman in the highly competitive field of medicine. Written over the last century and a half, this collection of personal stories, poems, essays, and quotations reveals the intimate lives of over a hundred female physicians.

Toxin

Just how safe is America's meat supply? Recent health scares and new public awareness have made this one of today's most controversial subjects - and the basis of Robin Cook's most startling, and important novel. When a doctor's daughter becomes infected with E. coli, the widespread dangers of bacterial contamination are no longer a subject for debate, but a grim reality.

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