The discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921–2 was one of the most dramatic events in the history of the treatment of disease. Insulin, discovered by the Canadian research team of Frederick Banting, Charles Best, James Collip, and John Macleod, was a wonder drug with the ability to bring diabetes patients back from the brink of death. It was no surprise that in 1923 the Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded for its discovery.In this engaging and award-winning accoun...

The discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921-22 was one of the most dramatic events in the history of the treatment of disease. Insulin was a wonder-drug with ability to bring patients back from the very brink of death, and it was no surprise that in 1923 the Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to its discoverers, the Canadian research team of Banting, Best, Collip, and Macleod.In this engaging and award-winning account, historian Michael Bliss recounts the fascin...

William Osler was born in a parsonage in backwoods Canada on July 12, 1849. In a life lasting seventy years, he practiced, taught, and wrote about medicine at Canada's McGill University, America's Johns Hopkins University, and finally as Regius Professor at Oxford. At the time of his death in England in 1919, many considered him to be the greatest doctor in the world. Osler, who was a brilliant, innovative teacher and a scholar of the natural history of disease, revolutionized the art of p...

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, we have become accustomed to medical breakthroughs and conditioned to assume that, regardless of illnesses, doctors almost certainly will be able to help—not just by diagnosing us and alleviating our pain, but by actually treating or even curing diseases, and significantly improving our lives.For most of human history, however, that was far from the case, as veteran medical historian Michael Bliss explains in The Making of Modern Medicin...

In January 1885, as the people of Montreal celebrated one of the greatest winter carnivals of the century, a deadly epidemic inched its way through the city streets. When the case of a railway porter suffering from smallpox was gravely mishandled, what followed was a “carnival of death” causing the preventable demise of over 3,000 Montrealers.In Plague, historian Michael Bliss uncovers one of the most remarkable untold stories in Canadian history. Crafted through thorough ...

Updated with an insightful and controversial assessment of Jean ChrétienSince first published in 1994, Right Honourable Men has remained the definitive source for Canadians wanting to know more about the quality of our leaders and the personalities behind the policies. Now, in this timely new edition, Bliss evaluates Jean Chrétien's record and asserts that he was actually a conservative prime minister -- as conservative as Mulroney himself. And Chrétien's legacy? ...

One of America’s most beloved comic duos, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy have entertained generations of viewers with their unique, heartwarming brand of slapstick comedy. The pair’s teamwork and friendship set their films apart, softening both pratfalls and hardships, and earning them a cherished place in cinema history. From their first joint on-screen appearance in 1921’s The Lucky Dog through their work at the Hal Roach studios, their comic signature remained unique. But what made the fi...

One of Canada's best-known and most-honoured biographers turns to the raw material of his own life in Writing History. A university professor, prolific scholar, public intellectual, and frank critic of the world he has known, Michael Bliss draws on extensive personal diaries to describe a life that has taken him from small-town Ontario in the 1950s to international recognition for his books in Canadian and medical history. His memoir ranges remarkably widely: it encompasses social...

Here is the first biography to appear in fifty years of Harvey Cushing, a giant of American medicine and without doubt the greatest figure in the history of brain surgery. Drawing on new collections of intimate personal and family papers, diaries and patient records, Michael Bliss captures Cushing's professional and his personal life in remarkable detail. Bliss paints an engaging portrait of a man of ambition, boundless, driving energy, a fanatical work ethic, a penchant for self-promotion...

Out of more than 180 science fiction films produced in the United States between 1950 and 1959, twenty were concerned with the notion of an invasion. Of these, a select number used the invasions as metaphors of issues that were of importance to America at the time, such as assaults upon individuality and marriage and debates about the supremacy of the human race. The invasion may be real (The Day the Earth Stood Still and War of the Worlds), dreamed (Invaders from Mars), or the result of a...

A leading public intellectual, Michael Bliss has written prolifically for academic and popular audiences and taught at the University of Toronto from 1968 to 2006. Among his publications are a comprehensive history of the discovery of insulin, and major biographies of Frederick Banting, William Osler, and Harvey Cushing. The essays in this volume, each written by former doctoral students of Bliss, with a foreword by John Fraser and Elizabeth McCallum, do honour to his influence, and, at th...

For four decades, Ideas has presented more than 400,000 CBC Radio listeners in Canada and the United States with the most challenging contemporary thought of the day. Now, to mark the program’s 40th anniversary, executive producer Bernie Lucht has selected the most striking interviews and lectures for Ideas: Brilliant Thinker Speak Their Minds. Featuring some the best thinkers from North America and around the world that have appeared on the program since its beginnings in 1965, Ideas: Bri...