Doctors and patients alike trust the medical profession and its therapeutic powers; yet this trust has often been misplaced. Whether prescribing opium or thalidomide, aspirin or antidepressants, doctors have persistently failed to test their favourite ideas - often with catastrophic results. From revolutionary America to Nazi Germany and modern big-pharmaceuticals, this is the unexpected story of just how bad medicine has been, and of its remarkably recent effort to improve.It is t...

A tearaway young man from Norfolk, Astley Cooper (1768-1841) became the world's richest and most famous surgeon. Admired from afar by the Brontës and up close by his student Keats, his success was born of an appetite for bloody revolutions.He set up an international network of bodysnatchers, won the Royal Society's highest prize and boasted to Parliament that there was no one whose body he could not steal. Experimenting on his neighbours' corpses and the living bodies of their stol...

In this humane and important exploration of modern medicine, Druin Burch examines the future of medicine, our changing physicalities and the implications of longer life.From birth to death and through the exploration of topics such as disease, sex, mind, eating and drinking, Burch tracks the future of medicine by looking at what is already possible today. Weaving in insights from literature, art and history, The Shape of Things to Come considers the cultural complexity surrounding m...

Winner, PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing"Warning: She spares no detail!" —Erik Larson, bestselling author of Dead WakeIn The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of nineteenth-century surgery and shows how it was transformed by advances made in germ theory and antiseptics between 1860 and 1875. She conjures up early operating theaters—no place for the squeamish—and s...

"Reveals the grisly conditions in which the mentally ill were kept . . . [and] harrowing details of the inhumane and gruesome treatment of these patients."— Daily MailIn the first half of the nineteenth century, treatment of the mentally ill in Britain and Ireland underwent radical change. No longer manacled, chained and treated like wild animals, patient care was defined in law and medical understanding, and treatment of insanity developed.Focusin...

" A deep dive into the education and lives of a medical professional's life over the span of 100 years . . . A good addition to any medical historian's library " ( The Lazy Historian).Imagine performing surgery on a patient without anesthetic or administering medicine that could kill or cure. Welcome to the world of the surgeon-apothecary.During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, significant changes occurred ...

"A fascinating insight into the country's most famous asylum for criminals" which reveals Victorian England's care and management of the mentally ill (Your Family Tree).On 27 May 1863, three coaches pulled up at the gates of a new asylum, built amongst the tall, dense pines of Windsor Forest. Broadmoor's first patients had arrived.In Broadmoor Revealed, Mark Stevens writes about what life was like for the criminally insane, over one hundred years ago...

Bestselling popular science author Dr. Joe Schwarcz breaks down the science of essential oils, placenta creams, intermittent fasting, and of course the spread of COVID-19 misinformation in this new collection from the master of demarcating non-science from scienceScience has gone viral! In more ways than one.Since we first heard rumblings about a novel type of pneumonia in Wuhan, China, terms like pandemic, spike protein, viral particles, v...

'Alternative' medicine is now used by one in three of us. In the UK we spend an estimated £4.5 billion a year on it and its practitioners are now insinuating themselves into the mainstream. There are methods based on ancient or far-eastern medicine, as well as ones invented in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many are promoted as natural treatments. What they have in common is that there is no hard evidence that any of them work.Treatments like homeopathy, acupuncture and ch...

"[A] fusion of science, social, and medical history . . . fascinating . . . the understanding of and responses to cholera are covered in detail and with sensitivity" —The Victorian WebDiscover the story of the disease that devastated the Victorian population, and brought about major changes in sanitation. Drawing on the latest scientific research and a wealth of archival material, Amanda J. Thomas uses first-hand accounts, blending personal storie...

The book EPIGENETICS is a global update of Darwin's book The Origin of Species. There is no other book that embraces all of the events (political, socially, biologically, nutritionally, chemically and genetically) that have been spawned since the publication of The Origin of Species by Darwin more than 100 years ago. EPIGENETICS is required reading for the very survival of Americans and yes all of humanity - modern man has bet on the wrong horse to save them from disease and pestilence - t...

A GUARDIAN, ECONOMIST AND PROSPECT BOOK OF THE YEAR'A superb book' Simon Sebag Montefiore'An empowering story of human ingenuity' Economist'Full of curious facts' The TimesCauses of death have changed irrevocably across time. In the course of a few centuries we have gone from a world where disease or violence were likely to strike anyone at any age, and wher...