This edition of a landmark work of scholarship includes both a new preface by the author and a new foreword that places the book in its historical context.When insulin was discovered in the early 1920s, even jaded professionals marveled at how it brought starved, sometimes comatose patients with diabetes back to life. Defying the average timeline, the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded for its discovery. To recount the fascinating story behind t...

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 ...

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...

One of the most innovative films ever made, Sam Peckinpah's motion picture The Wild Bunch was released in 1969. From the outset, the film was considered controversial because of its powerful, graphic, and direct depiction of violence, but it was also praised for its lush photography, intricate camera work, and cutting-edge editing. Peckinpah's tale of an ill-fated, aging outlaw gang bound by a code of honor is often regarded as one of the most complex and impactful Westerns in Ame...

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...

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? ...

John P. McGovern held seventeen professorships, received twenty-nine honorary doctorates, and established the nation’s largest privately owned allergy and immunology clinic. He authored 252 professional publications including twenty-six books in the medical sciences and humanities, and served as president or chief elected officer of fifteen professional societies in medicine. In addition, the McGovern Foundation has given millions of dollars to various local and national health charities, ...

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...

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 the most serious challenges to environmentalism that has emerged in the 1990s is the so-called Wise Use movement. While operating under the guise of an independent movement of small landowners, it is in reality a backlash against environmental protection measures, funded and organized by corporations with a vested interest in preventing further environmental gains. Let the People Judge collects the writings of a wide range of thinkers on the Wise Use movement and the contro...