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. To overcome this problem, they often brokered financial arrangements. Yet an ethic of gift exchange coex...

Medical ethics draws upon methods from a wide array of disciplines, including anthropology, economics, epidemiology, health services research, history, law, medicine, nursing, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and theology.In this influential book, outstanding scholars in medical ethics bring these many methods together in one place to be systematically described, critiqued, and challenged. Newly revised and updated chapters in this second edition include philosophy, religion and ...

The first full-length history of biomedical research with human subjects in the period "before Tuskegee"—from 1890 to 1940Long before the U.S. government began conducting secret radiation and germ-warfare experiments, and long before the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, medical professionals had introduced—and hotly debated the ethics of—the use of human subjects in medical experiments. In Subjected to Science, Susan Lederer provides the first full-length hi...

**#1 New York Times bestseller“Barry will teach you almost everything you need to know about one of the deadliest outbreaks in human history.”—Bill Gates"Monumental... an authoritative and disturbing morality tale."—Chicago Tribune**The strongest weapon against pandemic is the truth. Read why in the definitive account of the 1918 Flu Epidemic.Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and depth of research, The Great Inf...

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • The first full history of Black America’s shocking mistreatment as unwilling and unwitting experimental subjects at the hands of the medical establishment. No one concerned with issues of public health and racial justice can afford not to read this masterful book."[Washington] has unearthed a shocking amount of information and shaped it into a riveting, carefully documented book." —New York Times...

Discover the forgotten story of Mary Mallon—the real Typhoid Mary—in this humanizing portrait offering a window into the ethical dilemmas of public health policy that continue to haunt us in the COVID era.She was an Irish immigrant cook. Between 1900 and 1907, she infected 22 New Yorkers with typhoid fever through her puddings and cakes; one of them died. Tracked down through epidemiological detective work, she was finally apprehended as she hid behind a b...

A pediatrician and infectious disease specialist warns of the resurgence of measles, the antivaccine movement, and how we can prepare for the next pandemicEvery single child diagnosed with measles represents a system failure—an inexcusable unforced error. The technology to prevent essentially 100 percent of measles cases has been in our hands since before the moon landing. But this serious airborne disease, once seemingly defeated, is resurgent around the globe. Wh...

The struggle against deadly microbes is endless. Diseases that have plagued human beings since ancient times still exist, new maladies make their way into the headlines, we are faced with vaccine shortages, and the threat of germ warfare has reemerged as a worldwide threat.In this riveting account, medical historian Howard Markel takes an eye-opening look at the fragility of the American public health system. He tells the distinctive stories of six epidemics–tuberculosis, bubonic p...

The 2014 Ebola epidemic demonstrated the power of pandemics and their ability not only to destroy lives locally but also to capture the imagination and terrify the world. Christian W. McMillen provides a concise yet comprehensive account of pandemics throughout human history, illustrating how pandemic disease has shaped history and, at the same time, social behavior has influenced pandemic disease. Extremely interesting from a medical standpoint, the study of pandemics also provides unexpe...

Did you know...Medical interventions have become the third leading cause of death in America.An estimated 10 percent of Americans are implanted with medical devices -- like pacemakers, artificial hips, cardiac stents, etc.The overwhelming majority of high-risk implanted devices have never undergone a single clinical trial.In The Danger Within Us, award-winning journalist Jeanne Lenzer brings these horrifying statistics to life through the story of one w...

Essence and emblem of life--feared, revered, mythologized, and used in magic and medicine from earliest times--human blood is now the center of a huge, secretive, and often dangerous worldwide commerce. It is a commerce whose impact upon humanity rivals that of any other business--millions of lives have been saved by blood and its various derivatives, and tens of thousands of lives have been lost. Douglas Starr tells how this came to be, in a sweeping history that ranges through the centur...

**As Featured on What Now? with Trevor NoahFinalist for the 2024 New York Public Library's Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in JournalismInspiring and deeply distressing.” —Ezekiel J. Emanuel, author of Which Country Has the World’s Best Health Care?How did a lifesaving medical breakthrough become a for-profit enterprise that threatens many of the people it’s meant to save?**Six decades ago, visionary doctors achieved the impossible: the ...