New Books in Medicine

Freedom of choice lies at the heart of American society. Every day, individuals decide what to eat, which doctors to see, who to connect with online, and where to educate their children. Yet, many Americans don't realize that these choices are illusory at best. By the start of the 21st century, every major industrial sector in the global economy was controlled by no more than five transnational corporations, and in about a third of these sectors, a single company accounted for more than 40 percent of global sales. The available options in food, healthcare, education, transportation, and even online presence are largely constructed by corporations, whose sweeping influence have made them the public face and executive agents of 21st-century capitalism. At What Cost: Modern Capitalism and the Future of Health (Oxford UP, 2021) confronts how globalization, financial speculation, monopolies, and control of science and technology have enhanced the ability of corporations and their allies to overwhelm influences of government, family, community, and faith. As corporations manipulate demand through skillful marketing and veto the choices that undermine their bottom line, free consumer choice has all but disappeared, and with it, the personal protections guarding our collective health. At What Cost argues that the world created by 21st-century capitalism is simply not fit to solve our most serious public health problems, from climate change to opioid addiction. However, author and public health expert Nicholas Freudenberg also shows that though the road is steep, human and planetary well-being constitute a powerful mobilizing idea for a new social movement, one that will restore the power of individual voice to our democracy. With impeccably detailed research and an eye towards a better future, At What Cost arms ordinary citizens, activists, and health professionals with an understanding of how we've arrived at the precipice, and what we can do to ensure a healthier collective future. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

The COVID-19 virus has brought the spotlight to respiratory health. Over the past year, we have become more aware than ever of cough and cold-like symptoms, fevers, feeling tired, shortness of breath and any other indicators that our immune system is fighting off an infection. But COVID-19 is not the only health condition to affect the respiratory system. Tuberculosis is one of many infectious bacterial diseases that share a number of symptoms with COVID-19, and can also result in death. Professor Gregory Fox talked to Dr Natali Pearson about his work on infectious lung disease in Vietnam, and how his research is contributing to better respiratory health outcomes throughout the country. Disclaimer: This podcast was recorded in February 201 and the COVID-19 situation in Vietnam has since changed. About Professor Gregory Fox: Greg is a respiratory physician, epidemiologist and clinical trialist committed to using research to improve health care among disadvantaged populations. He is clinical Academic Lead (Research) for the Faculty of Medicine and Health at Cumberland Campus. Greg's research interests include the epidemiology of infectious disease in resource-limited setting, cluster randomised trials, clinical trials and digital technologies to support health care. He also has interests in systematic reviews and meta-analyses, translation of evidence into policy, decision analysis and capacity building in research. You can follow Greg on Twitter @foxsimile. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Everyone has heard of the term "pseudoscience", typically used to describe something that looks like science, but is somehow false, misleading, or unproven. Many would be able to agree on a list of things that fall under its umbrella-- astrology, phrenology, UFOlogy, creationism, and eugenics might come to mind. But defining what makes these fields "pseudo" is a far more complex issue. It has proved impossible to come up with a simple criterion that enables us to differentiate pseudoscience from genuine science. Given the virulence of contemporary disputes over the denial of climate change and anti-vaccination movements--both of which display allegations of "pseudoscience" on all sides-- there is a clear need to better understand issues of scientific demarcation. On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience (Oxford UP, 2021) explores the philosophical and historical attempts to address this problem of demarcation. This book argues that by understanding doctrines that are often seen as antithetical to science, we can learn a great deal about how science operated in the past and does today. This exploration raises several questions: How does a doctrine become demonized as pseudoscientific? Who has the authority to make these pronouncements? How is the status of science shaped by political or cultural contexts? How does pseudoscience differ from scientific fraud? Michael D. Gordin both answers these questions and guides readers along a bewildering array of marginalized doctrines, looking at parapsychology (ESP), Lysenkoism, scientific racism, and alchemy, among others, to better understand the struggle to define what science is and is not, and how the controversies have shifted over the centuries. On the Fringe provides a historical tour through many of these fringe fields in order to provide tools to think deeply about scientific controversies both in the past and in our present. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

A brief, elegant memoir of the author's work as a Red Cross volunteer delivering emergency water to residents of Flint, Michigan, Standpipe sets the struggles of a city in crisis against the author's personal journey as his mother declines into dementia and eventual death. Written with a poet's eye for detail and quiet metaphor, Standpipe: Delivering Water in Flint (Belt, 2021) is an intimate look at one man's engagement with both civic and familial trauma. This gentle, observant book is for readers seeking to better understand the human experience of the Flint Water Crisis, and a vivid investigation into how we all heal. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Cystic fibrosis was once a mysterious disease that killed infants and children. Now it could be the key to healing millions with genetic diseases of every type—from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to diabetes and sickle cell anemia. In 1974, Joey O'Donnell was born with strange symptoms. His insatiable appetite, incessant vomiting, and a relentless cough—which shook his tiny, fragile body and made it difficult to draw breath—confounded doctors and caused his parents agonizing, sleepless nights. After six sickly months, his salty skin provided the critical clue: he was one of thousands of Americans with cystic fibrosis, an inherited lung disorder that would most likely kill him before his first birthday. The gene and mutation responsible for CF were found in 1989—discoveries that promised to lead to a cure for kids like Joey. But treatments unexpectedly failed and CF was deemed incurable. It was only after the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, a grassroots organization founded by parents, formed an unprecedented partnership with a fledgling biotech company that transformative leaps in drug development were harnessed to produce groundbreaking new treatments: pills that could fix the crippled protein at the root of this deadly disease. From science writer Bijal P. Trivedi, Breath from Salt: A Deadly Genetic Disease, a New Era in Science, and the Patients and Families Who Changed Medicine Forever (Benbella, 2020) chronicles the riveting saga of cystic fibrosis, from its ancient origins to its identification in the dank autopsy room of a hospital basement, and from the CF gene's celebrated status as one of the first human disease genes ever discovered to the groundbreaking targeted genetic therapies that now promise to cure it. Told from the perspectives of the patients, families, physicians, scientists, and philanthropists fighting on the front lines, Breath from Salt is a remarkable story of unlikely scientific and medical firsts, of setbacks and successes, and of people who refused to give up hope—and a fascinating peek into the future of genetics and medicine. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

How does egg freezing reshape our conception of time, aging and fertility? In her new monograph, Freezing Fertility: Oocyte Cryopreservation and the Gender Politics of Aging (NYU Press, 2020) Dr. Lucy van de Wiel explores the significance of egg freezing in re-orienting the temporality of the gender politics of aging. Dr. van de Wiel argues that it is critical to examine the politicized dimensions of egg freezing because it transforms the broader discourses around aging and normative timeline of women's reproduction even though the technology is only accessible for an elite few. Through a cultural analysis of popular media and documentaries to highlight the role of rhetoric in creating conditions that motivate women in making decisions about their reproductive futures, Dr. van de Wiel criticizes the moralistic boundaries between social and medical utilized by some state actors to condemn women who decide to freeze their eggs for their careers. Dr. van de Wiel also highlights the role of financialized capitalism in refiguring fertility under the investment logic of optimization to speculate on the potential risks posed by anticipated infertility. Egg freezing technology shows us how the biopolitical control of population shifted to managing fertility, which transcends national borders as frozen eggs circulate transnationally for assisted reproduction as well as stem cell research. An incredibly rich and nuanced book, Freezing Fertility would be an invaluable read for anyone who is interested in the politics of reproduction, ART, gendered politics of aging, mortality, life, and regeneration. Dr. Lucy van de Wiel is a Research Associate at the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc), University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the social and cultural analysis of assisted reproductive technologies like egg freezing, time-lapse embryo selection and cross-border reproductive care. Da In Ann Choi is a PhD student at UCLA in the Gender Studies department. Her research interests include care labor and migration, reproductive justice, social movement, citizenship theory, and critical empire studies. She can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

In 2020, an estimated 5.8 million Americans had Alzheimer’s, and more than half a million died because of the disease and its devastating complications. 16 million caregivers are responsible for paying as much as half of the $226 billion annual costs of their care. As more people live beyond their seventies and eighties, the number of patients will rise to an estimated 13.8 million by 2025. Part case studies, part meditation on the past, present and future of the disease, The Problem of Alzheimer's: How Science, Culture, and Politics Turned a Rare Disease into a Crisis and What We Can Do About It (St. Martin's Press, 2021) traces Alzheimer’s from its beginnings to its recognition as a crisis. While it is an unambiguous account of decades of missed opportunities and our health care systems’ failures to take action, it tells the story of the biomedical breakthroughs that may allow Alzheimer’s to finally be prevented and treated by medicine and also presents an argument for how we can live with dementia: the ways patients can reclaim their autonomy and redefine their sense of self, how families can support their loved ones, and the innovative reforms we can make as a society that would give caregivers and patients better quality of life. Rich in science, history, and characters, The Problem of Alzheimer's takes us inside laboratories, patients' homes, caregivers’ support groups, progressive care communities, and Jason Karlawish's own practice at the Penn Memory Center. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Exhale: Hope, Healing, and a Life in Transplant (Post Hill Press, 2021) is the riveting memoir of a top transplant doctor who rode the emotional rollercoaster of saving and losing lives—until it was time to step back and reassess his own life. A young father with a rare form of lung cancer who has been turned down for a transplant by several hospitals. A kid who was considered not “smart enough” to be worthy of a transplant. A young mother dying on the waiting list in front of her two small children. A father losing his oldest daughter after a transplant goes awry. The nights waiting for donor lungs to become available, understanding that someone needed to die so that another patient could live. These are some of the stories in Exhale, a memoir about Dr. Weill’s ten years spent directing the lung transplant program at Stanford. Through these stories, he shows not only the miracle of transplantation, but also how it is a very human endeavor performed by people with strengths and weaknesses, powerful attributes, and profound flaws. Exhale is an inside look at the world of high-stakes medicine, complete with the decisions that are confronted, the mistakes that are made, and the story of a transplant doctor’s slow recognition that he needed to step away from the front lines. This book is an exploration of holding on too tight, of losing one’s way, and of the power of another kind of decision—to leave behind everything for a fresh start. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

In More Than Medicine: Nurse Practitioners and the Problems They Solve for Patients, Health Care Organizations, and the State (Cornell UP, 2020), LaTonya J. Trotter chronicles the everyday work of a group of nurse practitioners (NPs) working on the front lines of the American health care crisis as they cared for four hundred African American older adults living with poor health and limited means. Trotter describes how these NPs practiced an inclusive form of care work that addressed medical, social, and organizational problems that often accompany poverty. In solving this expanded terrain of problems from inside the clinic, these NPs were not only solving a broader set of concerns for their patients; they became a professional solution for managing "difficult people" for both their employer and the state. Through More Than Medicine, we discover that the problems found in the NP's exam room are as much a product of our nation's disinvestment in social problems as of physician scarcity or rising costs. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Fungal infections are amongst the leading infectious disease killers globally. They result in more deaths than malaria, and almost as many as tuberculosis. However, they are often overlooked, and receive less research attention and funding than viral or bacterial infections. Over the past decade, this has started to change as the emergence of resistance in fungal pathogens has caused global alarm. New, resistant organisms have emerged, and old familiar ones have become harder to treat - agricultural antifungal use is thought to be driving these trends. Dr Justin Beardsley spoke to Dr Natali Pearson about the problem of resistant fungal infections in Vietnam, describing how agricultural practices are contributing, and what can be done to mitigate the risks. Justin is a New Zealand trained infectious disease specialist and clinical researcher. From 2012 to 2017, he was based in the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City, where he was focused on fungal infections. There, he conducted a multinational randomised clinical trial into adjunctive steroid therapy for Cryptococcal Meningitis in Southeast Asia and Africa, alongside other work on the epidemiology of fungal infections, immune responses in Cryptococcal Meningitis, pharmacokinetics of anti-fungal drugs in the central nervous system, and temporal trends in cryptococcal drug susceptibility. His current research focuses on the emergence of anti-fungal drug resistance, especially in Southeast Asia. You can follow Justin on Twitter: @_jbeardsley_. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Some books are new, others are newly relevant – and so worth looking at from a new, contemporary perspective. Such is the case with Susan Reverby’s book Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and its Legacy (UNC Press, 2013). When the book was published in 2009, our world was reeling from a global financial crisis that exposed how subprime mortgages disproportionately affected Black homeowners; today we reel from a global pandemic that has starkly exposed how Black Americans and other people of color are disproportionately affected by the virus SARS-CoV-2 and its effects. Another inequity connected to the pandemic relates to vaccine distribution and uptake: they are much lower among Black (and Latinx) than white Americans. Examining Tuskegee is a deeply researched work that ranges from the trial’s origins within a public health partnership between the Tuskegee Institute and the Public Health Service, to portraits of its protagonists – the researchers, the men who were its subjects, the complex Nurse Rivers, and the persistent Peter Buxton, whose efforts eventually exposed the full truth of the study after it ran for 40 years – to the ways it was portrayed in popular culture and the media, to matters of bioethics and presidential apologies. In our conversation, Susan Reverby explains what actually happened in the study – no, the men were not injected by the researchers with syphilis – what it meant 50 years ago, and how it pertains, or not, to issues such as vaccine hesitancy among African Americans today. Rachel Pagones is chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego and a licensed acupuncturist. Her third book, an examination of the history of acupuncture as a means of social and political revolution, is under contract with the University of Michigan Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Mary Brazelton’s new book, Mass Vaccination: Citizens’ Bodies and State Power in Modern China (Cornell UP, 2019) could hardly be more timely. During the Covid-19 pandemic, China was in the headlines of Euro-American media as the site of the first cases of the disease. China is also centerstage in Brazelton’s insightful, antiracist book—not as a source of disease but as the source of an effective and pervasive global public health strategy that other nations during the Covid-19 pandemic have strained to implement: mass vaccination. As a historian of modern China and a historian of medicine, Brazelton offers a trustworthy and well-documented account of the National Epidemic Prevention Board and its successor agencies during the republic’s war-torn twentieth century. The location—and relocation—of the Board and its refugee scientists was decisive, Brazelton argues. During World War II and Japanese occupation (1937-45), the Board’s labs and scientists decamped from China’s coastal cities to the mountainous southwest borderland of Yunnan—exactly because the area was rugged, sparsely populated, and far from China’s urban hubs. In Yunnan, scientists were not isolated, but rather set within an idiosyncratic health infrastructure and network of longstanding political rivals vying for sway in the region—including France to the south, UK to the east, the League of Nations in the capital, and everywhere indigenous rulers, who retained local authority as the Nationalist Party struggled to consolidate power in the early years of the republic. The distinctive geography, epidemiology, and communities of health knowledge in Yunnan channeled the Board’s research and strategies. This regional system, developed under the banner of the national Board, became the blueprint for public health interventions for the People’s Republic of China after the Communist Revolution (1949). In the 1970s because of its repressive practices, China was officially excluded from the global health community, which was dominated by Europe and the US under the World Health Organization. Yet, China’s program of mass vaccination and strategy of universal primary care directly informed practices of new and nonaligned countries. Brazelton’s important new book addresses a classic puzzle of biopolitics in the history of science and medicine: when and why did governing regimes build public health programs that prioritized changing people’s behaviors and values (sanitation, hygiene; mask wearing, social distancing) rather than changing people’s health with quick technical fixes—such as vaccination. The interview refers to the image on the book’s cover (also p130) and to the important, related work of Alicia Altorfer-Ong, Ruth Rogawski, and the Connecting Three Worlds project. The conversation was a collective interview by Vanderbilt students in Laura Stark’s course, American Medicine & the World. Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, and Associate Editor of the journal History & Theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Elise K. Burton’s important book, Genetic Crossroads: The Middle East and the Science of Human Heredity (Stanford University Press, 2021), documents how race and nation became fused in concept and in political practice. Over the past century, nation-building and race-making became interdependent through the sciences of heredity and their uses during wartimes and their aftermaths. The book provincializes Euro-American histories of science by centering the intrepid and non-innocent scientists from land along the eastern coastline of the Mediterranean Sea (often called by the imperial name of “Middle East”)—and their transnational networks. The book tracks how scientists’ reputations, access to resources, and interpretations of data shifted from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the repackaged race science around World War II, the 1967 Six-Day War, and the lingering state-backed violence of the present day. The sciences of heredity—including physical anthropology and medical genetics—have continued to be used to justify violence and territorial occupation, as much as humanitarian “resettlement” programs, storage of biospecimen, and building of research infrastructures for a cosmopolitan science. Today, “the anti-racist, progressive discourses surrounding contemporary human genome projects have so far been unable to overcome the territorial regimes and ethnic concepts produced by a century of conflict,” Burton writes, because “nationalism is sustained by particular practices of human genetics research—specifically, the need to describe human populations according to geography and ancestral history, coinciding with the two major constituent elements of the nation-state paradigm.” The interview refers to the important, related work of Jenny Bangham, Emma Kowal, Joanna Radin, Gayle Rubin, and Kim TallBear. The conversation was a collective interview by Vanderbilt Master’s students in Laura Stark’s seminar, Critical Bioethics: Jazmyn Ayers, Kell Coney, Anyssa Francis, Caroline Goodman, Lily Jaremski, Natalie Jones, Ashley Mullen, Enna Pehadzic, Olivia Post, Karrie Raymond, Christina Rosca, Cecile Sahel, Chad Smith, and McKenzie Yates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

On 13 January 2020, Thailand confirmed the first known case of COVID-19 outside of China. As one of the world's most popular tourism destinations, with the majority of its travellers coming from China, this news came as no surprise. One year on, COVID-19 cases and related deaths have remained remarkably low in Thailand, and the country’s management of the pandemic has been hailed as a striking success. So what's the secret behind Thailand's COVID-19 response? Dr Anjalee Cohen joined Dr Natali Pearson to explore the many factors that have contributed to Thailand’s success in managing COVID-19 thus far, including the country’s long history of public healthcare, the overturning of medical elitism, the influence of certain cultural practices, and the critical role played by Thailand’s village health volunteers. Anjalee Cohen is a senior lecturer in the anthropology department at the University of Sydney. She joined the department in 2010 following research positions at the Brain and Mind Centre, University of Sydney, and the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, University of New South Wales. She specialises in medical anthropology and Northern Thailand. She has published on youth mental healthcare experiences in Australia, methamphetamine use among northern Thai youth, as well as northern Thai youth subcultures, including violent youth gangs. She is author of Youth Culture and Identity in Northern Thailand: Fitting in and sticking out (Routledge 2020), which explores how young people in urban Chiang Mai construct a sense of community and identity at the intersection of global capitalism, national ideologies and local culture. Her current research focuses on the role and success of Thailand’s village health volunteers in preventing and controlling the COVID-19 pandemic. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

The Emergence of Modern Hospital Management and Organisation in the World 1880s-1930s (Emerald, 2021) uses a range of empirical evidence and case studies drawn from previously unpublished archival sources to offer one of the first international comparative studies on the transformation and modernization of hospital management globally, a century ago. Focusing on the key years between the 1880s and the 1930s, when millions of people crossed the globe and created new large health care needs in the largest cities of the world, Paloma Fernández-Pérez analyzes core themes from a business history perspective, like organization, ownership and the professionalization of management, to reach a new understanding about the history of modern large scale healthcare institutions from the United States to China, with particular attention to Spain. Paloma Fernández Pérez (PhD. in History University of California, Berkeley) is Professor of Economic History at the University of Barcelona. She is currently also a member of the Academic Board of the Emerging Markets Institute of the University of Cornell and an Invited Project Professor of the University of Kyoto in Japan. She is the founder, and coeditor in chief of the Journal of Evolutionary Studies in Business recently accepted for indexation in the Scopus database of journal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Decades of data cannot be ignored: African American adults are far more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than white adults. But has science gone so far in racializing diabetes as to undermine the search for solutions? In a rousing indictment of the idea that notions of biological race should drive scientific inquiry, Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) provides an ethnographic picture of biotechnology’s framings of Type 2 diabetes risk and race and, importantly, offers a critical examination of the assumptions behind the recruitment of African American and African-descent populations for Type 2 diabetes research. James Doucet-Battle begins with a historical overview of how diabetes has been researched and framed racially over the past century, chronicling one company’s efforts to recruit African Americans to test their new diabetes risk-score algorithm with the aim of increasing the clinical and market value of the firm’s technology. He considers African American reticence about participation in biomedical research and examines race and health disparities in light of advances in genomic sequencing technology. Doucet-Battle concludes by emphasizing that genomic research into sub-Saharan ancestry in fact underlines the importance of analyzing gender before attempting to understand the notion of race. No disease reveals this more than Type 2 diabetes. Sweetness in the Blood challenges the notion that the best approach to understanding, managing, and curing Type 2 diabetes is through the lens of race. It also transforms how we think about sugar, filling a neglected gap between the sugar- and molasses-sweetened past of the enslaved African laborer and the high-fructose corn syrup- and corporate-fed body of the contemporary consumer-laborer. Rachel Pagones is chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego and a licensed acupuncturist. Her book about acupuncture as a tool of medical, social, and political revolution in the United States is under contract with University of Michigan Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

If health policy truly seeks to improve population health and reduce health disparities, addressing homelessness must be a priority. Homelessness is a public health problem. Nearly a decade after the great recession of 2008, homelessness rates are once again rising across the United States, with the number of persons experiencing homelessness surpassing the number of individuals suffering from opioid use disorders annually. Homelessness presents serious adverse consequences for physical and mental health, and ultimately worsens health disparities for already at-risk low-income and minority populations. While some state-level policies have been implemented to address homelessness, these services are often not designed to target chronic homelessness and subsequently fail in policy implementation by engendering barriers to local homeless policy solutions. In the face of this crisis, Ungoverned and Out of Sight: Public Health and the Political Crisis of Homelessness in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2021) seeks to understand the political processes influencing adoption of best-practice solutions to reduce chronic homelessness in US municipalities. Drawing on unique research from three exemplar municipal case studies in San Francisco, CA, Atlanta, GA, and Shreveport, LA, this volume explores conflicting policy solutions in the highly decentralized homeless policy space and provides recommendations to improve homeless governance systems and deliver policies that will successfully diminish chronic homelessness. Until issues of authority and fragmentation across competing or misaligned policy spaces are addressed through improved coordination and oversight, local and national policies intended to reduce homelessness may not succeed. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

MeaningFULL: 23 Life Changing Stories of Conquering Dieting, Weight, & Body Image Issues (Unsolicited Press, 2021) is a blend of motivational self-help, memoir, psychology, and health and wellness. Alli Spotts-De Lazzer is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, an expert in eating and body image issues, and a woman on the other side of her own decades-long struggle with food and body. A $702 billion global diet/nutrition and weight loss industry shows that people worldwide are devoted to achieving maximum health and their desired bodies. Yet mainstream approaches are failing these individuals, and sadly, science proves this. Intent on gaining the "health" and "happiness" that diets promise, consumers keep trying. They become sad and frustrated, believing they're failing when they're not. They simply need a legitimate, alternative path, which MeaningFULL offers. Through the contributors' diverse, real-life mini-memoirs followed by Spotts-De Lazzer's commentaries, readers will learn about themselves and discover their unique, unconventional formulas for conquering their issues. Along the way, MeaningFULL will also guide them towards more self-appreciation, wellness, and fulfillment. Alli Spotts-De Lazzer is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor, a CEDS Certified Eating Disorders Specialist, a CEDS Supervisor, and a person on the other side of her own decades-long struggle with food battles and body dislike. Alli has presented educational workshops at conferences, graduate schools, and hospitals; published articles in academic journals, trade magazines, and online information hubs; and appeared as an eating disorders expert on local news. For more information you can visit her website https://therapyhelps.us/ Her professional-related volunteerism includes co-chairing committees for both the International Association of Eating Disorders Professionals and the Academy for Eating Disorders and creating #ShakeIt for Self-Acceptance!(R), a series of public events sparking conversations about self-acceptance through fun, motivating messages. She was named the 2017 iaedp Member of the Year, and Mayor Garcetti declared July 13, 2017 #ShakeIt for Self-Acceptance! Day in the City of Los Angeles. Alli feels fortunate to share MeaningFULL with readers. She regards it as the book I needed years ago. Elizabeth Cronin, Psy.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher with offices in Brookline and Norwood, MA. You can follow her on Instagram or visit her website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

The conventional approach to suicide is psychiatric: ask the average person why people kill themselves, and they will likely cite depression. But this approach fails to recognize suicide’s social causes. People kill themselves because of breakups and divorces, because of lost jobs and ruined finances, because of public humiliations and the threat of arrest. While some psychological approaches address external stressors, this comprehensive study is the first to systematically examine suicide as a social behavior with social catalysts. Drawing on Donald Black’s theories of conflict management and pure sociology, Suicide: The Social Causes of Self-Destruction (University of Virginia Press, 2020) presents a new theory of the social conditions that compel an aggrieved person to turn to self-destruction. Interpersonal conflict plays a central but under-appreciated role in the incidence of suicide. Examining a wide range of cross-cultural cases, Jason Manning argues that suicide arises from increased inequality and decreasing intimacy, and that conflicts are more likely to become suicidal when they occur in a context of social inferiority. As suicide rates continue to rise around the world, this timely new theory can help clinicians, scholars, and members of the general public to explain and predict patterns of self-destructive behavior. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

"Antipsychiatry," Esalen, psychedelics, and DSM III: Radical challenges to psychiatry and the conventional treatment of mental health in the 1970s. The upheavals of the 1960s gave way to a decade of disruptions in the 1970s, and among the rattled fixtures of American society was mainstream psychiatry. A "Radical Caucus" formed within the psychiatric profession and the "antipsychiatry" movement arose. Critics charged that the mental health establishment was complicit with the military-industrial complex, patients were released from mental institutions, and powerful antipsychotic drugs became available. Meanwhile, practitioners and patients experimented with new approaches to mental health, from primal screaming and the therapeutic use of psychedelics to a new reliance on quantification. In Break on Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture (MIT Press, 2020), Lucas Richert investigates the radical challenges to psychiatry and to the conventional treatment of mental health that emerged in the 1970s and the lessons they offer for current debates. Drawing on archives and government documents, medical journals, and interviews, and interweaving references to pop (counter)culture into his account, Richert offers fascinating stories of the decade's radical mental health practices. He discusses anti-Vietnam War activism and the new diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder given to some veterans; the radical psychiatrists who fought the system (and each other); the entry of New Age-style therapies, including Esalen's Human Potential Movement, into the laissez-faire therapeutic marketplace of the 1970s; the development of DSM III; and the use of LSD, cannabis, and MDMA. Many of these issues have resonance today. Debates over medical marijuana and microdoses of psychedelics echo debates of the 1970s. With rising rates of such disorders as anxiety and depression, practitioners and patients continue to search for therapeutic breakthroughs. C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

As the push for a Universal Healthcare system in the United States becomes more and more popular among the American people, we’re beginning to have more public conversations about access to and affordability of medical care. While many of us may not consider our health insurance until we need it, for those with chronic conditions, the American medical system can be a nightmare of insurance claims bureaucracy and that prevents patients from getting the care they need at a cost they can afford. Worse, the rising prices of drugs and treatments developed in this for-profit system mean that some patients receive more medical care than they want or need, sometimes at the expense of their quality of life. When a young Katherine E. Standefer was suddenly diagnosed with Long QT Syndrome—the same congenital heart condition as her younger sister—she was faced with what felt like an impossible choice: implant a cardiac defibrillator and be forever tied to the American Medical System, or take a chance with death. In her stunning debut, Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life (Little, Brown, Spark, 2020) Standefer explores this system as both a patient and a consumer, visiting factories in California as well as mining communities in Rwanda and Madagascar where the metals in her defibrillator were sourced to learn more about the true human cost of the device that was meant to save her life. Throughout, Standefer wonders whether her life is worth this price, and asks us to reimagine approaches to care—both in medical and environmental. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

A compassionate and captivating examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness throughout history and the fight to end the stigma. For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness (W. W. Norton & Company, 2021), anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma—from the eighteenth century, through America’s major wars, and into today’s high-tech economy. Nobody’s Normal argues that stigma is a social process that can be explained through cultural history, a process that began the moment we defined mental illness, that we learn from within our communities, and that we ultimately have the power to change. Though the legacies of shame and secrecy are still with us today, Grinker writes that we are at the cusp of ending the marginalization of the mentally ill. In the twenty-first century, mental illnesses are fast becoming a more accepted and visible part of human diversity. Grinker infuses the book with the personal history of his family’s four generations of involvement in psychiatry, including his grandfather’s analysis with Sigmund Freud, his own daughter’s experience with autism, and culminating in his research on neurodiversity. Drawing on cutting-edge science, historical archives, and cross-cultural research in Africa and Asia, Grinker takes readers on an international journey to discover the origins of, and variances in, our cultural response to neurodiversity. Urgent, eye-opening, and ultimately hopeful, Nobody’s Normal explains how we are transforming mental illness and offers a path to end the shadow of stigma. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

We are here today with Sara Ritchey, associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, TN, about her new book, Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health, out with Cornell University Press this year, 2021. The author of Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity (Cornell, 2014) and numerous articles, including “Caring by the Hours: the Psalter as a Source of Gendered Healthcare,” “Health, Healing, and Salvation: Hagiography as a Source of Medieval Healthcare,” “The Wound’s Presence and Bodily Absence: The Experience of God in a Fourteenth-Century Manuscript,” Dr. Ritchey discusses her profound understanding in the intersection of religious practice (writ large) and the practice of medicine (writ large) in the Medieval era. In Acts of Care, Sara Ritchey recovers women's healthcare work by identifying previously overlooked tools of care: healing prayers, birthing indulgences, medical blessings, liturgical images, and penitential practices. Ritchey demonstrates that women in premodern Europe were both deeply engaged with and highly knowledgeable about health, the body, and therapeutic practices, but their critical role in medieval healthcare has been obscured because scholars have erroneously regarded the evidence of their activities as religious rather than medical. The sources for identifying the scope of medieval women's health knowledge and healthcare practice, Ritchey argues, are not found in academic medical treatises. Rather, she follows fragile traces detectable in liturgy, miracles, poetry, hagiographic narratives, meditations, sacred objects, and the daily behaviors that constituted the world, as well as in testaments and land transactions from hospitals and leprosaria established and staffed by beguines and Cistercian nuns. Through its surprising use of alternate sources, Acts of Care reconstructs the vital caregiving practices of religious women in the southern Low Countries, reconnecting women's therapeutic authority into the everyday world of late medieval healthcare. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

As we mark the one-year anniversary of the COIVD-19 pandemic, take the time to listen to this discussion of previous efforts to fight yellow fever, cholera, and plague pandemics. Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynteris’s Sulfuric Utopias: A History Maritime Fumigation (MIT Press, 2020) tells the story of the international dream of stopping the spread of infectious disease in global shipping networks. Their work shows how the interests of capitalism clashed with the efforts of public health officials. At the center of their narrative lies the Clayton, a machine which combined technocratic enthusiasm and necropolitical logic. Sulfuric Utopias brings together the history disease, capitalism, public health, and science. It is both a contribution to maritime history and urban history. Personally, I was so excited to interview two authors who know more about the history of rat killing than I do. Lukas Engelmann is a Chancellor's Fellow in the History and Sociology of Biomedicine, in the department of Science, Technology and Innovation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Christos Lynteris is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St. Andrews. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Medicine is most often understood through the metaphor of war. We encounter phrases such as “the war against the coronavirus,” “the front lines of the Ebola crisis,” “a new weapon against antibiotic resistance,” or “the immune system fights cancer” without considering their assumptions, implications, and history. But there is nothing natural about this language. It does not have to be, nor has it always been, the way to understand the relationship between humans and disease. Medicine Is War: The Martial Metaphor in Victorian Literature and Culture (SUNY Press, 2021) shows how this “martial metaphor” was popularized throughout the nineteenth century. Drawing on the works of Mary Shelley, Charles Kingsley, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Joseph Conrad, Lorenzo Servitje examines how literary form reflected, reinforced, and critiqued the convergence of militarism and medicine in Victorian culture. He considers how, in migrating from military medicine to the civilian sphere, this metaphor responded to the developments and dangers of modernity: urbanization, industrialization, government intervention, imperial contact, crime, changing gender relations, and the relationship between the one and the many. While cultural and literary scholars have attributed the metaphor to late nineteenth-century germ theory or immunology, this book offers a new, more expansive history stretching from the metaphor’s roots in early nineteenth-century militarism to its consolidation during the rise of early twentieth-century pharmacology. In so doing, Servitje establishes literature’s pivotal role in shaping what war has made thinkable and actionable under medicine’s increasing jurisdiction in our lives. Medicine Is War reveals how, in our own moment, the metaphor remains conducive to harming as much as healing, to control as much as empowerment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

An Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America (Rutgers UP, 2021) explores the origins of both popular and elite theories of criminality in the nineteenth-century United States, focusing in particular on the influence of phrenology. In the United States, phrenology shaped the production of medico-legal knowledge around crime, the treatment of the criminal within prisons and in public discourse, and sociocultural expectations about the causes of crime. The criminal was phrenology’s ideal research and demonstration subject, and the courtroom and the prison were essential spaces for the staging of scientific expertise. In particular, phrenology constructed ways of looking as well as a language for identifying, understanding, and analyzing criminals and their actions. This work traces the long-lasting influence of phrenological visual culture and language in American culture, law, and medicine, as well as the practical uses of phrenology in courts, prisons, and daily life. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

In 1524, Pope Clement VII gave two condemned criminals to his physician to test a promising new antidote. After each convict ate a marzipan cake poisoned with deadly aconite, one of them received the antidote, and lived—the other died in agony. In sixteenth-century Europe, this and more than a dozen other accounts of poison trials were committed to writing. Alisha Rankin tells their little-known story. At a time when poison was widely feared, the urgent need for effective cures provoked intense excitement about new drugs. As doctors created, performed, and evaluated poison trials, they devoted careful attention to method, wrote detailed experimental reports, and engaged with the problem of using human subjects for fatal tests. In reconstructing this history, Rankin reveals how the antidote trials generated extensive engagement with “experimental thinking” long before the great experimental boom of the seventeenth century and investigates how competition with lower-class healers spurred on this trend. Alisha Rankin's The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science (U Chicago Press, 2021) sheds welcome and timely light on the intertwined nature of medical innovations, professional rivalries, and political power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Scientists have scientific reason and use the scientific method. Humanists have... Emotion? Close reading? Not so, argues Eric Hayot in Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan (Columbia UP, 2021). Contrary to popular belief, the humanities involve both reasoning and methods. Humanist reason, Hayot shows, is philosophically and historically grounded and applicable to almost every discipline. Part history of philosophy, part methods handbook, and part manifesto, Humanist Reason will change the way we advocate for the humanities in the twenty-first century. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Normally we write blogposts that try to convince you to listen to a conversation with an author about their fascinating book. In the time of COVID-19, it doesn't seem necessary to have to sell you on why you should listen to this podcast. Suffice it to say that Mitchell Hammond’s excellent survey of a dozen deadly diseases is a must-read primer to make sense of epidemic history. In Epidemics and the Modern World (University of Toronto Press, 2020), he balances the science of disease etiology and disease cycles with political, socio-economic, and cultural contexts. Read this book! Mitchell L. Hammond, an Assistant Professor at the University of Victoria in beautiful British Columbia. Dr. Hammond studied at Yale, where he earned a BA in Political Science and a MA in Religious History before getting another MA and a PhD in European History at the University of Virginia. His dissertation was entitled “The Origins of Civic Health Care in Early Modern Germany”. He has published several articles and book chapters on the intersection of medicine and religion in 16th and 17th century Germany. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Life expectancy in the United States has recently fallen for three years in a row—a reversal not seen since 1918 or in any other wealthy nation in modern times. In the past two decades, deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism have risen dramatically, and now claim hundreds of thousands of American lives each year—and they’re still rising. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, known for first sounding the alarm about deaths of despair, explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class. They demonstrate why, for those who used to prosper in America, capitalism is no longer delivering. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2020) paints a troubling portrait of the American dream in decline. For the white working class, today’s America has become a land of broken families and few prospects. As the college educated become healthier and wealthier, adults without a degree are literally dying from pain and despair. In this critically important book, Case and Deaton tie the crisis to the weakening position of labor, the growing power of corporations, and, above all, to a rapacious health-care sector that redistributes working-class wages into the pockets of the wealthy. Capitalism, which over two centuries lifted countless people out of poverty, is now destroying the lives of blue-collar America. This book charts a way forward, providing solutions that can rein in capitalism’s excesses and make it work for everyone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward campaign organized millions of Chinese peasants into communes in a misguided attempt to rapidly collectivize agriculture with disastrous effects. Catastrophic famine lingered as the global cholera pandemic of the early 1960s spread rampantly through the infected waters of southeastern coastal China. Confronted with a political crisis and the seventh global cholera pandemic in recorded history, the communist government committed to social restructuring in order to affirm its legitimacy and prevent transmission of the disease. Focusing on the Wenzhou Prefecture in Zhejiang Province, the area most seriously stricken by cholera at the time, Xiaoping Fang demonstrates how China’s pandemic was far more than a health incident; it became a significant social and political influence during a dramatic transition for the People’s Republic. China's Cholera Pandemic: Restructuring Society Under Mao (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) reveals how disease control and prevention, executed through the government’s large-scale, clandestine anticholera campaign, were integral components of its restructuring initiatives, aimed at restoring social order. The subsequent rise of an emergency disciplinary health state furthered these aims through quarantine and isolation, which profoundly impacted the social epidemiology of the region, dividing Chinese society and reinforcing hierarchies according to place, gender, and socioeconomic status. Rachel Pagones is chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego and a licensed acupuncturist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

In his book The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Healthcare in Rust Belt America (Harvard University Press, 2021), Gabriel Winant explains how the social reproductive labor sustaining the US's industrial economy was institutionalized in response to steelworker layoffs, aging, and sickness beginning in the 1960s. The result was a recomposition of the American working class, from a predominantly white male industrial one, to a meagerly paid and socially devalued pool of care workers comprised mostly of women, and especially women of color. Neoliberalism's insecure labor regime is not a reversion to an earlier period of inequality but a consequence of midcentury welfare policy, the partial security it offered and the race and gender hierarchies it remade. Patrick Reilly studies history at Vanderbilt University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Of all forms of alternative medicine, chiropractic is the one that is most generally accepted. In the UK, for instance, chiropractors are regulated by statute and even have their own ‘Royal College of Chiropractic’. In the US, chiropractic’s country of origin, most chiropractors carry the title ‘doctor’ and many consumers believe they are medically trained. Despite this high level of acceptance, chiropractic is wide open to criticism. The claims and assumptions made by chiropractors are far from evidence based. Chiropractic manipulations are of doubtful effectiveness and have regularly been associated with severe adverse effects, including multiple fatalities. The advice issued by chiropractors to patients and consumers is often less than responsible. The behaviour of chiropractors and their organisations is frequently less than professional. Edzard Ernst's Chiropractic:' Not All That It's Cracked Up to Be (Springer, 2020) presents and discusses recent evidence in and around chiropractic in a factual and unemotional manner. It amounts to an evidence-based critique of this profession and discloses the often dangerously misleading information published for the lay audience. It thereby contributes to advancing public health and critical thinking. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

John M. Janzen's Health in a Fragile State: Science, Sorcery, and Spirit in the Lower Congo (Wisconsin University Press, 2019) offers a granular and insightful view of the state of healthcare services in the Manianga region of the Lower Congo (Democratic Republic of Congo), and examines the extent to which said services are able to improve the health of the communities that inhabit this region. The collapse of the Congolese state during the 1980s and 1990s resulted in the deterioration and virtual disappearance of state-sponsored healthcare institutions. This vacuum came to be filled by organisms such as the World Health Organization, other NGOs and health-based institutions organized under the new framework of the health zone. As a result, a precarious healthcare system emerged, one that combines the ingenuity and resources of the local population with those from external sources. Unfortunately, this system is only able to offer a limited and fragile solution to the health needs of the populations it seeks to serve. Janzen uses this examination to remind us that positive health outcomes are not merely a factor of adequate knowledge and resources, but also require that those in charge of creating and implementing health policies are seen as legitimate within their communities. To support this argument, he starts by describing the population history of the region in relation to policies of the colonial and postcolonial era, and the ways in which specific diseases affected the lives peoples in the region. He then explores the different kind of institutions that support the social reproduction of health and the ways in which people in this region explain what it means to be healthy. Finally, he looks at theories of legitimation, both in Western thought and in the Kongo culture, and argues that legitimacy is a key element in the creation of a robust and effective healthcare system. Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is an associate professor of history at Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

An exposé of the corruption of medicine by the pharmaceutical industry at every level, from exploiting the vulnerable destitute for drug testing, through manipulation of research data, to disease mongering and promoting drugs that do more harm than good. Authors, Professor Jon Jureidini and Dr Leemon McHenry, made critical contributions to exposing the scientific misconduct in two infamous trials of antidepressants. Ghostwritten publications of these trials were highly influential in prescriptions of paroxetine (Paxil) and citalopram (Celexa) in paediatric and adolescent depression, yet both trials (Glaxo Smith Kline's paroxetine study 329 and Forest Laboratories' citalopram study CIT-MD-18) seriously misrepresented the efficacy and safety data. The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the Crisis of Credibility in Clinical Research (Wakefield Press, 2020) provides a detailed account of these studies and argues that medicine desperately needs to re-evaluate its relationship with the pharmaceutical industry. Without a basis for independent evaluation of the results of randomised, placebo-controlled clinical trials, there can be no confidence in evidence-based medicine. Science demands rigorous, critical examination and especially severe testing of hypotheses to function properly, but this is exactly what is lacking in academic medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Alzheimer’s disease, a haunting and harrowing ailment, is one of the world’s most common causes of death. Alzheimer’s lingers for years, with patients’ outward appearance unaffected while their cognitive functions fade away. Patients lose the ability to work and live independently, to remember and recognize. There is still no proven way to treat Alzheimer’s because its causes remain unknown. Mind Thief: The Story of Alzheimer's (Columbia UP, 2021) is a comprehensive and engaging history of Alzheimer’s that demystifies efforts to understand the disease. Beginning with the discovery of “presenile dementia” in the early twentieth century, Han Yu examines over a century of research and controversy. She presents the leading hypotheses for what causes Alzheimer’s; discusses each hypothesis’s tangled origins, merits, and gaps; and details their successes and failures. Yu synthesizes a vast amount of medical literature, historical studies, and media interviews, telling the gripping stories of researchers’ struggles while situating science in its historical, social, and cultural contexts. Her chronicling of the trajectory of Alzheimer’s research deftly balances rich scientific detail with attention to the wider implications. In narrating the attempts to find a treatment, Yu also offers a critical account of research and drug development and a consideration of the philosophy of aging. Wide-ranging and accessible, Mind Thief is an important book for all readers interested in the challenge of Alzheimer’s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at [email protected] or [email protected]. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear: about Dr Bikman’s unconventional path to pursuing degrees in science, why scientists need to do a postdoc, what it means to have your own lab, the important role of insulin in the body, and a discussion of the book Why We Get Sick: The Hidden Epidemic at the Root of Most Chronic Disease--And How to Fight It (Benbella Books, 2020). Our guest is: Dr. Benjamin Bikman, associate professor of Physiology & Developmental Biology at BYU, where he has his own lab and is currently exploring the contrasting roles of insulin and ketones as key drivers of metabolic function. He frequently publishes his research in peer-reviewed journals and presents at international science meetings. He lives in Utah with his wife and children, and strongly believes in the importance of a work-life balance. Your host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. She specializes in decoding diaries written by rural women in 19th-century America. She supports her work-life balance by taking long walks, and making time for her loved ones. Listeners to this episode might be interested in: Why We Get Sick by Benjamin Bikman Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz Getting the Most Out of Your Postdoc Determine Whether A STEM Major Is The Right Choice Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Viruses are not very different from machines that process information, and thus, how the virus functions can be simulated on a computer. This ability to “imitate” the way viruses behave is particularly useful today, as we battle the impact of the coronavirus pandemic and struggle to prepare for similar events. Dr. Klaus Mainzer, Co-founder and Senior Professor at the Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker Center of the University of Tübingen and President of European Academy of Sciences and Arts in Salzburg, explains this further in a new podcast episode, in which he talks about his book Leben als Maschine: Wie entschlüsseln wir den Corona-Kode? published by Brill. He explains how bringing together the fields of bioinformatics, machine learning, AI, and big data can help us to decipher the workings of the novel coronavirus and, perhaps, be better equipped to deal with such crises in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Based on a viral article, the gripping medical mystery story of Ron Davis, a world-class Stanford geneticist who has put his career on the line to find the cure for chronic fatigue syndrome, the disease killing his son. For the past six years, Whitney Dafoe has been confined to a bedroom in the back of his parents' home, unable to walk, to eat, to speak. The sound of music causes him pain. At one point, the formerly healthy, young, freelance photographer, faced starvation as his 6'3" frame withered to 115 pounds. In desperation, Whitney and his parents went from one specialist to another, and still no answers. Then, finally, a diagnosis: the mysterious disease myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Whitney's story is heartbreaking, but it's also one of redemption. It reaches far beyond just one family's harrowing tale. Today, ME/CFS affects between 1 and 2.5 million Americans--and 20 million people around the world. Those afflicted largely suffer in silence because the disease is little known and much misunderstood. The question lingers still whether it even exists outside the patient's mind. Often disbelieved, they're abandoned by family and friends. They lose their jobs, and battle with insurance companies over rising medical costs as the chronic disease continues on year after year. In one way, Whitney has been lucky. He could reach out to his father, a world renowned, scientist, for answers. This book is the story of one father's desperate hunt for the insidious illness that stole his son away. The Puzzle Solver follows Ron as he unravels the molecular trail within his own son's donated blood and genome, to began to find answers. He confirms this is a biological disease and uncovers new possibilities for treatments and potentially a cure. At its heart, The Puzzle Solver: A Scientist's Desperate Hunt to Cure the Illness That Stole His Son by Tracie White and Ronald W. Davis (Hachette Books, 2021) is about more than just cutting edge research or a race to find the cure for ME/CFS--it's about the unbreakable bond between a father and his son, and the lengths to which a parent will go to save their child's life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Although physicians during World War I, and scholars since, have addressed the idea of disorders such as shell shock as inchoate flights into sickness by men unwilling to cope with war's privations, they have given little attention to the agency many soldiers actually possessed to express dissent in a system that medicalized it. In Germany, these men were called "war tremblers," for their telltale symptom of uncontrollable shaking. Based on archival research that constitutes the largest study of psychiatric patient files from 1914 to 1918, Rebecca Ayako Bennette examines the important space that wartime psychiatry provided soldiers expressing objection to the war in Diagnosing Dissent: Hysterics, Deserters, and Conscientious Objectors in Germany during World War One (Cornell University Press, 2020). Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. It was recently awarded the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize for 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Can your zip code predict when you will die? Should you space out childhood vaccines? Does talcum powder cause cancer? Why do some doctors recommend e-cigarettes while other doctors recommend you stay away from them? Health information―and misinformation―is all around us, and it can be hard to separate the two. A long history of unethical medical experiments and medical mistakes, along with a host of celebrities spewing anti-science beliefs, has left many wary of science and the scientists who say they should be trusted. How can we unravel the knots of fact and fiction to find out what we should really be concerned about, and what we can laugh off? In Viral BS: Medical Myths and Why We Fall for Them (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), medical journalist, doctor, professor, and former CDC disease detective Seema Yasmin, driven by a need to set the record straight, dissects some of the most widely circulating medical myths and pseudoscience. Exploring how epidemics of misinformation and disinformation can spread faster than microbes, Dr. Yasmin asks why bad science is sometimes more believable and contagious than the facts. Each easy-to-read chapter covers a specific myth, whether it has endured for many years or hit the headlines more recently. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Typhoid fever is a food- and water-borne infectious disease that was insidious and omnipresent in Victorian Britain. It was one of the most prolific diseases of the Industrial Revolution. There was a palpable public anxiety about the disease in the Victorian era, no doubt fueled by media coverage of major outbreaks across the nation, but also because Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, died of the disease in 1861. Their son and heir, Prince Albert Edward, contracted and nearly succumbed to typhoid a decade later in 1871. The Filth Disease: Typhoid Fever and the Practices of Epidemiology in Victorian England (U Rochester Press, 2020) shows that typhoid was at the center of a number of critical debates about health, science, and governance. Victorian public health reformers, the book argues, working in central and local government, framed typhoid as the most pressing public health problem in order to persuade local officials to implement sanitary infrastructure to prevent the spread of disease. In this period British epidemiologists uncovered how typhoid is spread via food and water supplies, disrupting the longstanding idea that typhoid was spread via filth. In the process the modern disciple of epidemiology emerged as the chief science of public health. Typhoid was as much a social and political problem as it was a scientific one, and The Filth Disease provides a striking reminder of the cultural context in which infectious diseases strike populations and how scientists study them. Jacob Steere-Williams is Associate Professor of History at the College of Charleston. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Much of the world's politics revolve around questions about the development of the international market for drugs; the roles merchants, government officials, and drug manufacturers played in shaping this market over time and space; and the process of globalization. There are no easy answers to these questions, but the decisions that all of us make about them will have tremendous consequences for individuals and for the planet in the future. Kenneth V. Faunce's new book Heavy Traffic: The Global Drug Trade in Historical Perspective (Oxford UP, 2020) helps students to understand globalization not as an inevitable or natural process, but instead as one that is created by and responds to a variety of human motivations. Examining the international trade in coffee, alcohol, opium, heroin, and cocaine, which have had a significant impact on economies and societies in countries around the world, it offers insight into globalization as a historical process, thereby helping to make sense of today's interconnected world, where products grown or produced in only a handful of places circulate widely, with varying impacts on local populations. Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Today we speak to Hannah Marcus, Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, about her new monograph, Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Forbidden Knowledge explores the censorship of medical books from their proliferation in print through the prohibitions placed on them during the Counter-Reformation. How and why did books banned in Italy in the sixteenth century end up back on library shelves in the seventeenth? Historian Hannah Marcus uncovers how early modern physicians evaluated the utility of banned books and facilitated their continued circulation in conversation with Catholic authorities. Through extensive archival research, Marcus highlights how talk of scientific utility, once thought to have begun during the Scientific Revolution, in fact began earlier, emerging from ecclesiastical censorship and the desire to continue to use banned medical books. What’s more, this censorship in medicine, which preceded the Copernican debate in astronomy by sixty years, has had a lasting impact on how we talk about new and controversial developments in scientific knowledge. Beautiful illustrations accompany this masterful, timely book about the interplay between efforts at intellectual control and the utility of knowledge. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

What does the birth of babies whose embryos have gone through genome editing mean—for science and for all of us? In November 2018, the world was shocked to learn that two babies had been born in China with DNA edited while they were embryos—as dramatic a development in genetics as the 1996 cloning of Dolly the sheep. In this book, Hank Greely, a leading authority on law and genetics, tells the fascinating story of this human experiment and its consequences in CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans (The MIT Press, 2021). Greely explains what Chinese scientist He Jiankui did, how he did it, and how the public and other scientists learned about and reacted to this unprecedented genetic intervention. The two babies, nonidentical twin girls, were the first “CRISPR'd” people ever born (CRISPR, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, is a powerful gene-editing method). Greely not only describes He's experiment and its public rollout (aided by a public relations adviser) but also considers, in a balanced and thoughtful way, the lessons to be drawn both from these CRISPR'd babies and, more broadly, from this kind of human DNA editing—“germline editing” that can be passed on from one generation to the next. Greely doesn't mince words, describing He's experiment as grossly reckless, irresponsible, immoral, and illegal. Although he sees no inherent or unmanageable barriers to human germline editing, he also sees very few good uses for it—other, less risky, technologies can achieve the same benefits. We should consider the implications carefully before we proceed. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

In today’s program, Dr. Paul Steinberg, a psychiatrist and clinical professor at the University of British Columbia, discusses his recently released book Psychoanalysis in Medicine: Applying Psychoanalytic Thought to Contemporary Medical Care (Routledge, 2020). In this new volume, Dr. Steinberg offers both theoretical inferences and practical guidance related to the application of psychoanalysis to medical practice. Dr. Steinberg provides insight on, among many other topics, how clinicians’ awareness of their own feelings can aid in the diagnostic process and how a psychoanalytic approach can enrich patient interview. Alec Kacew is a medical school student at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Daniel A. Rodriguez's history of a newly independent Cuba shaking off the U.S. occupation, The Right to Live in Health: Medical Politics in Postindependence Havana (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), focuses on the intersection of public health and politics in Havana. While medical policies were often used to further American colonial power, in Cuba, Rodriguez argues, they evolved into important expressions of anticolonial nationalism as Cuba struggled to establish itself as a modern state. A younger generation of Cuban medical reformers, including physicians, patients, and officials, imagined disease as a kind of remnant of colonial rule. These new medical nationalists, as Rodriguez calls them, looked to medical science to guide Cuba toward what they envisioned as a healthy and independent future. Rodriguez describes how medicine and new public health projects infused republican Cuba's statecraft, powerfully shaping the lives of Havana's residents. He underscores how various stakeholders, including women and people of color, demanded robust government investment in quality medical care for all Cubans, a central national value that continues today. On a broader level, Rodriguez proposes that Latin America, at least as much as the United States and Europe, was an engine for the articulation of citizens' rights, including the right to health care, in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

A scientist assesses the potential of stem cell therapies for treating such brain disorders as stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease. Stem cell therapies are the subject of enormous hype, endowed by the media with almost magical qualities and imagined by the public to bring about miracle cures. Stem cells have the potential to generate new cells of different types, and have been shown to do so in certain cases. Could stem cell transplants repair the damaged brain? In his book The Future of Brain Repair: A Realist's Guide to Stem Cell Therapy (MIT Press, 2020), neurobiologist Jack Price assesses the potential of stem cell therapies to treat such brain disorders as stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and spinal cord injuries. Certainly brain disorders are in need of effective treatments. These disorders don’t just kill, they disable, and conventional drug therapies have not had much success in treating them. Price explains that repairing the human brain is difficult, largely because of its structural, functional, and developmental complexity. He examines the self-repairing capacity of blood and gut cells—and the lack of such capacity in the brain; describes the limitations of early brain stem cell therapies for neurodegenerative disorders; and discusses current clinical trials that may lead to the first licensed stem cell therapies for stroke, Parkinson’s and macular degeneration. And he describes the real promise of pluripotential stem cells, which can make all the cell types that constitute the body. New technologies, Price reports, challenge the very notion of cell transplantation, instead seeking to convince the brain itself to manufacture the new cells it needs. Could this be the true future of brain repair? You can find more about Jack’s work here and here. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Vaccines make us wholly or partly immune to disease, such as Covid-19. But what is it to be immune? What is an immune system, and what does it do? In its beginnings, immunology was considered the science of the self/non-self distinction: the immune system comprised the self’s defenses against invading non-self pathogens, and was a sophisticated system possessed only by vertebrates. In Philosophy of Immunology (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Thomas Pradeu explains why these traditional conceptions have been upended over the past 20 years or so. It is now accepted that even single celled organisms have immune systems and that immune systems are also active in many biological activities, including regulation of foreign entities that are not part of the body but are not pathogens either, such as the gut microbiome. Pradeu, who is senior researcher at CNRS and University of Bordeau, defends his view of the individual as an immunologically unified chimera, and speculates about the implications for our understanding of cognition and psychiatric illness in the light of new discoveries of overlap between the immune and nervous systems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

We are just over a year from when global news first reported a new type of pneumonia emerging in the Chinese city of Wuhan. A lockdown of Wuhan on January 23rd, 2020, was the first indication that these stories were more serious than originally thought. All of us know what happened next: COVID-19 spread from China to other countries in Asia, then to Europe, then to North America, then worldwide. To slow the spread, countries frantically imposed travel restrictions on those coming from places affected by COVID-19: a massive shift away from the increasingly open borders seen over the past two decades. One traveller caught up in these new restrictions was Ethan Lou, author of Field Notes From a Pandemic: A Journey Through a World Suspended (Signal, 2020). Ethan arrives in China in early 2020 to visit his family, as the first leg of a trip around the world. On each leg of his journey, he sees how different parts of the world are transformed by the global pandemic. Field Notes From a Pandemic, named among the CBC’s best Canadian non-fiction books of 2020, is one half travelogue, one half commentary, in and about a changed world. In this interview, Ethan and I talk about his journey around the world, and how COVID-19 made a routine trip exceptionally complicated. He shares how he saw the world change in real-time, and which of those changes may end up sticking around. Ethan Lou is a former Reuters reporter and has served as a visiting journalist at the University of British Columbia. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Globe and Mail, Maclean's, the South China Morning Post, the Walrus, and the Washington Post. His next book is Once a Bitcoin Miner: Scandal and Turmoil in the Cryptocurrency Wild West. He can be found on Twitter at @Ethan_Lou, and his work can be found at https://ethanlou.com/. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Field Notes From a Pandemic. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine