At the heart of Houston stands the Texas Medical Center. This dense complex of educational, clinical, and hospital facilities offers state-of-the-art patient care, basic science, and applied research in more than fifty medicine-related institutions. Three medical schools, four schools of nursing, and schools of dentistry, public health, and pharmacology occupy the thousand-acre campus.But none of this would exist if not for the generosity and vision of Monroe Dunaway Anderson, who,...

“Thought-provoking…[Allen] writes without sanctimony and never simplifies the people in his book or the moral issues his story inevitably raises." —Wall Street JournalFew diseases are more gruesome than typhus. Transmitted by body lice, it afflicts the dispossessed—refugees, soldiers, and ghettoized peoples—causing hallucinations, terrible headaches, boiling fever, and often death. The disease plagued the German army on the Eastern Front and left the Reich...

Plague has been the most feared disease across Europe since the Black Death in the 1340s. Dreaded because of the scale of the mortality and its sheer foulness, its periodic outbreaks had a devastating impact. London’s last and most destructive attack came in 1665, when, according to Bishop Gilbert Burnet, ‘a most terrible plague broke out, that depopulated the city of London, ruined the trade of the nation, and swept away about a hundred thousand persons’. Roughly one-fifth of the city’s p...

In the Spring of 1844, a fiery political conflict erupted over the admission of Texas into the Union, a hard-fought and bitter controversy that profoundly changed the course of American history. Indeed, as Joel Silbey argues in Storm Over Texas, the battle over Texas marked the crucial moment when partisan differences were transformed into a North-vs-South antagonism, and the momentum towards Civil War leaped into high gear.One of America's renowned political historians, Silbey offers a sw...

Tuberculosis is an ancient disease, but it's not a disease of history. With more than a million victims every year – more than any other disease, including malaria – and antibiotic resistance now found in every country worldwide, tuberculosis is once again proving itself to be one of the smartest killers humanity has ever faced. But it's hardly surprising considering how long it's had to hone its skills. Forty-thousand years ago, our ancestors set off from the cradle of ci...

On March 18, 1937, a spark ignited a vast pool of natural gas that had collected beneath the school building in New London, a tiny community in East Texas. The resulting explosion leveled the four-year-old structure and resulted in a death toll of more than three hundred—most of them children. To this day, it is the worst school disaster in the history of the United States. The tragedy and its aftermath were the first big stories covered by Walter Cronkite, then a young wire service report...

Everybody in the bar had to drop a quarter in the jukebox or be shamed by “Momo” Villarreal. It wasn’t about the money, Mary Ann Villarreal’s grandmother insisted. It was about the music—more songs for all the patrons of the Pecan Lounge in Tivoli, Texas. But for Mary Ann, whose schoolbooks those quarters bought, the money didn’t hurt.When as an adult Villarreal began to wonder how the few recordings of women singers made their way into that jukebox, questions about the money seeme...

The shots that killed President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 were fired from the sixth floor of a nondescript warehouse at the edge of Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas. That floor in the Texas School Book Depository became a museum exhibit in 1989 and was designated part of a National Historic Landmark District in 1993. This book recounts the slow and painful process by which a city and a nation came to terms with its collective memory of the assassination and its aftermath.Step...

Tuberculosis, also known as consumption, the White Plague, or simply TB, was the number-one killer in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many physicians of the era advised their patients to chase the cure for tuberculosis in the Southwest, where the region�s clean, dry, fresh air, high altitude, and sunshine offered relief for most and recovery for some. New Mexico, called the �well country,� was particularly eager to promote itself as a mecca for lungers with the...