The story of Tufts Medical Center and the Floating Hospital for Children encompasses the history of medicine in Boston. It was founded in 1796 as the Boston Dispensary, where district physicians provided free medical care to the poor through annual subscriptions from wealthy Boston families, including such luminaries as Samuel Adams and Paul Revere. Fueled by a huge influx of immigrants at the turn of the 20th century, the city of Boston rapidly expanded and diversified. So too did the hos...

**#1 New York Times BestsellerIn Being Mortal, bestselling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending**Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the huma...

**NATIONAL BESTSELLERThe New York Times bestselling author of Being Mortal and Complications examines, in riveting accounts of medical failure and triumph, how success is achieved in a complex and risk-filled profession.**The struggle to perform well is universal: each one of us faces fatigue, limited resources, and imperfect abilities in whatever we do. But nowhere is this drive to do better more important than in medicine, where lives are on the...

Renowned for her practice's exemplary results and low intervention rates, Ina May Gaskin has gained international notoriety for promoting natural birth. She is a much-beloved leader of a movement that seeks to stop the hyper-medicalization of birth—which has lead to nearly a third of hospital births in America to be cesarean sections—and renew confidence in a woman's natural ability to birth.Upbeat and informative, Gaskin asserts that the way in which women become mothers is a women...

A journalist " explores the way childbirth has changed, from pre-history to the present" in this "fascinating, funny and occasionally shocking" historical survey ( Kirkus Reviews, starred review).From midwives to the epidural and beyond, mother and former Boston Globe editor Tina Cassidy presents an intelligent, enlightening, and impeccably researched cultural history of how we handle the process of childbirth. W...

New York Times Bestseller“Every once in a while a book comes along that rocks the foundations of an established order that's seriously in need of being shaken. The modern American hospital is that establishment and Unaccountable is that book.”-Shannon Brownlee, author of OvertreatedDr. Marty Makary is co-developer of the life-saving checklist outlined in Atul Gawande's bestselling The Checklist Manifesto. As a busy surgeon who has ...

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

For more than 25 years, there's always been a home in Uncle John's Bathroom Reader for those stories about doctor visits or routine surgeries gone horribly wrong--the wrong limb getting amputated, the wrong person getting a transplant, the nurse who didn't notice her patient had died…for three days. Because we never get tired of reading about big boo-boos (as long as they're happening to someone else), here is a whole book of the troubling and funny stories of when good health care goes ba...

"[An] engrossing survey of the history of childbirth." —Stephen Lowman, Washington PostMaking and having babies—what it takes to get pregnant, stay pregnant, and deliver—have mystified women and men throughout human history. The insatiably curious Randi Hutter Epstein journeys through history, fads, and fables, and to the fringe of science. Here is an entertaining must-read—an enlightening celebration of human life.

The How We Die, Reflections on Life's Final Chapter Study Guide contains a comprehensive summary and analysis of How We Die, Reflections on Life's Final Chapter by Sherwin B. Nuland. It includes a detailed Plot Summary, Chapter Summaries & Analysis, Character Descriptions, Objects/Places, Themes, Styles, Quotes, and Topics for Discussion.

**"A real jewel of science history...brims with suspense and now-forgotten catastrophe and intrigue...Wadman’s smooth prose calmly spins a surpassingly complicated story into a real tour de force."—The New York Times“Riveting . . . [The Vaccine Race] invites comparison with Rebecca Skloot's 2007 The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.”—NatureThe epic and controversial story of a major breakthrough in cell biology that led to the conquest of...

The reassuring bromides of "chicken soup for the soul" provide little solace for nurses—and the people they serve—in real-life hospitals, nursing homes, schools of nursing, and other settings. In the minefield of modern health care, there are myriad obstacles to quality patient care—including work overload, inadequate funds for nursing education and research, and poor communication between and within the professions, to name only a few. The seventy RNs whose stories are co...