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

Over the past ten years, cardiac transplantation has evolved from an exper imental procedure performed in a handful of university centers to a viable therapeutic modality now performed in more than 150 centers worldwide. The complexity of the procedure, the changing immunosuppressive re gimes, and the follow-up care have necessitated a multidisciplinary ap proach involving a variety of medical, nursing, and social sciences special ties and subspecialties. In addition, health care trainees ...

In this year’s CBC Massey Lectures, bestselling author Lawrence Hill offers a provocative examination of the scientific and social history of blood, and on the ways that it unites and divides us today.Blood runs red through every person’s arteries and fulfills the same functions in every human being. The study of blood has advanced our understanding of biology and improved medical treatments, but its cultural and social representations have divided us perennially. Blood pulses thro...

**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...

Upon its first publication more than twenty years ago, And the Band Played on was quickly recognized as a masterpiece of investigative reporting.An international bestseller, a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and made into a critically acclaimed movie, Shilts' expose revealed why AIDS was allowed to spread unchecked during the early 80's while the most trusted institutions ignored or denied the threat. One of the few true modern classics...

Happy Accidents is a fascinating, entertaining, and highly accessible look at the surprising role serendipity has played in some of the most important medical discoveries in the twentieth century. What do penicillin, chemotherapy drugs, X-rays, Valium, the Pap smear, and Viagra have in common? They were each discovered accidentally, stumbled upon in the search for something else. In the 1990s, Pfizer had high hopes for a new drug that would boost blood flow to the heart. As they c...

A New York Times bestsellerThe definitive account of the infectious diseases threatening humanity by Pulitzer Prize**–winning investigative journalist Laurie Garrett**"Prodigiously researched . . . A frightening vision of the future and a deeply unsettling one." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York TimesAfter decades spent assuming that the conquest of infectious diseas...

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

In The Demon Under the Microscope, Thomas Hager chronicles the dramatic history of sulfa, the first antibiotic and the drug that shaped modern medicine.The Nazis discovered it. The Allies won the war with it. It conquered diseases, changed laws, and single-handedly launched the era of antibiotics. Sulfa saved millions of lives—among them those of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr.—but its real effects are even more far reaching. Sulfa chan...

The story of a microbiologist’s remarkable career, from identifying ?the Ebola virus to pioneering AIDS research and policy.When Peter Piot was in medical school, a professor warned, “There’s no future in infectious diseases. They’ve all been solved.” Fortunately, Piot ignored him, and the result has been an exceptional, adventure-filled career. In the 1970s, as a young man, Piot was sent to Central Africa as part of a team tasked with identifying a grisly new virus. Crossing into ...

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...

One of Entertainment Weekly's Top 10 Nonfiction Books of the DecadeA definitive history of the successful battle to halt the AIDS epidemic, here is the incredible story of the grassroots activists whose work turned HIV from a mostly fatal infection to a manageable disease. Almost universally ignored, these men and women learned to become their own researchers, lobbyists, and drug smugglers, established their own newspapers and research journals, and went o...