New Books in Medicine

Latest Episodes:

The History of Contraception Apr 27, 2023

Show notes

An interview with Donna J. Drucker, author of Contraception, from The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series. We discuss reproductive justice, the history of contraceptive technology and how the future of contraception can offer more choice and more freedom for every kind of person.

The development, manufacturing, and use of contraceptive methods from the late nineteenth century to the present, viewed from the perspective of reproductive justice.

The beginning of the modern contraceptive era began in 1882, when Dr. Aletta Jacobs opened the first birth control clinic in Amsterdam. The founding of this facility, and the clinical provision of contraception that it enabled, marked the moment when physicians started to take the prevention of pregnancy seriously as a medical concern. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Donna Drucker traces the history of modern contraception, outlining the development, manufacturing, and use of contraceptive methods from the opening of Dr. Jacobs's clinic to the present. Drucker approaches the subject from the perspective of reproductive justice: the right to have a child, the right not to have a child, and the right to parent children safely and healthily.

Drucker describes contraceptive methods available before the pill, including the diaphragm (dispensed at the Jacobs clinic) and condom, spermicidal jellies, and periodic abstinences. She looks at the development and dissemination of the pill and its chemical descendants; describes technological developments in such non-hormonal contraceptives as the cervical cap and timing methods (including the “rhythm method” favored by the Roman Catholic church); and explains the concept of reproductive justice. Finally, Drucker considers the future of contraception—the adaptations of existing methods, new forms of distribution, and ongoing efforts needed to support contraceptive access worldwide.

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Tom Hutton, "Hitler's Maladies and Their Impact on World War II" (Texas Tech UP, 2023) Apr 23, 2023

Show notes

Toward the end of World War II, Hitler's many health complications became even more pronounced, making an evil man yet more erratic and dangerous. While the subject of Hitler's health has been catalogued previously, never has it been done so this thoroughly or with this level of up-to-date medical expertise.

Tom Hutton's Hitler's Maladies and Their Impact on World War II (Texas Tech UP, 2023) draws from a lifetime of medical research and clinical experience to understand how the dictator's particular medical history further warped a deformed personality and altered Hitler's decision making. Dr. Hutton trained under the world-renowned neuropsychologist and father of modern neuropsychological assessment, Dr. Alexander Luria, giving him a uniquely qualified eye to undertake this most difficult assessment.

While many books on the subject thumb through the annals of popular psychology to understand history's most famous monsters, Dr. Hutton's latest book uses contemporary clinical knowledge, lucidly synthesizing medical complexities for all audiences.

Here Dr. Hutton undertakes a thorough medical history to elucidate a pivotal historical moment, examining how disease impacted Hitler's destructive life.

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Arleen Tuchman, "Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease" (Yale UP, 2020) Apr 21, 2023

Show notes

Arleen Marcia Tuchman’s book, Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease (Yale UP, 2020), tells the American history of a disease that continues to defy categorizations. Researchers for more than a century have worked to create distinctions between “types” of diabetes to parse people who all share the trait of high levels of sugar in their blood. Tuchman shows how efforts to divide diabetes into types tracked efforts to divide people into different types—specifically by race. For Tuchman, this move reflects an American obsession with race that too often overlooks racism as a fundamental cause of disease.

The book won the 2022 Rosen Prize from the American Association for the History of Medicine and will be of immediate interest to readers interested in Science & Technology Studies, American History, and social justice.

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and graduate students at Vanderbilt University in the course, “American Medicine & the World.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about how to design collaborative interview projects for the classroom. Email: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu.

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Susan Burch, "Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and Beyond Institutions" (UNC Press, 2021) Apr 14, 2023

Show notes

Between 1902 and 1934, the United States confined hundreds of adults and children from dozens of Native nations at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, a federal psychiatric hospital in South Dakota. But detention at the Indian Asylum, as families experienced it, was not the beginning or end of the story. For them, Canton Asylum was one of many places of imposed removal and confinement, including reservations, boarding schools, orphanages, and prison-hospitals. Despite the long reach of institutionalization for those forcibly held at the Asylum, the tenacity of relationships extended within and beyond institutional walls.

In Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and Beyond Institutions (UNC Press, 2021), Susan Burch tells the story of the Indigenous people—families, communities, and nations, across generations to the present day—who have experienced the impact of this history. Drawing on oral history interviews, correspondence, material objects, and archival sources, Burch reframes the histories of institutionalized people and the places that held them. Committed expands the boundaries of Native American history, disability studies, and U.S. social and cultural history generally.

Susan Burch is a professor of American Studies. Before joining the Middlebury faculty in 2009, she taught at Gallaudet University, King’s College (University of Aberdeen, Scotland), and the Ohio State University. Professor Burch also has worked as a research associate at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. She earned her BA degree in history and Soviet Studies from Colorado College and her MA and PhD in American and Soviet history from Georgetown University.

Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio.

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Cristina Mejia Visperas, "Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory" (NYU, 2022) Apr 14, 2023

Show notes

An abolitionist approach to STS and the history of the life sciences: this is the model that Cristina Mejia Visperas offers in her book, Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory (NYU 2022). By now, scientists’ experiments on captive men at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison are well known, thanks to the brave and important testimony of former captive-subjects in books like Allen Hornblum’s Acres of Skin. Building on this documentary work, Visperas turns attention to the prison experiments’ “optical rationality,” the way of seeing images that came out of a space that was simultaneously prison and laboratory. For Visperas, skin is a scientific apparatus and a metaphor for what science makes visible—and what it leaves as a void, namely, the endurance of anti-Black racism in the US, from slavery to mass incarceration. At its core, the book asks “What is the relationship between science and the project of freedom?”—and it hopes towards a reparative bioethics that dismantles scientific racism and the prison nation that it upholds.

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and graduate students at Vanderbilt University in the seminar “Critical Bioethics.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about how to design collaborative interview projects for the classroom.

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Moheb Costandi, "Body Am I: The New Science of Self-Consciousness" (MIT Press, 2022) Apr 03, 2023

Show notes

How the way we perceive our bodies plays a critical role in the way we perceive ourselves: stories of phantom limbs, rubber hands, anorexia, and other phenomena.

The body is central to our sense of identity. It can be a canvas for self-expression, decorated with clothing, jewelry, cosmetics, tattoos, and piercings. But the body is more than that. Bodily awareness, says scientist-writer Moheb Costandi, is key to self-consciousness. In Body Am I: The New Science of Self-Consciousness (MIT Press, 2022), Costandi examines how the brain perceives the body, how that perception translates into our conscious experience of the body, and how that experience contributes to our sense of self. Along the way, he explores what can happen when the mechanisms of bodily awareness are disturbed, leading to such phenomena as phantom limbs, alien hands, and amputee fetishes.

Costandi explains that the brain generates maps and models of the body that guide how we perceive and use it, and that these maps and models are repeatedly modified and reconstructed. Drawing on recent bodily awareness research, the new science of self-consciousness, and historical milestones in neurology, he describes a range of psychiatric and neurological disorders that result when body and brain are out of sync, including not only the well-known phantom limb syndrome but also phantom breast and phantom penis syndromes; body integrity identity disorder, which compels a person to disown and then amputate a healthy arm or leg; and such eating disorders as anorexia.

Wide-ranging and meticulously researched, Body Am I (the title comes from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra) offers new insight into self-consciousness by describing it in terms of bodily awareness.

Melek Firat Altay is a neuroscientist, biologist and musician. Her research focuses on deciphering the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders.

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Mike Jay, "Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind" (Yale UP, 2023) Apr 02, 2023

Show notes

Mike Jay's Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind (Yale UP, 2023) is a provocative and original history of the scientists and writers, artists and philosophers who took drugs to explore the hidden regions of the mind.

Until the twentieth century, scientists investigating the effects of drugs on the mind did so by experimenting on themselves. Vivid descriptions of drug experiences sparked insights across the mind sciences, pharmacology, medicine, and philosophy. Accounts in journals and literary fiction inspired a fascinated public to make their own experiments--in scientific demonstrations, on exotic travels, at literary salons, and in occult rituals. But after 1900 drugs were increasingly viewed as a social problem, and the long tradition of self-experimentation began to disappear. From Sigmund Freud's experiments with cocaine to William James's epiphany on nitrous oxide, Mike Jay brilliantly recovers a lost intellectual tradition of drug-taking that fed the birth of psychology, the discovery of the unconscious, and the emergence of modernism. Today, as we embrace novel cognitive enhancers and psychedelics, the experiments of the original psychonauts reveal the deep influence of mind-altering drugs on Western science, philosophy, and culture.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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Life Extension Therapies Mar 29, 2023

Show notes

The story of the Fountain of Youth is as old as history itself. Herodotus, the father of ancient Greek history, wrote of a mythical spring that extended the life of its bathers. Today, biotech entrepreneurs, scientists, and health influencers are still searching for that mythical spring.

Longevity and anti-aging research has recently blossomed, with a number of tantalizing discoveries. Still, this research hasn't delivered any magic bullets. Yet, that hasn't stopped a cottage industry of folks hawking a plethora of dubious supplements and bizarre health regimens.

Jay Cockburn tries to make sense of what's real, what's hype, who could benefit, and who would pay. Do we even want to live in the world the longevity researchers are looking for? Should we keep looking for that fountain?

We'll hear from: CEO of BioViva, Liz Parish, who has stepped outside of the regular drug approval process and experimented on herself; Dr. Charles Brenner, a scientist and vocal critic of the claims of life extension; and Dr. Keisha S. Ray, a bioethicist who reminds us that while the rich look for fanciful new ways to live longer, the poor lack access to basic health care.

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Declan Warde et al., "Safety As We Watch: Anaesthesia in Ireland 1847-1998" (Wordwell Books, 2022) Mar 27, 2023

Show notes

The discovery of anaesthesia which could be administered safely to eliminate the pain of surgery and other medical and dental procedures is widely considered to be one of the greatest developments of the nineteenth century. Yet, until now few studies have focused on anaesthesia in Ireland.

Safety As We Watch: Anaesthesia in Ireland 1847-1998(Wordwell Books, 2022), written by three Irish anaesthetists, is the first published study of the history of anaesthesia in Ireland. Featuring fascinating vignettes of the personalities and innovators who led the development of anaesthesia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book leads readers through the history of the practice over 150 years, sketching global networks of exchange between medical practitioners and researchers. Beginning with the administration of the first general anaesthetic in Ireland on 1 January 1847, when ether was given to an 18-year-old girl undergoing an amputation under the care of Dr John MacDonnell, the book traces the debates and issues surrounding the uses and administration of anaesthesia through to the foundation of the College of Anaesthetists of Ireland in 1998. Safety as We Watch is divided into two parts: Part I focuses on the development of chloroform and ether, the mechanisms used to administer the drugs, as well as the innovators and medical professionals responsible, and Part II focuses on the organizations and academic developments in anaesthesia practice and education.

In its examination of this often-overlooked area in the history of Irish medicine Safety as We Watch offers new insight into medical organizations, as well as cultural conceptions of pain and consciousness, and the ways that anaesthesia transformed doctor-patient relationships. This book will be of great interest to medical professionals, historians of medicine, health humanities scholars and to more general readers interested in anaesthesia.

Bridget English is a scholar of Irish literature and culture, modernism, and health humanities, based at the University of Illinois Chicago. She co-convenes the Irish Studies Seminar at the Newberry Library. On Twitter.

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Heidi J. Larson, "Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start--and Why They Don't Go Away" (Oxford UP, 2020) Mar 27, 2023

Show notes

Vaccine reluctance and refusal are no longer limited to the margins of society. Debates around vaccines' necessity -- along with questions around their side effects -- have gone mainstream, blending with geopolitical conflicts, political campaigns, celebrity causes, and "natural" lifestyles to win a growing number of hearts and minds. Today's anti-vaccine positions find audiences where they've never existed previously.

Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start--and Why They Don't Go Away (Oxford UP, 2020) examines how the issues surrounding vaccine hesitancy are, more than anything, about people feeling left out of the conversation. A new dialogue is long overdue, one that addresses the many types of vaccine hesitancy and the social factors that perpetuate them. To do this, Stuck provides a clear-eyed examination of the social vectors that transmit vaccine rumors, their manifestations around the globe, and how these individual threads are all connected.

Heidi J. Larson, PhD, is Professor of Anthropology, Risk and Decision Science and is the Founding Director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. She is also Clinical Professor of Health Metrics Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, USA, and Guest Professor at the University of Antwerp, Belgium.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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