New Books in Medicine

Latest Episodes:

Ayan S. Mandal, "A Stethoscope for the Brain: Preventive Approaches to Protect the Mind" (New Degree Press, 2022) Nov 04, 2022

Show notes

A taken-for-granted miracle occurs in doctors’ offices across the world every single day. With only a stethoscope and an inflatable cuff, a physician can check your blood pressure to predict your risk of future heart problems. These tools give you the chance to take proactive steps to reduce this risk if needed. Why don’t we have similar tools for the brain?

A Stethoscope for the Brain: Preventive Approaches to Protect the Mind (New Degree Press, 2022) is a book about proactive strategies to prevent brain diseases. Blending the stories of people affected by brain disease with the science that saves patients’ lives, neuroscientist Ayan Mandal invites readers to learn about the future of brain health.

This book tells the stories of...

A sisterhood of Catholic nuns who taught the world the secret to preventing dementia
The French patient whose legacy guides our ability to treat strokes early
Military veterans whose routine checkups led to a discovery that could prevent the most common cause of disability in young adults

New advances in medicine are proving that maladies of the mind are not inevitable. Learn what can be done to protect the brains of you and your loved ones.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Robert Gottlieb, "Care-Centered Politics: From the Home to the Planet" (MIT Press, 2022) Nov 01, 2022

Show notes

This agenda-setting book presents a framework for creating a more just and equitable care-centered world. Climate change, pandemic events, systemic racism, and deep inequalities have all underscored the centrality of care in our lives. Yet care work is, for the most part, undervalued and exploited. In Care-Centered Politics: From the Home to the Planet (MIT Press, 2022), Robert Gottlieb examines how a care economy and care politics can influence and remake health, climate, and environmental policy, as well as the institutions and practices of daily life. He shows how, through this care-centered politics, we can build an ethics of care and a society of cooperation, sharing, and solidarity.

Arguing that care is a form of labor, Gottlieb expands the ways we think about home care, child care, elder care, and other care relationships. He links them to the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, immigration, and the militarization of daily life. He also provides perspective on the events of 2020 and 2021 (including the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and movements calling attention to racism and inequality) as they relate to a care politics. Care, says Gottlieb, must be universal--whether healthcare for all, care for the earth, care at work, or care for the household, shared equally by men and women. Care-centered politics is about strategic and structural reforms that imply radical and revolutionary change. Gottlieb offers a practical, mindful, yet also utopian, politics of daily life.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Mackenzie Cooley, "The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance" (U Chicago Press, 2022) Oct 31, 2022

Show notes

The Renaissance is celebrated for the belief that individuals could fashion themselves to greatness, but there is a dark undercurrent to this fêted era of history. The same men and women who offered profound advancements in European understanding of the human condition—and laid the foundations of the Scientific Revolution—were also obsessed with controlling that condition and the wider natural world.

Tracing early modern artisanal practice, Mackenzie Cooley shows how the idea of race and theories of inheritance developed through animal breeding in the shadow of the Spanish Empire. While one strand of the Renaissance celebrated a liberal view of human potential, another limited it by biology, reducing man to beast and prince to stud. “Race,” Cooley explains, first referred to animal stock honed through breeding. To those who invented the concept, race was not inflexible, but the fragile result of reproductive work. As the Spanish empire expanded, the concept of race moved from nonhuman to human animals. Cooley reveals how, as the dangerous idea of controlled reproduction was brought to life again and again, a rich, complex, and ever-shifting language of race and breeding was born.

Adding nuance and historical context to discussions of race and human and animal relations, The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance(U Chicago Press, 2022) provides a close reading of undertheorized notions of generation and its discontents in the more-than-human world.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author. Before moving to the UK in 2021 she was chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego.

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Sian E. Harding, "The Exquisite Machine: The New Science of the Heart" (MIT Press, 2022) Oct 31, 2022

Show notes

Your heart is a miracle in motion, a marvel of construction unsurpassed by any human-made creation. It beats 100,000 times every day--if you were to live to 100, that would be more than 3 billion beats across your lifespan. Despite decades of effort in labs all over the world, we have not yet been able to replicate the heart's perfect engineering. But, as Sian Harding shows us in The Exquisite Machine: The New Science of the Heart(MIT Press, 2022), new scientific developments are opening up the mysteries of the heart. And this explosion of new science--ultrafast imaging, gene editing, stem cells, artificial intelligence, and advanced sub-light microscopy--has crucial, real-world consequences for health and well-being.

Harding--a world leader in cardiac research--explores the relation between the emotions and heart function, reporting that the heart not only responds to our emotions, it creates them as well. The condition known as Broken Heart Syndrome, for example, is a real disorder than can follow bereavement or stress. The Exquisite Machine describes the evolutionary forces that have shaped the heart's response to damage, the astonishing rejuvenating power of stem cells, how we can avoid heart disease, and why it can be so hard to repair a damaged heart. It tells the stories of patients who have had the devastating experiences of a heart attack, chaotic heart rhythms, or stress-induced acute heart failure. And it describes how cutting-edge technologies are enabling experiments and clinical trials that will lead us to new solutions to the worldwide scourge of heart disease.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Ayurveda and Alchemy: A Conversation with Dagmar Wujastyk Oct 27, 2022

Show notes

A candid conversation with Dr. Dagmar Wujastyk about her fascinating work at the intersection of yoga, Ayurveda, and alchemy.

Dr. Wujastyk’s online course “Ayurveda, Yoga and Alchemy."

Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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Krystale E. Littlejohn, "Just Get on the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics" (U California Press, 2021) Oct 27, 2022

Show notes

The average person concerned about becoming pregnant spends approximately thirty years trying to prevent conception. People largely do so alone using prescription birth control, a situation often taken for granted in the United States as natural and beneficial.

In Just Get On the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics(University of California Press, 2021), a keenly researched and incisive examination, Krystale Littlejohn investigates how birth control becomes a fundamentally unbalanced and gendered responsibility. She uncovers how parents, peers, partners, and providers draw on narratives of male and female birth control methods to socialize cisgender women into sex and ultimately into shouldering the burden for preventing pregnancy. Littlejohn draws on extensive interviews to document this gendered compulsory birth control—a phenomenon in which people who give birth are held accountable for preventing and resolving pregnancies in gender-constrained ways. She shows how this gendered approach encroaches on reproductive autonomy and poses obstacles for preventing disease. While diverse cisgender women are the focus, Littlejohn shows that they are not the only ones harmed by this dynamic. Indeed, gendered approaches to birth control also negatively impact trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming people in overlooked ways. In tracing the divisive politics of pregnancy prevention, Littlejohn demonstrates that the gendered division of labor in birth control is not natural. It is unjust.

Nicole Bourbonnais is Associate Professor of International History and Politics and Co-Director of the Gender Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Her research explores reproductive politics and practice from a transnational, historical perspective. Profile here.

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Gwen Shuni D'Arcangelis, "Bio-Imperialism: Disease, Terror, and the Construction of National Fragility" (Rutgers UP, 2020) Oct 21, 2022

Show notes

Gwen Shuni D'Arcangelis's book Bio-Imperialism: Disease, Terror, and the Construction of National Fragility (Rutgers UP, 2020) focuses on an understudied dimension of the war on terror: the fight against bioterrorism. This component of the war enlisted the biosciences and public health fields to build up the U.S. biodefense industry and U.S. global disease control. The book argues that U.S. imperial ambitions drove these shifts in focus, aided by gendered and racialized discourses on terrorism, disease, and science. These narratives helped rationalize American research expansion into dangerous germs and bioweapons in the name of biodefense and bolstered the U.S. rationale for increased interference in the disease control decisions of Global South nations. Bio-Imperialism is a sobering look at how the war on terror impacted the world in ways that we are only just starting to grapple with.

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Jay Baruch, "Tornado of Life: A Doctor's Journey through Constraints and Creativity in the ER" (MIT Press, 2022) Oct 21, 2022

Show notes

To be an emergency room doctor is to be a professional listener to stories. Each patient presents a story; finding the heart of that story is the doctor’s most critical task. More technology, more tests, and more data won’t work if doctors get the story wrong. Empathy, creativity, and imagination are the cornerstones of clinical care. In Tornado of Life: A Doctor's Journey through Constraints and Creativity in the ER (MIT Press, 2022), ER physician Jay Baruch offers a series of short, powerful, and affecting essays that capture the stories of ER patients in all their complexity and messiness.

Patients come to the ER with lives troubled by scales of misfortune that have little to do with disease or injury. ER doctors must be problem-finders before they are problem-solvers. Cheryl, for example, whose story is a chaos narrative of “and this happened, and then that happened, and then, and then and then and then,” tells Baruch she is "stuck in a tornado of life.” What will help her, and and what will help Mr. K., who seems like a textbook case of post-combat PTSD but turns out not to be? Baruch describes, among other things, the emergency of loneliness (invoking Chekhov, another doctor-writer); his own (frightening) experience as a patient; the patient who demanded a hug; and emergency medicine during COVID-19. These stories often end without closure or solutions. The patients are discharged into the world. But if they’re lucky, the doctor has listened to their stories as well as treated them.

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Anita Wohlmann, "Metaphor in Illness Writing: Fight and Battle Reused" (Edinburgh UP, 2022) Oct 18, 2022

Show notes

Metaphor in Illness Writing: Fight and Battle Reused(Edinburgh UP, 2022) argues that even when a metaphor appears problematic and limiting, it need not be dropped or dismissed. Metaphors are not inherently harmful or beneficial; instead, they can be used in unexpected and creative ways. This book analyses the illness writing of contemporary North American writers who reimagine and reappropriate the supposedly harmful metaphor 'illness is a fight' and shows how Susan Sontag, Audre Lorde, Anatole Broyard, David Foster Wallace and other writers turn the fight metaphor into a space of agency, resistance, self-knowledge and aesthetic pleasure. It joins a conversation in Medical Humanities about alternatives to the predominance of narrative and responds to the call for more metaphor literacy and metaphor competence.

Wohlman has developed the vade mecum for Metaphor Method. You can find it here (in the right column). For the PDF file, click here.

Anita Wohlmann is an associate professor in the Department for the Study of Culture at SDU.

Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South studies.

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Suicide Prevention: Grassroots Intervention for High-Risk Groups Oct 04, 2022

Show notes

Suicide has been on the rise in recent years, most frighteningly among young people. Suicide is second leading cause of death for people ages 10-14 and 25-34. Gay, lesbian, and transgender youth are at particular risk.

Every year in the U.S., more people die by suicide than in car accidents, and more suicide deaths occur than homicide and AIDS deaths combined.

In this episode Renee Garfinkel and Hannah Rothstein discuss the myths and facts about suicide, its warning signs, and how friends and family, teachers and others can help.

Hannah Rothstein, Ph.D. is Professor Emerita of Management at Baruch College, City University of New York, Crisis Counselor for the Trevor Project.

If you’re thinking about suicide or you’re in crisis right now,

In U.S. call or text 988 or contact 988lifeline.org to talk with someone online.

In Israel: call suicide hotline *1201 (press 3 for languages, then select English).

Hannah Rothstein, Ph.D. is Professor Emerita of Management at Baruch College, City University of New York, Crisis Counselor for the Trevor Project.

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