The global triumph of Mendelian genetics in the twentieth century was not a foregone conclusion, thanks to the existence of graft hybrids. These chimeral plants and animals are created by grafting tissue from one organism to another with the goal of passing the newly hybridized genetic material on to their offspring. But prevailing genetic theory insisted that heredity was confined to the sex cells and there was no inheritance of characteristics acquired during an organism’s lifetime. Under sustained attacks from geneticists, scientific belief in the existence of graft hybrids slowly began to decline. Yet ordinary horticulturalists and breeders continued to believe in the power of grafting. Matthew Holmes tells the story of these organisms—which include multicolored chickens and black nightshades that grew tomatoes—and their enduring influence on twentieth-century biology. Their creators sought a goal as ambitious as the wildest dreams of genetic engineering today: to smash the barriers between species and freely exchange genes between plants and animals. The Graft Hybrid presents a greater understanding of the controversial history of graft hybrids, offering a crucial intervention in the history of genetics and the future of biological science.

Public health, housing, poverty, and immigration dominated social and political discourse in early twentieth-century New York, much as they do today. The Lower East Side provided an urban environment where infectious disease and other public health concerns flourished. One city block in particular, known in muckraking circles as “The Lung Block,” housed four thousand first- and second-generation Americans in dilapidated tenements where deadly tuberculosis spread uninhibited. The Lung Block looks at a 1903 reform crusade to demolish this working-class tenement neighborhood and replace it with a park. Progressive reformers aimed to confront the area’s moral and environmental dangers, but their conceptualization of the problem and methods for addressing it placed them into direct conflict with the hand-to-mouth priorities of the residents. The campaign and its eventual failure illuminate the formidable social barriers distancing urban reformers and the marginalized populations they intend to help.

Winner, 2022 Edward Kremers AwardCompound Remedies examines the equipment, books, and remedies of colonial Mexico City’s Herrera pharmacy—natural substances with known healing powers that formed part of the basis for modern-day healing traditions and home remedies in Mexico. Paula S. De Vos traces the evolution of the Galenic pharmaceutical tradition from its foundations in ancient Greece to the physician-philosophers of medieval Islamic empires and the Latin West and eventually through the Spanish Empire to Mexico, offering a global history of the transmission of these materials, knowledges, and techniques. Her detailed inventory of the Herrera pharmacy reveals the many layers of this tradition and how it developed over centuries, providing new perspectives and insight into the development of Western science and medicine: its varied origins, its engagement with and inclusion of multiple knowledge traditions, the ways in which these traditions moved and circulated in relation to imperialism, and its long-term continuities and dramatic transformations. De Vos ultimately reveals the great significance of pharmacy, and of artisanal pursuits more generally, as a cornerstone of ancient, medieval, and early modern epistemologies and philosophies of nature.

When we are born, we are basically sterile. By the time we die, we are more microbe than human. Microscopic organisms are essential to the development of human life. Until Antonie van Leeuwenhoek observed his own microbes under a self-made microscope in the seventeenth century, we were not even aware that they existed. Clinician-scientist Fergus Shanahan and graphic design artist Laura Gowers shed light on the microbial world. How can we nurture microbes in the face of the climate emergency? Why do Irish Travellers have a unique microbiome? A remarkable, ground-breaking graphic book.

A Nurse’s Life tells the remarkable story of one woman’s devotion to a life of care in the medical profession. Beginning her career as a midwife, Geralyn later became an authority in palliative care, but throughout her goal has always been about understanding what it means to truly care for another person. That is precisely what she does in this book: portray the essence of nursing. After years in the hospital wards Geralyn decided it was time for a change and volunteered to work for Concern Worldwide in a two-year post among the most needy in Bangladesh. Here she learned first-hand about the link between poverty and health care. Upon her return to Ireland she returned to academia and enrolled in an MsC programme at Trinity College Dublin. Eventually she became Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing at Trinity. Interspersed between her highly entertaining personal stories as a nurse, Geralyn expounds on many of the key issues in the nursing profession today: the changing nature of nursing and environment of care; challenges in providing person-centred care in the hospital setting, the essential qualities needed to be a good nurse; the problematic doctor/nurse/administration relationship; the future of nursing and possible ways to address the current challenges; and much more. More recently, Geralyn experienced nursing from the other side when she was diagnosed with a brain tumour that while benign meant surgery, radiotherapy and several new chronic conditions as a result. This has given her a deeper, first-hand understanding of nursing and the extraordinary reality of loving care.

Strategies for the preservation of health and for the prevention and treatment of illness and disease have been discerned in the surviving written records and material remains of most societies since earliest times. Compared to the prehistoric past the evidence for the ancient Greek and Roman periods is comparatively full, though still sparse or lacking in some key areas. Most accounts of the history of Greek and Roman medicine are based on ancient medical texts. As a study of the subject through its material remains, this book will be a unique and major contribution to the understanding of ancient medical implements and surgical instruments, of surgery, and of the history of medicine. In addition to medical instruments, the British Museum collection also includes an important range of objects which help to illustrate the multi-faceted approach to healing in antiquity. They include one of the largest holdings of collyrium-stamps − small inscribed stone tablets which were used to mark sticks of eye medicine; Greek inscriptions honouring public physicians; stone statues, bronze figurines and engraved gemstones depicting the principal healer deities; and marble and terracotta models of body parts (‘anatomical votives’) dedicated to the healer deities by those seeking divine cures. Together with the instrumentation, the publication will show how they encompass most aspects of ancient medicine and represent starting points from which to develop discussions of strategies for health and healing.

The public has voiced concern over the adverse effects of vaccines from the moment Dr. Edward Jenner introduced the first smallpox vaccine in 1796. The controversy over childhood immunization intensified in 1998, when Dr. Andrew Wakefield linked the MMR vaccine to autism. Although Wakefield’s findings were later discredited and retracted, and medical and scientific evidence suggests routine immunizations have significantly reduced life-threatening conditions like measles, whooping cough, and polio, vaccine refusal and vaccine-preventable outbreaks are on the rise. This book explores vaccine hesitancy and refusal among parents in the industrialized North. Although biomedical, public health, and popular science literature has focused on a scientifically ignorant public, the real problem, Maya J. Goldenberg argues, lies not in misunderstanding, but in mistrust. Public confidence in scientific institutions and government bodies has been shaken by fraud, research scandals, and misconduct. Her book reveals how vaccine studies sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry, compelling rhetorics from the anti-vaccine movement, and the spread of populist knowledge on social media have all contributed to a public mistrust of the scientific consensus. Importantly, it also emphasizes how historical and current discrimination in health care against marginalized communities continues to shape public perception of institutional trustworthiness. Goldenberg ultimately reframes vaccine hesitancy as a crisis of public trust rather than a war on science, arguing that having good scientific support of vaccine efficacy and safety is not enough. In a fraught communications landscape, Vaccine Hesitancy advocates for trust-building measures that focus on relationships, transparency, and justice.

The terrifying fact is this: Huntington’s disease leads to physical and mental deterioration. There is no cure. It is handed down genetically, with a 1:2 chance of inheritance that cannot be determined until the disease shows itself, often not until the sufferer is in their 40s. Many do not know they have the gene or are at risk of passing it on. Those who do know, because a parent has suffered from it, may wait a lifetime before finding out whether they are safe or not. The prospects are horrific. After his first marriage failed, Brian Verity had a breakdown and married the woman who nursed him back to health. Within a few years, she began showing the signs of Huntington’s that he had seen in other members of her family and that he had a morbid fear of. Having fallen in love with her in hospital, he now found himself repelled, fearful of his own psychological fragility and inability to cope and yet committed to protecting her from the terrible distress that lay in wait. In his view, assisted dying was her only option. Was he right? Stephen Games, who edited this book, was in contact with Brian Verity in the year before he died, and is available to talk about the raw issues raised by the author and about the wider context of the book.

Since at least the eighteenth century, European administrators and officers, military men, soldiers, missionaries, doctors, wives, and servants moved back and forth between Britain and its growing imperial territories. The introduction of steam-powered vessels and deep-docks to accommodate them at London ports significantly reduced travel time for colonists and imperial servants travelling home to see their families, to enjoy a period of study leave, or to recuperate from the tropics. With their minds enervated by the sun, livers disrupted by the heat, and blood teeming with parasites, these patients brought the empire home and, in doing so, transformed medicine in Britain. With Imperial Mobilities, Kristin Hussey offers a postcolonial history of medicine in London. Moving beyond the insular scale of the nation, her book challenges the idea of a uniquely domestic medical practice, arguing instead that British medicine was imperial medicine in the late Victorian era. Using the analytic tools of geography, she interrogates sites of encounter across the imperial metropolis to explore how medical research and practice were transformed and remade.

Health practitioners working in gray zones, or between official and unofficial medicines, played a fundamental role in the shaping of Latin America from the colonial period onward. The Gray Zones of Medicine offers a human, relatable, complex examination of the history of health and healing in Latin America across five centuries. Contributors uncover how biographical narratives of individual actors—outside those of hegemonic biomedical knowledge, careers of successful doctors, public health initiatives, and research and medical institutions—can provide a unique window into larger social, cultural, political, and economic historical changes and continuities in the region. They reveal the power of such stories to illuminate intricacies and resilient features of the history of health and disease, and they demonstrate the importance of escaping analytical constraints posed by binary frameworks of legality/illegality, learned/popular, and orthodoxy/heterodoxy when writing about the past. Through an accessible and story-like format, this book unlocks the potential of historical narratives of healings to understand and give nuance to processes too frequently articulated through intellectual medical histories or the lenses of empires, nation-states, and their institutions.

Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward campaign organized millions of Chinese peasants into communes in a misguided attempt to rapidly collectivize agriculture with disastrous effects. Catastrophic famine lingered as the global cholera pandemic of the early 1960s spread rampantly through the infected waters of southeastern coastal China. Confronted with a political crisis and the seventh global cholera pandemic in recorded history, the communist government committed to social restructuring in order to affirm its legitimacy and prevent transmission of the disease. Focusing on the Wenzhou Prefecture in Zhejiang Province, the area most seriously stricken by cholera at the time, Xiaoping Fang demonstrates how China's pandemic was far more than a health incident; it became a significant social and political influence during a dramatic transition for the People's Republic. China and the Cholera Pandemic reveals how disease control and prevention, executed through the government's large-scale, clandestine anticholera campaign, were integral components of its restructuring initiatives, aimed at restoring social order. The subsequent rise of an emergency disciplinary health state furthered these aims through quarantine and isolation, which profoundly impacted the social epidemiology of the region, dividing Chinese society and reinforcing hierarchies according to place, gender, and socioeconomic status.

During the early 1990s, the diet drugs fen-phen and Redux achieved tremendous popularity. The chemical combination was discovered by chance, marketed with hyperbole, and prescribed to millions. But as the drugs' developer, pharmaceutical giant American Home Products, cashed in on the miracle weight-loss pills, medical researchers revealed that the drugs caused heart valve disease. This scandal was, incredibly, only the beginning of an unbelievable saga of greed and graft. In Fat Chance, Rick Christman recounts a story that a judicial tribunal member later described as "a tale worthy of the pen of Charles Dickens." As class action lawsuits against American Home Products began to be filed, four avaricious attorneys saw an irresistible opportunity. Bill Gallion, Shirley Cunningham, Melbourne Mills, and Stan Chesley contrived to a bring a class action suit to trial in Covington, Kentucky, where their hired trial consultant, Mark Modlin, had a manipulative relationship with the presiding judge, Jay Bamberger. Their efforts were rewarded with a $200 million settlement - a sum that the four lawyers immediately set out to plunder and misappropriate. Ultimately, two of the attorneys received long prison sentences, another was acquitted after claiming to be unaware of the grift due to his alcoholism, and one managed to escape criminal charges; all four were disbarred, and Bamberger was disbarred and disrobed. Recounting a dramatic affair that bears conspicuous similarities to opioid-related class action litigation against the pharmaceutical industry, Christman offers an engaging if occasionally horrifying account of one of America's most prominent product liability cases and the settlement's aftermath.

The practice of medicine has advanced dramatically in recent years, but the language used to discuss illness - by medical practitioners, patients and caregivers - has not kept pace. As a result, clinicians and, just as importantly, patients and their relatives and caregivers, are not able to communicate clearly in relation to illness. The upshot is misunderstanding and confusion on all sides. In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Fergus Shanahan, an eminent gastroenterologist who has practiced in Ireland, the United States and Canada, and published widely around the world, looks at memoirs of illness, and outlines the lessons we can learn from a better understanding of the words we use to describe illness. He looks at the ways in which language can act as a barrier with regard to illness, and proposes practical ways in which we can dismantle these barriers. The book is written for the general reader: as Dr. Shanahan puts it himself, he is “enough of an expert to be wary of experts." The Language of Illness, part manifesto, part memoir, and part instruction manual, is an appeal for the use of clearer, more holistic language, by all those involved with, and affected by, illness. Like the great American poet-doctor William Carlos Williams, he aims to help us develop a new language by means of which we can develop a new way of living with illness - which is an integral part of the human condition. Put simply, it is a book for all those who care about caring.

People suffering from dementia need continued high-quality health care from diagnosis until the end of life. Stable relationships and wellness are the prerequisites for quality of life. In countries like Australia, this is the era of chronic illness of which dementia is the epitome. The seeming epidemic of dementia comes with the ageing of the population, which was predictable for generations and for which successive governments failed to prepare. What now passes for aged care in Australia is a travesty where the glowing reform rhetoric obfuscates the grim reality.

Industrialisation is a notoriously complex issue in terms of the hazards and benefits it has brought to human beings in our endeavours to improve our lives. This is never more evident than in the field of health and medicine, where there are many questions about the causes and treatments of diseases we commonly encounter today, such as cancer, diabetes and degenerative age-related conditions. Are there genetic predispositions to these conditions? Are they a mirror of our modern lives driven by our fast-paced lifestyles or have they always existed but gone undetected? The archive of human skeletal remains at the Museum of London provides a large bank of evidence that has been explored here, along with other skeletal collections from around England, to investigate how far some of these diseases go back in time and what we can tell about the influence of living environments past and present on human health. The Industrial Period was a key period in human history where substantial change occurred to the population’s lifestyles, in terms of occupations, housing and diet as well as leisurely past-times, all of which would have impacted on their health. London had become the most densely populated metropolis in the world, the beating heart of trade and consumerism, an unambiguous example of the urban experience in the Industrial age. Using up-to-date medical imaging technologies in addition to osteoarchaeological examination of human skeletal remains, we have been able to establish the presence of modern day diseases in individuals living in the past, both before and during Industrialisation, to compare to rates in UK populations today. By re-examining the skeletal evidence, we have traced how the perils of unregulated rural and urban lives, changing food consumption, transport, technologies as well as improving medical treatment and life expectancy, have all altered health patterns over time.

Much like the Information Age of the twenty-first century, the Industrial Age was a period of great social changes brought about by rapid industrialization and urbanization, speed of travel, and global communications. The literature, medicine, science, and popular journalism of the nineteenth century attempted to diagnose problems of the mind and body that such drastic transformations were thought to generate: a range of conditions or “diseases of modernity” resulting from specific changes in the social and physical environment. The alarmist rhetoric of newspapers and popular periodicals, advertising various “neurotic remedies,” in turn inspired a new class of physicians and quack medical practices devoted to the treatment and perpetuation of such conditions. Anxious Times examines perceptions of the pressures of modern life and their impact on bodily and mental health in nineteenth-century Britain. The authors explore anxieties stemming from the potentially harmful impact of new technologies, changing work and leisure practices, and evolving cultural pressures and expectations within rapidly changing external environments. Their work reveals how an earlier age confronted the challenges of seemingly unprecedented change, and diagnosed transformations in both the culture of the era and the life of the mind.