Shows / New Books in Medicine
New Books in Medicine
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/…
Episodes
- New Books in Medicine
Ashely Alker, "99 Ways to Die: And How to Avoid Them" (St. Martin's Press, 2026)
In 99 Ways to Die: And How To Avoid Them (St. Martins Press, 2026) emergency medicine doctor Ashley Alker presents an illuminating, hilarious, and practical…
- New Books in Medicine
Anne Mendelson, "Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood" (Columbia UP, 2023)
Why is cows' milk, which few nonwhite people can digest, promoted as a science-backed dietary necessity in countries where the majority of the population is…
- New Books in Medicine
Vanessa Rampton, "Making Medical Progress: History of a Contested Idea" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Answers to the question 'what is medical progress?' have always been contested, and any one response is always bound up with contextual ideas of personhood…
- New Books in Medicine
Howard Alan Israel, "Nazi Anatomy Lessons: A Dissection of Evil" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2026)
What if the tools that shaped your life’s work were rooted in unimaginable evil? In this haunting episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with Dr. Howard Alan…
- New Books in Medicine
Andreas Killen, "Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War" (Harper, 2023)
In this eye-opening chronicle of scientific research on the brain in the early Cold War era, the acclaimed historian Andreas Killen traces the complex…
- New Books in Medicine
Stephen Bezruchka, "Born Sick in the USA: Improving the Health of a Nation" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
How healthy you are is dependent on where you live. Americans suffer more cancers, heart disease, mental illness, and other chronic diseases than those who…
- New Books in Medicine
Olivia Weisser, "The Dreaded Pox: Sex and Disease in Early Modern London" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, venereal disease, or the 'pox,' was a dreaded diagnosis throughout Europe. Its ghastly marks, along with their…
- New Books in Medicine
Jonathan Gleason, "Field Guide to Falling Ill" (Yale UP, 2026)
Jonathan Gleason spent ten years writing the ten essays in his debut collection, Field Guide to Falling Ill (Yale UP, 2026). In them, Gleason braids together…
- New Books in Medicine
Lesly-Marie Buer, "RX Appalachia: Stories of Treatment and Survival in Rural Kentucky" (Haymarket, 2020)
Using the narratives of women who use(d) drugs, this account challenges popular understandings of Appalachia spread by such pundits as JD Vance by documenting…
- New Books in Medicine
How Do We Treat Opioid Addiction?
Mark Parrino has been involved with the delivery of health care and treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD) since 1974. As the president of the American…
- New Books in Medicine
Elizabeth Kelly Gray, "Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776-1914" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Habitual drug use in the United States is at least as old as the nation itself. Elizabeth Kelly Gray's book Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776-1914…
- New Books in Medicine
Bruno J. Strasser and Thomas Schlich, "The Mask: A History of Breathing Bad Air" (Yale UP, 2025)
The Mask: A History of Breathing Bad Air (Yale UP, 2025) by Dr. Bruno J. Strasser and Dr. Thomas Schlich presents a history of masks protecting against bad…
- New Books in Medicine
Clare Griffin, "Mixing Medicines: The Global Drug Trade and Early Modern Russia" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)
Clare Griffin's book Mixing Medicines: The Global Drug Trade and Early Modern Russia (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022) introduces the reader to the dynamic and complex…
- New Books in Medicine
Linda Eckert, "Enough: Because We Can Stop Cervical Cancer" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Cervical cancer kills almost 350,000 women each year. What's more horrifying, is that millions have died of this disease that's nearly 100% preventable. It's…
- New Books in Medicine
Alison Bashford, "Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Why did Isaac Newton read books on chiromancy, the occult science of hand reading that revealed the secrets of the soul? Why did Charles Darwin claim that the…
- New Books in Medicine
Mike Jay, "Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind" (Yale UP, 2023)
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…
- New Books in Medicine
Kate Clancy, "Period: The Real Story of Menstruation" (Princeton UP, 2023)
Menstruation is something half the world does for a week at a time, for months and years on end, yet it remains largely misunderstood. Scientists once thought…
- New Books in Medicine
Donna J. Drucker, "Fertility Technology" (MIT Press, 2023)
A concise overview of fertility technology—its history, practical applications, and ethical and social implications around the world. In the late 1850s, a…
- New Books in Medicine
Joseph L Graves, "Why Black People Die Sooner: What Medicine Gets Wrong about Race and How to Fix It" (Columbia UP, 2025)
Why Black People Die Sooner is a powerful and rigorous examination of the ways racism shapes health and disease. Joseph L. Graves Jr. demonstrates that the…
- New Books in Medicine
Mark Deuze, "Well-Being and Creative Careers: What Makes You Happy Can Also Make You Sick" (Intellect Books, 2025)
The media and creative industries thrive on passion, but that passion often comes at a cost. Behind the glamour of journalism, filmmaking, games, music…
- New Books in Medicine
The Nursing Clio Editorial Collective, "The Nursing Clio Reader: Histories of Sex, Reproduction, and Justice" (Rutgers UP, 2025)
The Nursing Clio Reader: Histories of Sex, Reproduction, and Justice (Rutgers UP, 2025) brings together essays that examine reproductive health through…
- New Books in Medicine
Daniel Skinner et al., "The City and the Hospital: The Paradox of Medically Overserved Communities" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
The City and the Hospital (Chicago 2023) focuses on an urban paradox: American hospitals are imagined as sites of healing and care, and yet the people who live…
- New Books in Medicine
Jonathan S. Jones, "Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis" (UNC Press, 2025)
During the Civil War, the utility and widespread availability of opium and morphine made opiates essential to wartime medicine. After the war ended, thousands…
- New Books in Medicine
Deborah Carr, "Aging in America" (U California Press, 2023)
The aging of America will reshape how we live and will transform nearly every aspect of contemporary society. Renowned life course sociologist Deborah Carr…
- New Books in Medicine
Taylor McCall, "The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe" (Reaktion Books, 2023)
Taylor McCall's The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe (Reaktion, 2023) is the first history of medieval European anatomical images. Richly illustrated, The Art…
- New Books in Medicine
Karen Weingarten, "Pregnancy Test" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
In the 1970s, the invention of the home pregnancy test changed what it means to be pregnant. For the first time, women could use a technology in the privacy of…
- New Books in Medicine
David Kieran, "Signature Wounds: The Untold Story of the Military's Mental Health Crisis" (NYU Press, 2019)
The surprising story of the Army's efforts to combat PTSD and traumatic brain injury The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken a tremendous toll on the…
- New Books in Medicine
Andrea Kitta, "The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore" (Utah State UP, 2019)
Disease is a social issue and not just a medical one. This is the central tenet underlying The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore (Utah…
- New Books in Medicine
Vania Smith-Oka, "Becoming Gods: Medical Training in Mexican Hospitals" (Rutgers UP, 2021)
In Becoming Gods: Medical Training in Mexican Hospitals (Rutgers University Press, 2021), Vania Smith-Oka follows a cohort of interns throughout their year of…
- New Books in Medicine
Carol Mason, "From the Clinics to the Capitol: How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary" (U California Press, 2025)
Antiabortion stories, images, and policies have primed Americans to embrace attitudes and politics once deemed extreme. Abroad, US antiabortion tactics…
- New Books in Medicine
Muhammad H. Zaman, "Infected: How Power, Politics, and Privilege Use Science Against the World’s Most Vulnerable" (The New Press, 2025)
In Infected: How Power, Politics, and Privilege Use Science Against the World’s Most Vulnerable (The New Press, 2025), Professor Muhammad H. Zaman reveals the…
- New Books in Medicine
Eram Alam, "The Care of Foreigners: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare" (JHU Press, 2025)
For more than 60 years, the United States has trained fewer physicians than it needs, relying instead on the economically expedient option of soliciting…
- New Books in Medicine
Nora Kenworthy, "Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare" (MIT Press, 2024)
In Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare (MIT Press, 2024), Dr. Nora Kenworthy presents an eye-opening investigation into charitable…
- New Books in Medicine
Anthony Valerio, "Semmelweis: The Women's Doctor" (Zantedeschi Books, 2019)
Though his advice has saved the lives of millions of people, the name Ignaz Semmelweis is not one commonly known today. In his book Anthony Valerio’s…
- New Books in Medicine
Kalle Kananoja, "Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
In Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa (Cambridge UP, 2021), Kalle Kananoja tells the story of how pre-colonial communities throughout the west coast of…
- New Books in Medicine
Julia Ross Cummiskey, "Virus Research in Twentieth-Century Uganda: Between Local and Global" (Ohio UP, 2024)
Virus Research in Twentieth-Century Uganda: Between Local and Global (Ohio UP, 2024) presents the stories of scientists at the Uganda Virus Research Institute…
- New Books in Medicine
Walter Scott Peterson, "[M]y ‘case’ to work up’: William Carlos Williams’s Paterson" (William Carlos Williams Review, Vol 41, No. 2, 2024),
In “[M]y ‘case’ to work up’: William Carlos Williams’s Paterson” (William Carlos Williams Review, Volume 41, Number 2, 2024), Walter Scott Peterson argues that…
- New Books in Medicine
Meghan Crnic, "The Beach Cure: A History of Healing on Northeastern Shores" (U Washington Press, 2025)
For centuries, the ocean was seen as a place of danger and work, but by the late nineteenth century, northeastern shores of the United States became…
- New Books in Medicine
Katherine J. Parkin, "The Abortion Market: Buying and Selling Access in the Era Before Roe" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
The abortion market was a powerful economic force in American life. Before legalization lowered the cost, one million women each year collectively paid upward…
- New Books in Medicine
Katie Herzog, "Drink Your Way Sober: The Science-Based Method to Break Free from Alcohol" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
After 20 years of fighting and failing to get sober using abstinence-based methods, journalist Katie Herzog found a simple, inexpensive, and effective way to…
- New Books in Medicine
Jack Hartnell, "Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image" (Princeton UP, 2025)
The Wound Man—a medical diagram depicting a figure fantastically pierced by weapons and ravaged by injuries and diseases—was reproduced widely across the…
- New Books in Medicine
Breanne Pleggenkuhle and Joseph A. Schafer, "Crime, Corrections, and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Responses and Adaptations in the US Criminal Justice System" (Southern Illinois UP, 2025)
While COVID-19 lockdowns affected nearly everyone worldwide, feelings of anxiety and fear were exacerbated for those already entangled in the criminal justice…
- New Books in Medicine
Dan Roche, "Eyes by Hand: Prosthetics of Art and Healing" (MIT Press, 2025)
Eyes by Hand: Prosthetics of Art and Healing (MIT Press, 2025) is a book about artificial eyes—about the artisans and artists who make them, and about the…
- New Books in Medicine
Helen C. Epstein, "Why Live: An Anatomy of Suicide Epidemics" (Columbia Global Reports, 2025)
What causes suicide epidemics—and how can we prevent them? Many suicides are caused by biological mental illness, but sometimes the suicide rate of a…
- New Books in Medicine
Agnes Arnold-Forster, "The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteenth-Century Britain" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Agnes Arnold-Forster's book The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2021) offers the first medical, cultural, and social…
- New Books in Medicine
Christopher Kemp, "Dark and Magical Places: The Neuroscience of Navigation" (Norton, 2022)
Inside our heads we carry around an infinite and endlessly unfolding map of the world. Navigation is one of the most ancient neural abilities we have―older…
- New Books in Medicine
Christopher Kemp, "Dark and Magical Places: The Neuroscience of Navigation" (Norton, 2022)
Inside our heads we carry around an infinite and endlessly unfolding map of the world. Navigation is one of the most ancient neural abilities we have―older…
- New Books in Medicine
Susan C. Boyd, "Heroin: An Illustrated History" (Fernwood, 2022)
Dr. Susan Boyd is a scholar/activist and Distinguished Professor emerita at the University of Victoria. Her research examines a variety of topics related to…
- New Books in Medicine
Stacia Kalinoski, "Racing Uphill: Confronting a Life with Epilepsy" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
The book, Racing Uphill: Confronting a Life with Epilepsy (U of Minnesota Press, 2025), is a memoir and an educational resource, which tells the story of an…
- New Books in Medicine
Lewis A. Grossman, "Choose Your Medicine: Freedom of Therapeutic Choice in America" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Throughout American history, lawmakers have limited the range of treatments available to patients, often with the backing of the medical establishment. The…
- New Books in Medicine
Manuel Barcia, "The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade" (Yale UP, 2020)
As we now know, epidemics and pandemics are not new phenomena. In her new book The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic…
- New Books in Medicine
Athena Aktipis, "The Cheating Cell: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer" (Princeton UP, 2020)
When we think of the forces driving cancer, we don’t necessarily think of evolution. But evolution and cancer are closely linked because the historical…
- New Books in Medicine
Ayo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China" (U California Press, 2018)
From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive…
- New Books in Medicine
Melody Glenn, "Mother of Methadone: A Doctor's Quest, a Forgotten History, and a Modern-Day Crisis" (Beacon Press, 2025)
Dr. Melody Glenn was a burned-out emergency physician who had grown to resent the large population of opioid dependent patients passing through her ER. While…
- New Books in Medicine
Judith Grisel, "Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction" (Doubleday, 2019)
Not a lot of authors go from spending their early twenties homeless and addicted to cocaine to becoming one of the world’s leading researchers on the…
- New Books in Medicine
Rehearsals for Dying
Deena stepped out of the shower and opened her towel in the steam. “Does my breast look weird?” These words irrevocably change the lives of writer Ariel Gore…
- New Books in Medicine
Joseph Gfroerer, "War Stories from the Drug Survey: How Culture, Politics, and Statistics Shaped the National Survey on Drug Use and Health" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Joseph Gfroerer spent nearly 40 years working as a statistician for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health…
- New Books in Medicine
Childhood malnutrition and pneumonia in Timor-Leste
Dr Nick Fancourt is a Horizon Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the Sydney Medical School. He also works as a paediatrician at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead…
- New Books in Medicine
Rene Almeling, Lisa Campo-Engelstein, Brian T. Nguyen eds., "Seminal: On Sperm, Health, and Politics" (NYU Press, 2025)
In Seminal: On Sperm, Health, and Politics, Rene Almeling, Lisa Campo-Engelstein, and Brian T. Nguyen come together across disciplines to offer a kaleidoscopic…
- New Books in Medicine
Ela Przybylo, "Ungendering Menstruation" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
Ungendering Menstruation by Ela Przybyło discusses why and how menstrual pain needs to be incorporated into discussions of gender, embodiment, and disability…