New Books in Medicine cover art

New Books in Medicine

New Books in Medicine

By: Marshall Poe
Listen for free

About this listen

 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/ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicineNew Books Network Science
Episodes
  • Vanessa Rampton, "Making Medical Progress: History of a Contested Idea" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

    Vanessa Rampton, "Making Medical Progress: History of a Contested Idea" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
    Feb 15 2026
    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, society, and health. However, the widely held enthusiasm for medical progress escapes more general critiques of progress as a conceptual category. From the intersection of intellectual history, philosophy, and the medical humanities, in Making Medical Progress: History of a Contested Idea (Cambridge UP, 2025) Dr. Vanessa Rampton sheds light on the politics of medical progress and how they have downplayed the tensions between individual and social goods. She examines how a shared consensus about its value gives medical progress vast political and economic capital, revealing who benefits, who is left out, and who is harmed by this narrative. From ancient Greece to artificial intelligence, exploring the origins and ethics of different visions of progress offers valuable insight into how we can make them more meaningful in future. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine
    Show More Show Less
    34 mins
  • Howard Alan Israel, "Nazi Anatomy Lessons: A Dissection of Evil" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2026)

    Howard Alan Israel, "Nazi Anatomy Lessons: A Dissection of Evil" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2026)
    Feb 13 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 Israel to discuss Nazi Anatomy Lessons: A Dissection of Evil, a book born from a single, shattering moment in an operating room. For over twenty years, Dr. Israel had prepared for surgeries using the same anatomy atlas—methodically studying each illustration, planning for every variation, and building a career marked by innovation, research, and the training of future surgeons. Then a colleague changed everything with one sentence: the atlas had been created by Nazi doctors. That revelation launched a thirty-year journey into the moral abyss—an investigation into who these anatomists were, who their “subjects” had been, and how healers became murderers. Dr. Israel began to confront terrifying questions: Was his career built, in part, on the suffering of victims? How could such knowledge remain hidden in plain sight for decades? And how does a profession devoted to healing become an instrument of genocide? Together, Rabbi Katz and Dr. Israel explore not only the historical horror of Nazi medicine, but the urgent bioethical questions it raises today. As genocide remains a recurring human reality, this conversation asks what must change in our moral frameworks, institutions, and education to prevent the transformation of healers into agents of destruction—and how we might instead build a society committed to healing rather than harm. Rabbi Marc Katz is the author of Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine
    Show More Show Less
    48 mins
  • Andreas Killen, "Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War" (Harper, 2023)

    Andreas Killen, "Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War" (Harper, 2023)
    Feb 1 2026
    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 circumstances surrounding the genesis of our present-day fascination with this organ. The 1950s were a transformative, even revolutionary decade in the history of brain science. Using new techniques for probing brain activity and function, researchers in neurosurgery, psychiatry, and psychology achieved dramatic breakthroughs in the treatment of illnesses like epilepsy and schizophrenia, as well as the understanding of such faculties as memory and perception. Memory was the site of particularly startling discoveries. As one researcher wrote to another in the middle of that decade, “Memory was the sleeping beauty of the brain—and now she is awake.” Collectively, these advances prefigured the emergence of the field of neuroscience at the end of the twentieth century. But the 1950s also marked the beginning of the Cold War and a period of transformative social change across Western society. These developments resulted in unease and paranoia. Mysterious new afflictions—none more mystifying than “brainwashing”—also appeared at this time. Faced with the discovery that, as one leading psychiatrist put it, “the human personality is not as stable as we often assume,” many researchers in the sciences of brain and behavior joined the effort to understand these conditions. They devised ingenious and sometimes transgressive experimental methods for studying and proposing countermeasures to the problem of Communist mind control. Some of these procedures took on a strange life of their own, escaping the confines of the research lab to become part of 1960s counterculture. Much later, in the early 2000s, they resurfaced in the War on Terror. These stories, often told separately, are brought together by the historian Andreas Killen in this chronicle of the brain’s mid-twentieth-century emergence as both a new research frontier and an organ whose integrity and capacities—especially that of memory—were imagined as uniquely imperiled in the 1950s. Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War (Harper, 2023) explores the anxious context in which the mid-century sciences of the brain took shape and reveals the deeply ambivalent history that lies behind our contemporary understanding of this organ. Paul Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He can be reached at plerner@usc.edu and @PFLerner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine
    Show More Show Less
    53 mins
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.