Showing results for "A History of the World" in Physical Illness & Disease

On the night of December 2nd, 1943, the Luftwaffe bombed a critical Allied port in Bari, Italy, sinking 17 ships and killing over a thousand servicemen and hundreds of civilians. Caught in the surprise air raid was the John Harvey, an American Liberty ship carrying a top-secret cargo of 2,000 mustard bombs to be used in retaliation if the Germans resorted to gas warfare. After young sailors began suddenly dying with mysterious symptoms, Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Alexander, a doctor and chemical weapons expert, was dispatched to investigate.

In the dying months of World War I, Spanish flu suddenly overwhelmed the world, killing between 50 and 100 million people. Nowhere escaped this common enemy: in Britain, 250,000 people died, and in the United States it was 750,000, while European deaths reached over two million. The numbers are staggering. And yet at the time, news of the danger was suppressed for fear of impacting wartime morale. Behind the numbers are human lives, stories of those who suffered and fought it - in the hospitals and laboratories.

In the early 1800s, a century before there was any concept of the gene, physicians in insane asylums began to record causes of madness in their admission books. Almost from the beginning, they pointed to heredity as the most important of these causes. As doctors and state officials steadily lost faith in the capacity of asylum care to stem the terrible increase of insanity, they began emphasizing the need to curb the reproduction of the insane. They became obsessed with identifying weak or tainted families and anticipating the outcomes of their marriages.

In 1900, the U.S. sent three doctors to Cuba to discover how yellow fever was spread. There, they launched one of history's most controversial human studies. Compelling and terrifying, The American Plague depicts the story of yellow fever and its reign in this country - and in Africa, where even today it strikes thousands every year. With "arresting tales of heroism," it is a story as much about the nature of human beings as it is about the nature of disease.

Listen to this detailed and chilling account of the influenza outbreak of 1918. A terrifying virus that stretched across the globe. Even now, a century after the great flu of 1918, which left an estimated 50 to 100 million people dead worldwide, there's still no cure. This audiobook examines influenza from all sorts of angles - history, diagnosis and treatment, economics and epidemiology‚ healthcare policy, and prevention.