Showing titles in Medical

Joe and Rose Kennedy's strikingly beautiful daughter, Rosemary, attended exclusive schools, was presented as a debutante to the queen of England, and traveled the world with her high-spirited sisters. And yet Rosemary was intellectually disabled - a secret fiercely guarded by her powerful and glamorous family.

A week after her 41st birthday, Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living payslip to payslip who had always been the caregiver rather than the one needing care, the catastrophic condition was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness.

Born in war-torn Afghanistan, Waheed Arian's earliest memories are of bombs. Fleeing the conflict with his family, he spent much of his childhood in refugee camps in Pakistan, living sometimes 10 to a room without basic sanitation or access to education. After he contracted tuberculosis, his first-hand experience of the power of medicine inspired Waheed to dedicate his life to healing others. But how does a boy with nothing hope to become a doctor?

In April 2014, Deputy Editorial Director at BuzzFeed Lara Parker opened up to the world in an article on the website: She suffers from endometriosis. And beyond that? She let the whole world know that she wasn’t having any sex, as sex was excruciatingly painful. Less than a year before, she received not only the diagnosis of endometriosis, but also a diagnosis of pelvic floor dysfunction, vulvodynia, vaginismus, and vulvar vestibulitis.

After his December 2003 arrest, registered nurse Charlie Cullen was quickly dubbed 'The Angel of Death' by the media. But Cullen was no mercy killer, nor was he a simple monster. He was a favourite son, husband, beloved father, best friend, and celebrated caregiver. Implicated in the deaths of as many as 300 patients, he was also perhaps the most prolific serial killer in American history. Cullen's murderous career in the world's most trusted profession spanned sixteen years and nine hospitals across New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

In Uncle Tungsten, Oliver Sacks evokes, with warmth and wit, his upbringing in wartime England. He tells of the large science-steeped family who fostered his early fascination with chemistry. There follow his years at boarding school where, though unhappy, he developed the intellectual curiosity that would shape his later life. And we hear of his return to London, an emotionally bereft 10-year-old who found solace in his passion for learning. Uncle Tungsten radiates all the delight and wonder of a boy’s adventures and is an unforgettable portrait of an extraordinary young mind.

By the time she was thirty, Gila Pfeffer was the oldest living member of her family, having lost her mother to breast cancer and her father to colon cancer. A simple blood test confirmed she carried the BRCA1 gene-which put her at high risk of developing cancer herself. Determined to break the cycle of early death in her family, Gila decides to undergo an elective double mastectomy. This memoir follows her journey as she becomes a reluctant expert on how to sit shiva, grows up, falls in love, and enters motherhood, before her life is derailed yet again.

When paramedic Tim Booth finds himself rushing a patient's dead cat to a (human) hospital's Emergency Department for resuscitation, he finds himself wondering where it all went wrong. From bedroom mishaps and hypochondriacs to suspicious rashes and freak cattle incidents, the doctors, nurses and paramedics of our hospital EDs have seen everything. Every day, Tim and his colleagues battle burnout, an overburdened healthcare system and compassion fatigue, powered only by caffeine, dark humour and a heartfelt drive to save lives.

Anna's always had too many feelings. Or not enough feelings—she's never been quite sure. Debilitating panic. Extraordinary melancholy. Paranoia. Ambivalence. Fear. Despair. From anxious child to terrified parent, mental illness has been a constant. But between therapists' rooms and emergency departments, there's been a feeling even harder to explain … optimism. In this sharp-eyed and illuminating memoir, award-winning writer Anna Spargo-Ryan pieces together the relationships between time, mental illness, and our brain as the keeper of our stories.

Ignác Semmelweis is remembered for the now-commonplace notion that doctors must wash their hands before examining patients. In mid-19th century Vienna, however, this was a subversive idea. With deaths from childbed fever exploding, Semmelweis discovered that doctors themselves were spreading the disease. While his simple reforms worked immediately - childbed fever in Vienna all but disappeared - they brought down upon Semmelweis the wrath of the establishment, and led to his tragic end.

As one of the world's leading brain surgeons, Dr Jandial is the last hope for many patients who have extreme forms of cancer - patients who can't be saved, but deserve more time. Life on a Knife's Edge is his account of the resilience, courage and belief he has witnessed in his patients, and the lessons he has learned from them.

When 18-year-old Mary Hazard touched down in postwar Putney to begin her nurse's training, she could never have known that it was the beginning of a colourful career that would still be going 60 years later - one of the longest-ever serving NHS nurses. For Mary, raised in a strict convent in rural south Ireland, working in her first London hospital was a shocking and life-changing experience. Against a backdrop of ongoing rationing and poverty, she saw for the first time the horrors of disease...

In this captivating exploration of the body, Weston dissolves the boundaries that usually divide surgeon and patient, pushing beyond the limit of what science has to tell us about who we are. Focusing on our individual organs, not just under the intense spotlight of the operating theatre, but in the central role they play in the stories of our lives, a fuller and more human picture of our bodies emerges: more fragile, frightening and miraculous than we could have imagined.

People from all walks of life call 911 when things go bad. These are their stories, told by the people who respond and make things better. First responders often don't tell stories, preferring to keep what happens at work private. Rescue Captain Michael Morse changes that with these heartfelt descriptions of hundreds of emergency calls, with the usual coverings peeled back, exposing the bizarre, heartbreaking, and often hilarious reactions to 911 emergencies.

In the 1970s and 1980s almost 5,000 people in the UK contracted HIV or hepatitis C after being infected by contaminated blood products, including the notorious Factor VIII, yet no organisation or individual has ever been held to account. So far more than 2,800 are known to have died, while tens of thousands more lives have been destroyed in the families of those affected. Caroline Wheeler has been reporting on this scandal - the worst treatment disaster in the history of the NHS - for over two decades.

Madame Restell is a sharp, witty Gilded Age medical history which introduces us to an iconic, yet tragically overlooked, feminist heroine: a glamorous women’s healthcare provider in Manhattan, known to the world as Madame Restell. A celebrity in her day with a flair for high fashion and public, petty beefs, Restell was a self-made woman and single mother who used her wit, her compassion, and her knowledge of family medicine to become one of the most in-demand medical workers in New York.

From Darkness to Sight chronicles the remarkable life journey of Dr. Ming Wang, a world-renowned laser eye surgeon and philanthropist. As a teenager, Ming fought valiantly to escape one of history’s darkest eras - China’s Cultural Revolution - during which millions of innocent youth were deported to remote areas to face a life sentence of poverty and hard labor. Through his own tenacity and his parents’ tireless efforts to provide a chance of freedom for their son, Ming eventually made his way to America with $50 in his pocket and an American dream in his heart.

Gynaecologists Catherine and Reg Hamlin left Australia in 1959 on a short contract to establish a midwifery school in Ethiopia. Almost 50 years later, Catherine is still there, running one of the most outstanding medical programs in the world. Through this work, thousands of women have been able to resume a normal existence after living as outcasts. The Hamlins dedicated their lives to women suffering the catastrophic effects of obstructed labour - a problem easily dealt with in the developed world by assisted delivery or caesarean section, but disastrous without medical intervention.

For nearly three decades, Dr Colin Manock was in charge of South Australia's forensic pathology services. In cases of unexpected or unexplained death, it was his job to determine when a person took their final breath, and whether they had died naturally - or not. But Manock did not have the necessary training for such a specialist role, and made serious errors in several major cases. The full extent of his wrongdoing, and the exact number of cases impacted by it, remain a mystery more than twenty-five years after he retired.

Cystic fibrosis was once a mysterious disease that killed infants and children. Now it could be the key to healing millions with genetic diseases of every type - from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to diabetes and sickle cell anemia. Told from the perspectives of the patients, families, physicians, scientists, and philanthropists fighting on the front lines, Breath from Salt is a remarkable story of unlikely scientific and medical firsts, of setbacks and successes, and of people who refused to give up hope....