検索キーワード： 歴史・解説

It’s the business of saving lives. Miracle Medicines goes behind the scenes of the pharmaceutical industry and into the high-security laboratories to tell the stories of the men and women - chemists, physiologists, medical and clinical researchers, engineers - who have chosen to toil for years in the lab in order to transform scientific theories into new lifesaving medicines. You’ll witness the day-to-day labors, victories and defeats of the dedicated professionals who are waging a war against the diseases that still plague mankind.

The Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) was discovered in 1964. At the time, the very idea of a virus underlying a cancer was revolutionary. Cancer is, after all, not catching. Even now, the idea of a virus causing cancer surprises many people. But Epstein-Barr, named after its discoverers, Sir Anthony Epstein and Dr Yvonne Barr, is fascinating for other reasons, too. Almost everyone carries it, yet it is only under certain circumstances that it produces disease.

The first full-length biography of the Civil War surgeon who, over the course of the war’s bloodiest battles - from Antietam to Gettysburg - redefined military medicine.

Jonathan Letterman was an outpost medical officer serving in Indian country in the years before the Civil War, responsible for the care of just hundreds of men. But when he was appointed the chief medical officer for the Army of the Potomac, he revolutionized combat medicine over the course of four major battles - Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg - that produced unprecedented numbers of casualties.

In 2006, the Wall Street pioneer and philanthropist Ray Chambers flicked through some holiday snapshots taken by a friend and remarked on the placid beauty of a group of sleeping Malawian children. "They're not sleeping," his friend told him. "They're in malarial comas. A few days later, they were all dead." This moment sparked Chambers' determination to coordinate an unprecedented, worldwide effort to eradicate a disease that has haunted humanity since before the advent of medicine.

The average individual is far more likely to die in a car accident than from a communicable disease...yet we are still much more fearful of the epidemic. Even at our most level-headed, the thought of an epidemic can inspire terror. As Philip Alcabes persuasively argues in Dread, our anxieties about epidemics are created not so much by the germ or microbe in question - or the actual risks of contagion - but by the unknown, the undesirable, and the misunderstood.

A vibrant young Hispano woman, Shonnie Medina, inherits a breast-cancer mutation known as BRCA1.185delAG. It is a genetic variant characteristic of Jews. The Medinas knew they were descended from Native Americans and Spanish Catholics, but they did not know that they had Jewish ancestry as well. The mutation most likely sprang from Sephardic Jews hounded by the Spanish Inquisition. The discovery of the gene leads to a fascinating investigation of cultural history and modern genetics by Dr. Harry Ostrer and other experts on the DNA of Jewish populations.

From the chaos of a psychiatric ER to the bowels of a maximum security prison, the stories range from bizarre to poignant and the people from noble to callous. Bedlam's Door depicts the challenges mental illness poses for patients, families, and health-care professionals and offers hope for the future. Like the case histories in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks, it shows that though every person's story is unique, we are all more alike than different and are linked by our shared human experience.

Weaving together information from official sources and personal interviews, Barbara Tomblin gives the first full-length account of the US Army Nurse Corps in the Second World War. She describes how over 60,000 army nurses, all volunteers, cared for sick and wounded American soldiers in every theater of the war, serving in the jungles of the Southwest Pacific, the frozen reaches of Alaska and Iceland, the mud of Italy and northern Europe, or the heat and dust of the Middle East.

In November 1942, Paul Andrew Kennedy (1912-1993) boarded the St. Elena in New York Harbor and sailed for Casablanca as part of Operation Torch, the massive Allied invasion of North Africa. As a member of the US Army's 2nd Auxiliary Surgical Group, he spent the next 34 months working in North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany, in close proximity to the front lines and often under air or artillery bombardment. He was uncomfortable, struck by the sorrows of war, and homesick for his wife.

The remote farming community of Murdock, Nebraska, seemed to be the least likely setting for one of the heartland's most ruthless and bloody double murders in decades. In fact the little town had gone more than a century without a single homicide. But on the night of Easter 2006, Wayne and Sharmon Stock were brutally murdered in their home. The murders garnered sensational front-page headlines and drew immediate statewide attention. Practically everybody around Murdock was filled with fear, panic, and outrage. Who killed Wayne and Sharmon Stock? What was the motive?

The entire raison d'être for this mental health historical reader of the "paper of record", The New York Times, is to give the listener a window on the past and to include the listener on a journey of a time long ago. Seeing the original articles written by and about Sigmund Freud or his famous "psychoanalysis" as well as the many other issues we hear about transports us to another time and place.

Women physicians in 19th-century America faced a unique challenge in gaining acceptance to the medical field as it began its transformation into a professional institution. The profession had begun to increasingly insist on masculine traits as signs of competency. Not only were these traits inaccessible to women according to 19th-century gender ideology, but showing competence as a medical professional was not enough.

Why is ancient medicine the best medicine? Simply because it's been around for so long. Most drugs that your doctor will prescribe are produced in a lab and sold by large drug companies. Of course, these drugs have their place and do save some a lot of people from death or chronic illness. However, what is concerning is that so many ailments can be healed and so many symptoms can be eased by merely checking out what is already in your spice cabinet.

Shooting Up: A Short History of Drugs and War examines how intoxicants have been put to the service of states, empires, and their armies throughout history. Since the beginning of organized combat, armed forces have prescribed drugs to their members for two general purposes: to enhance performance during combat and to counter the trauma of killing and witnessing violence after it is over.

Defining "medicalization" as the perception of nonmedical conditions as medical problems and nondiseases as diseases, Thomas Szasz has devoted much of his career to exposing the dangers of "medicalizing" the conditions of some who simply refuse to conform to society's expectations. Szasz argues that modern psychiatry's tireless ambition to explain the human condition has led to the treatment of life's difficulties and oddities as clinical illnesses rather than as humanity revealed in its fullness.

The Heart's Truth should be listened to at every nursing school in the country. It offers a powerful and moving portrait of what it means to be a nurse. In writing that is of the highest quality, the listener is swept up in the drama of nursing and the compassion with which it is perfused.

This riveting audiobook takes the listener around the globe and through the centuries to discover how different cultures have sought to combat and treat physical pain. With colorful stories and sometimes frightening anecdotes, Dr. Thomas Dormandy describes a checkered progression of breakthroughs, haphazard experiments, ignorant attitudes, and surprising developments in human efforts to control pain.

In this first history of the military ambulance, historian John S. Haller Jr. documents the development of medical technologies for treating and transporting wounded soldiers on the battlefield. More than a history of medical evacuation systems and vehicles, this exhaustively researched and richly illustrated volume tells a fascinating story, giving listeners a unique perspective of the changing nature of warfare in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In the 1970s, a small group of leading psychiatrists met behind closed doors and literally rewrote the book on their profession. Revising and greatly expanding the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM for short), they turned what had been a thin, spiral-bound handbook into a hefty tome. Almost overnight the number of diagnoses exploded. The result was a windfall for the pharmaceutical industry and a massive conflict of interest for psychiatry at large.

Again and again, microbes have shaped our health, our genetics, our history, our culture, our politics, even our religion and ethics. This book reveals much that scientists and cultural historians have learned about the pervasive interconnections between infectious microbes and humans. It also considers what our ongoing fundamental relationship with infectious microbes might mean for the future of the human species.