Plague Years

Plague Years: In 1992, Dr. Ross A. Slotten signed more death certificates in Chicago—and, by inference, the state of Illinois—than anyone else. As a family physician, he was trained to care for patients from birth to death, but when he completed his residency in 1984, he had no idea that many of his future patients would be cut down in the prime of their lives. Among those patients were friends, colleagues, and lovers, shunned by most of the medical community because they were gay and HIV positive. Slotten wasn’t an infectious disease specialist, but because of his unique position as both a gay man and a young physician, he became an unlikely pioneer, swept up in one of the worst epidemics in modern history.

Plague Years is an unprecedented first-person account of that epidemic, spanning not just the city of Chicago but four continents as well. Slotten provides an intimate yet comprehensive view of the disease’s spread alongside heartfelt portraits of his patients and his own conflicted feelings as a medical professional, drawn from more than thirty years of personal notebooks. In telling the story of someone who was as much a potential patient as a doctor, Plague Years sheds light on the darkest hours in the history of the LGBT community in ways that no previous medical memoir has.

Merchants of Medicines

Merchants of Medicines: The period from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century—the so-called long eighteenth century of English history—was a time of profound global change, marked by the expansion of intercontinental empires, long-distance trade, and human enslavement. It was also the moment when medicines, previously produced locally and in small batches, became global products. As greater numbers of British subjects struggled to survive overseas, more medicines than ever were manufactured and exported to help them. Most historical accounts, however, obscure the medicine trade’s dependence on slave labor, plantation agriculture, and colonial warfare.

In Merchants of Medicines, Zachary Dorner follows the earliest industrial pharmaceuticals from their manufacture in the United Kingdom, across trade routes, and to the edges of empire, telling a story of what medicines were, what they did, and what they meant. He brings to life business, medical, and government records to evoke a vibrant early modern world of London laboratories, Caribbean estates, South Asian factories, New England timber camps, and ships at sea. In these settings, medicines were produced, distributed, and consumed in new ways to help confront challenges of distance, labor, and authority in colonial territories. Merchants of Medicines offers a new history of economic and medical development across early America, Britain, and South Asia, revealing the unsettlingly close ties among medicine, finance,...

Medical Monopoly

Medical Monopoly: During most of the nineteenth century, physicians and pharmacists alike considered medical patenting and the use of trademarks by drug manufacturers unethical forms of monopoly; physicians who prescribed patented drugs could be, and were, ostracized from the medical community. In the decades following the Civil War, however, complex changes in patent and trademark law intersected with the changing sensibilities of both physicians and pharmacists to make intellectual property rights in drug manufacturing scientifically and ethically legitimate. By World War I, patented and trademarked drugs had become essential to the practice of good medicine, aiding in the rise of the American pharmaceutical industry and forever altering the course of medicine.             Drawing on a wealth of previously unused archival material, Medical Monopoly combines legal, medical, and business history to offer a sweeping new interpretation of the origins of the complex and often troubling relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and medical practice today. Joseph M. Gabriel provides the first detailed history of patent and trademark law as it relates to the nineteenth-century pharmaceutical industry as well as a unique interpretation of medical ethics, therapeutic reform, and the efforts to regulate the market in pharmaceuticals before World War I. His book will be of interest not only to historians of medicine and science and intellectual property scholars but also to anyo...

Heredity under the Microscope

Heredity under the Microscope: By focusing on chromosomes, Heredity under the Microscope offers a new history of postwar human genetics. Today chromosomes are understood as macromolecular assemblies and are analyzed with a variety of molecular techniques. Yet for much of the twentieth century, researchers studied chromosomes by looking through a microscope. Unlike any other technique, chromosome analysis offered a direct glimpse of the complete human genome, opening up seemingly endless possibilities for observation and intervention. Critics, however, countered that visual evidence was not enough and pointed to the need to understand the molecular mechanisms.
 
Telling this history in full for the first time, Soraya de Chadarevian argues that the often bewildering variety of observations made under the microscope were central to the study of human genetics. Making space for microscope-based practices alongside molecular approaches, de Chadarevian analyzes the close connections between genetics and an array of scientific, medical, ethical, legal, and policy concerns in the atomic age. By exploring the visual evidence provided by chromosome research in the context of postwar biology and medicine, Heredity under the Microscope sheds new light on the cultural history of the human genome.

Make Labs’ Biosphere

Make Labs’ Biosphere

Roleplaying for Healthcare Training: Game On, And Let The Learning Begin!

Roleplaying for Healthcare Training: Game On, And Let The Learning Begin!: How a learning and research center uses simulation games to help caregivers work better together  “The tension in the [...]

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Ants care for wounded comrades by licking their wounds clean

Ants care for wounded comrades by licking their wounds clean: If a Matabele ant loses a limb in a battle with termites, its nestmates will tend its injuries - a behaviour never before seen in any non-human animal

Hearing implant uses lasers to shoot sound into your ear

Hearing implant uses lasers to shoot sound into your ear: Using lasers instead of electrodes to vibrate the hairs in the inner ears could lead to less damaging cochlear implants

How social stress makes your brain vulnerable to depression

How social stress makes your brain vulnerable to depression: Bullying and other social stresses may make it easier for inflammatory substances to enter your brain, altering your mood and leaving you susceptible to depression

Facebook can make your profile pic wink and scowl

Facebook can make your profile pic wink and scowl: Like portraits and pictures in Harry Potter, your Facebook image will soon react to visitors’ actions with happiness, sadness, or anger

Grow fake versions of rare delicacies like sea urchin at home

Grow fake versions of rare delicacies like sea urchin at home: Japanese meat culturing project goes beyond hamburger to copy problematic delicacies like sea urchin, foie gras - and someday maybe dinosaur

Gluten-sensitive? It may actually be a carb making you ill

Gluten-sensitive? It may actually be a carb making you ill: Rather than gluten, fructan molecules seem to be to blame for sensitive guts. If true, gluten-free people could eat soy sauce and sourdough bread again

A bizarre supernova keeps exploding over and over again

A bizarre supernova keeps exploding over and over again: The weirdest supernova ever seen is a zombie star that keeps collapsing and coming back to life. It’s so strange, it may be a whole new kind of celestial object

Sheep learn to recognise celebrity faces from different angles

Sheep learn to recognise celebrity faces from different angles

Shark on the menu: Species hunted for their fins

Shark on the menu: Species hunted for their fins: The rising popularity of shark's fin soup in China is increasing fishing for sharks across the globe. Let's see which species are on the menu

Sharks now protected no matter whose waters they swim in

Sharks now protected no matter whose waters they swim in: 126 countries have signed up to cross-border protection measures to conserve whale sharks and many other endangered migratory species

Alzheimer’s may be able to spread through blood transfusions

Alzheimer’s may be able to spread through blood transfusions: A protein might be capable of spreading Alzheimer’s through blood transfusions and surgical equipment, but we don’t know yet how much of a risk this is

Female birds that used to be silent are now singing like males

Female birds that used to be silent are now singing like males: When faced with a rival, some female dark-eyed juncos now sing just like males to defend their mates and territories

The first ancestors of giant pandas probably lived in Europe

The first ancestors of giant pandas probably lived in Europe: Ten million years ago a bear similar to modern giant pandas lived in what is now Hungary, suggesting the earliest pandas really came from Europe, not China