21 books like Framing Disease

I am a historian of early America, including the American Revolution, though I'm not a huge reader (or writer) of conventional military history. Published in 2001, Elizabeth Fenn's book was in many ways ahead of its time in emphasizing how military outcomes—and strategies—were often contingent on other seemingly unrelated factors. In this case, she argues that smallpox was a decisive force in the American War for Independence. The continental scope of her study, moreover, provides a link between that war and the ultimately successful military offensives that the independent United States inflicted on disease-weakened Native American peoples in the post-revolutionary era.

As a historian, some books just keep coming back to you. McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples is just such a book. 

He is really the first historian to outline the dramatic impact that infectious diseases have had on human history. He outlines the spread of smallpox, diphtheria, Yellow Fever, Malaria, the Plague, and many others, as they originate mostly in Africa and come into the Mediterranean Ocean, to produce cycles of death. 

But the people who lived on the edge of that ocean soon came to develop antibodies, and ultimately, master the impact of such terrible diseases.  

Unfortunately, those diseases were soon transferred to the Americas, where perhaps a hundred million American Indians died from them. They had no immunities!

Had such a calamity not occurred, the two western hemispheric continents might easily be dominated by Natives, who spoke a different language and prayed to a different God.

This is a sweeping study of disease in human history written by a scientist who describes both the biological and historical trajectory of ten infectious diseases that have afflicted human society, from bubonic plague to HIV/Aids. While science and medicine continue to find ways to control individual diseases, new infections and parasites continue to emerge to sicken, disable and kill. Loomis concludes with a thoughtful discussion about the future of epidemic disease as we continue to alter our global environment.

McNeill, William McNeill’s son, examines the intersection of disease, ecology, race, and international politics to show how infectious disease shaped the fortunes of colonial empires in the Caribbean. In the wake of the encounter between Europeans and the New World which destroyed up to 90 percent of the Amerindian population, European empires restructured the region into a colonial economy of sugar and slavery. Mosquitos bearing malaria and yellow fever flourished in this environment and McNeill shows how anyone seeking power in the region had to reckon with both them and disease.

Another classic book that describes the history of American medicine and organized medicine’s interactions with the political process. 

It is necessary background to understand the predominance of employment-based health insurance and why the 2010 Affordable Care Act was such a breakthrough. Starr is a Princeton sociologist who participated in the 1990s debate on the failed Clinton health insurance plan.

Professor and psychiatrist Arthur Kleinman’s The Soul of Care movingly explicates the practical, emotional, and moral aspects of caregiving. Based on Kleinman’s experiences as the primary caregiver for his late wife Joan after she developed early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, this book skillfully reveals caregiving – however grueling, however much about enduring the unendurable – as resonating with emotional, moral, and, for many, religious meaning, and ultimately enabling us to realize our humanity most fully. Moreover, inspired by the work of Anne-Marie Slaughter, Kleinman poignantly argues for the importance of recognizing care as a basic human right.

Women’s voices are often trivialized in healthcare and I’m willing to bet that most women have experienced some form of medicalized sexism while receiving healthcare (I know I have).

Anika Wilson does an amazing job of listening to women’s voices and their experiences in this book, highlighting how important rumors, legend, and gossip are to healthcare. 

This book inspires me because it discusses the significance of taking responsibility for reflecting on the more difficult and often hidden aspects of ourselves.

It helped to open up my mind to my blind spots and increase self-awareness. Based in medicine and psychology this book promotes the kind of honest and important self-reflection that is an asset in improving leadership culture and how you relate to others, even in conflict. 

Gabor Mate’s book is reflective and deep; it offers information on how adverse experience shapes people.

The author provides rigorously researched information on how all of the intersections of our daily stressors, adverse childhood experiences, toxic work environments, world events, and internal conflicts take their tolls on our minds and bodies, while providing the tools to look within oneself to find the cure.

This is a brilliant, thoughtful analysis of how sudden death is managed and can be read as a response to Sudnow — and I do assign it for that reason. But what I really love is leaving it out in my office and seeing people’s reactions. “The myth of CPR? What?!” People are horrified. Timmermans clearly shows, and it has been well documented, that CPR works way better on television than it does in real life. But its use has become so standardized that EMTs, as well as family members, were horrified when CPR wasn’t attempted on every dead body picked up during the pandemic.

If your beloved 93-year-old great grandma was just finishing the last bites of her favorite food that you spent all day making when she slumped over – should you hold her tight, whisper that you love her, or quickly put her on her back, break… show more.

There are a lot of critics of the biopharmaceutical industry who belittle the contributions of this industry by accusing it of overselling the value of new medicines, underselling safety, and having numerous conflicts of interest with academic researchers.

This book details the importance of collaborations between doctors and industry for the development of new drugs. For anyone involved in pharmaceutical R&D, it is refreshing to read accounts about successful interactions that lead to breakthroughs.

Rather than look at healthcare as “good guys vs. bad guys,” this book gives great examples of partnerships that result in saving lives.