Here are 82 books that Wonder Drug fans have personally recommended if you like
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As a physician, medicine is my job. But along the way, I wondered how medicine got to where it is now–like really wondered. I wondered to the point that I was reading the original treatises written by 18th-century physicians. I started publishing research on medical history and giving presentations at medical conferences. I’d like to think this helps me be a better doctor by broadening my perspective on the healthcare industry. But at the very least, I’ve found these books enjoyable and compelling. I hope you enjoy them, too!
Healthcare is delivered by people who are sometimes subject to biases or prejudices, and this book is a vivid and extraordinarily researched account of how horrible it is when these biases and prejudices go unchecked.
However, what really hit hard for me was that this book is only half about medical history. The last part of this book discusses research practices and biases that are in effect today.
As a physician, this book was imperative to better understand the historical and contemporary issues involving race and medicine.
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • The first full history of Black America’s shocking mistreatment as unwilling and unwitting experimental subjects at the hands of the medical establishment. No one concerned with issues of public health and racial justice can afford not to read this masterful book.
"[Washington] has unearthed a shocking amount of information and shaped it into a riveting, carefully documented book." —New York Times
From the era of slavery to the present day, starting with the earliest encounters between Black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, Medical Apartheid details the ways…
As a physician, medicine is my job. But along the way, I wondered how medicine got to where it is now–like really wondered. I wondered to the point that I was reading the original treatises written by 18th-century physicians. I started publishing research on medical history and giving presentations at medical conferences. I’d like to think this helps me be a better doctor by broadening my perspective on the healthcare industry. But at the very least, I’ve found these books enjoyable and compelling. I hope you enjoy them, too!
I re-read this book anytime I want a greater appreciation for living in the 21st century because it is teeming with downright disgusting medical stories from the 1800s–and it’s fantastic.
Our healthcare system is nowhere near perfect, but the juxtaposition between it and the gory details of pre-anesthetic and pre-antiseptic surgeries makes me so incredibly thankful.
Winner, 2018 PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing Short-listed for the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize A Top 10 Science Book of Fall 2017, Publishers Weekly A Best History Book of 2017, The Guardian
"Warning: She spares no detail!" —Erik Larson, bestselling author of Dead Wake
In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of nineteenth-century surgery and shows how it was transformed by advances made in germ theory and antiseptics between 1860 and 1875. She conjures up early operating theaters—no place for the squeamish—and surgeons, who, working before anesthesia, were lauded for their speed and…
As a physician, medicine is my job. But along the way, I wondered how medicine got to where it is now–like really wondered. I wondered to the point that I was reading the original treatises written by 18th-century physicians. I started publishing research on medical history and giving presentations at medical conferences. I’d like to think this helps me be a better doctor by broadening my perspective on the healthcare industry. But at the very least, I’ve found these books enjoyable and compelling. I hope you enjoy them, too!
I remember watching my first transplant in medical school and wondering, who was brave enough to be the first for something like this? Hearing the stories of the medical firsts and the people behind them is remarkable.
What I found even more captivating were the costs incurred by the patients involved. In that way, this book widened my perspective on the patient experience as we continue to push the boundaries of medicine.
From one of America’s top physicians, a “riveting,” “fascinating,” and “timely” (Nature) history of risk in medicine
Every medical decision—whether to have chemotherapy, an X-ray, or surgery—is a risk, no matter which way you choose. In You Bet Your Life, physician Paul A. Offit argues that, from the first blood transfusions four hundred years ago to the hunt for a COVID-19 vaccine, risk has been essential to the discovery of new treatments. More importantly, understanding the risks is crucial to whether, as a society or as individuals, we accept them.
Told in Offit’s vigorous and rigorous style, You Bet Your…
As a physician, medicine is my job. But along the way, I wondered how medicine got to where it is now–like really wondered. I wondered to the point that I was reading the original treatises written by 18th-century physicians. I started publishing research on medical history and giving presentations at medical conferences. I’d like to think this helps me be a better doctor by broadening my perspective on the healthcare industry. But at the very least, I’ve found these books enjoyable and compelling. I hope you enjoy them, too!
I never thought I’d describe a book about plagues as amusing and laughable, but Jennifer Wright found a way to write one. Thanks to this book, I now have a favorite plague–which is obviously the dancing plague.
I’ve re-read this book multiple times because it’s such lighthearted and fluent storytelling. I read it both before and after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
At first, the discussion regarding plagues and people’s reactions to them seemed prophetic. But really, this book made me realize how much history repeats itself, even when it comes to infectious diseases.
In 1518, in a small town in France, Frau Troffea began dancing and didn't stop. She danced herself to her death six days later, and soon thirty-four more villagers joined her. Then more. In a month more than 400 people had died from the mysterious dancing plague. In late-nineteenth-century England an eccentric gentleman founded the No Nose Club in his gracious townhome--a social club for those who had lost their noses, and other body parts, to the plague of syphilis for which there was then no cure. And in turn-of-the-century New York, an Irish cook caused two lethal outbreaks of…
I'm the author of several books on this topic and work on this topic as executive director of a nonprofit organization. I see war as one of the dumbest things that we could easily stop doing and as one of the most damaging things we do. It's the reason we are at risk of nuclear apocalypse, the leading cause of homelessness, a leading cause of death and injury, the justification for government secrecy, one of the most environmentally destructive activities, the major barrier to global cooperation on non-optional crises, and one of the main pits into which massive resources are diverted that we all desperately need for useful things.
This book makes a powerful case that humanitarian war no more exists than philanthropic child abuse or benevolent torture. I’m not sure the actual motivations of wars are limited to economic and strategic interests—which seems to forget the insane, power-mad, and sadistic motivations—but I am sure that no humanitarian war has ever benefitted humanity.
This book makes that very clear. It does not take the approach so widely recommended of watering down the truth so that the reader is only gently nudged in the right direction from where he or she is starting. There’s no getting 90% reassuringly wrong to make the 10% palatable here. This is a book for either people who have some general notion of what war is or people who aren’t traumatized by jumping into an unfamiliar perspective and thinking about it. Refreshing!
"Kovalik helps cut through the Orwellian lies and dissembling which make so-called 'humanitarian' intervention possible." -Oliver Stone
War is the fount of all the worst human rights violations including genocide and not its cure. This undeniable truth, which the framers of the UN Charter understood so well, is lost in today's obsession with the oxymoron known as "humanitarian" intervention.
No More War: How the West Violates International Law by Using 'Humanitarian' Intervention to Advance Economic and Strategic Interests sets out to reclaim the original intent of the Charter founders to end the scourge of war on the heels of the…
I began gathering stories about pregnancy and its avoidance in Mexican archives twenty-five years ago when I was working on my dissertation on religious history. This topic fascinated me because it was central to the preoccupations of so many women I knew, and it seemed to present a link to past generations. But as I researched, I also realized that radical differences existed between the experiences and attitudes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexican women and the concerns, practices, and understandings of my own period that I had assumed were timeless and unchanging. For me, this was a liberating discovery.
I appreciate Christopolous’ book because he renders concrete the abstract realm of papal pronouncements by studying their reception by sixteenth-century Italian women and their confessors. He also unearths the complexity of attitudes to abortion that existed even within the church establishment in this period.
When Pope Sixtus issued a 1588 edict declaring all who aborted their pregnancies were automatically excommunicated and reserving the right to absolve them to the papacy alone, bishops across Italy’s Renaissance states objected. They argued that neither they nor their confessants could afford to travel to Rome to seek absolution; they sought mercy and forgiveness for the women to whom they ministered.
With this example, and in other parts of his book, Christopolous treats his subjects with sensitivity and precision.
A comprehensive history of abortion in Renaissance Italy.
In this authoritative history, John Christopoulos provides a provocative and far-reaching account of abortion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. His poignant portraits of women who terminated or were forced to terminate pregnancies offer a corrective to longstanding views: he finds that Italians maintained a fundamental ambivalence about abortion. Italians from all levels of society sought, had, and participated in abortions. Early modern Italy was not an absolute anti-abortion culture, an exemplary Catholic society centered on the "traditional family." Rather, Christopoulos shows, Italians held many views on abortion, and their responses to its…
I spent many a night growing up glued to the television, watching Ken Burns’ Civil War. But as I got older, I found my interests stretching beyond the battles and melancholic music on the screen. I decided to become a historian of abolitionism–the radical reform movement that fought to end the evils of slavery and racial prejudice. Through my research, I seek to explain the substantial influence of the abolitionist movement as well as its significant limitations. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 2017, and have since held positions at such institutions as The New School, the University of Bonn, and the Massachusetts Historical Society.
This book does a fantastic job of illustrating something that I explore in my own work: pro-slavery (and anti-Black) white Americans were not the only obstacles facing abolitionists in the fight for racial equality.
The abolitionist movement itself was often divided along racial lines. Black abolitionists pushed for radical, egalitarian change in all aspects of American life. When push came to shove, however, many of their white counterparts had a limit as to how far they would go.
Bell shows how this dynamic played out at progressive colleges like Oberlin before, during, and after the Civil War. The implications of this book, however, stretch far beyond those campuses–and far beyond that time.
The abolitionist movement not only helped bring an end to slavery in the United States but also inspired the large-scale admission of African Americans to the country's colleges and universities. Oberlin College changed the face of American higher education in 1835 when it began enrolling students irrespective of race and sex. Camaraderie among races flourished at the Ohio institution and at two other leading abolitionist colleges, Berea in Kentucky and New York Central, where Black and white students allied in the fight for emancipation and civil rights. After Reconstruction, however, color lines emerged on even the most progressive campuses. For…
As an Arab American woman who grew up in Nashville in an evangelical church, I’ve always maintained complex understandings of myself as both an Arab and a woman. My experiences coupled with my love for reading led me to become a journalist where I could explore stories about Arab women in hopes of learning more about myself. After 9/11, watching my family face racism and hate from a country we're so proud to be a part of, I wanted to change the narrative. I got a Ph.D. in Media Sociology from the University of Missouri and started writing critical analyses of media’s poor representation of Arab women and how we can help change the game.
This is hands down the best book on transnational feminism that I’ve ever read!
I have recommended this book to so many people that I’m planning on hosting a book club. Zakaria opens the book with her own experience attending a happy hour with a group of white women that ends on a particularly awkward note.
Zakaria is not only challenging white feminists, but she is also calling out all people who subscribe to white feminism and how it does more harm than good. What is white feminism you ask? Pick up this book and let Zakaria tell you.
Upper-middle-class white women have long been heralded as "experts" on feminism. They have presided over multinational feminist organizations and written much of what we consider the feminist canon, espousing sexual liberation and satisfaction, LGBTQ inclusion, and racial solidarity, all while branding the language of the movement itself in whiteness and speaking over Black and Brown women in an effort to uphold privilege and perceived cultural superiority. An American Muslim woman, attorney, and political philosopher, Rafia Zakaria champions a reconstruction of feminism in Against White Feminism, centering women of color in this transformative overview and counter-manifesto to white feminism's global, long-standing…
I’ve been a philosopher before I knew what philosophers were: asking questions to challenge the starting points for conversations. My biggest pet peeve has always been people who were sure they entirely understood something. While scientists conduct science to help learn about the world, philosophers of science like me study science to try to figure out how it works, why (and when) it’s successful, and how it relates to human concerns and society. Humans ultimately invent science, and I think it’s fascinating to consider how its features relate to our interests and foibles and how it’s so successful at producing knowledge and practical abilities.
“Science doesn’t care what you believe” has become a slogan meant to point out that science is objective. Yet science is influenced by social and cultural values—by what we believe and what we think is important—in many ways.
This approachable book outlines how values can influence science, describing when that influence is okay and when it’s not.
The role of values in scientific research has become an important topic of discussion in both scholarly and popular debates. Pundits across the political spectrum worry that research on topics like climate change, evolutionary theory, vaccine safety, and genetically modified foods has become overly politicized. At the same time, it is clear that values play an important role in science by limiting unethical forms of research and by deciding what areas of research have the greatest relevance for society. Deciding how to distinguish legitimate and illegitimate influences of values in scientific research is a matter of vital importance. Recently, philosophers…
I have studied nineteenth-century American literature and culture for more than thirty years. My friends roll their eyes when I excitedly share a passage from Charles Chesnutt, Henry James, Herman Melville, or Kate Chopin. I wrote this book because I realized that nineteenth-century thinkers and writers have a lot to teach us about tyranny, particularly the dangers it presents to our nation. I hope you’ll find the challenge of these books as important as I do!
Neal Wood was a respected scholar of political thought and he wrote this book to be accessible to many readers, motivated by his conviction that the thorough embrace of capitalist competition was degrading the character and culture of the United States.
When reading this, I could not help but think about the writings of Black Americans in the nineteenth century, who argued that greed was one of the main reasons for slavery. Wood offers a sober reminder that it is useful to think about the consequences, intended and not, of our nation’s choices and priorities.
The US has been subjected to the ruthless and unrelenting tyranny of the world's most advanced capitalism, permeating every aspect of American life. The chief difference from other tyrannies is its facelessness, its dependence on impersonal coercive power more than on direct violence and terror against its subjects. A frightening irony of this new tyranny, dissected by the distinguished historian of political thought Neal Wood, is that it is producing a degenerating society and a politics headed toward collapse. All world empires have decayed from within and eventually fallen. The new tyranny's demise may long be hidden by a sophisticated…
