100 books like Working Cures

This book is one of the reasons why I became a historian.

Ulrich uncovered the nearly illegible diary of an eighteenth-century midwife in Maine and included excerpts of the original at the start of each chapter. When I read the excerpts, I thought: How could these possibly be significant and what do they mean, anyway?

And then, like a detective, a gifted mind-reader, and a learned botanist all rolled into one, Ulrich unpacked each entry, weaving each snippet into the fabric of a wide textile of social history that includes reproductive history, gender and marital relations, local economies, political conflicts, and religion.

Abortion and abortifacients play a marginal role in the story Ulrich tells, but the history of midwifery and reproductive health are central to it. 

Helen Jewett was a sex worker living in New York in the 1830s. She worked in a brothel under a matron, which should have been a safe enough situation—she wasn’t out on the street, at least, and others knew when she had clients. Early one morning, however, others in the house wake up to realize there’s a fire in Helen’s room, and that she’s dead. Was it a murder committed by her last client, a man quickly identified as Richard Robinson, or was it a suicide? If she hadn’t died so brutally, we wouldn’t know Helen Jewett’s name, so she’s become another victim only known for her murder. Cohen reminds us that she’s more than just her death.

Everyone knows the life and times of Benjamin Franklin, but what about the extraordinary experiences and opinions of his beloved sister, Jane Franklin?

“Gabby, frank, and vexed,” Jane’s life story demonstrates a smart, witty, and hardworking woman who birthed 12 children and survived the death of all of them but one. The hidden history of women in early America comes alive through Lepore’s sleuthing arts in this compelling nugget of forgotten history.

It is hardly news that housework is gendered. But in this classic study Cowan, by taking housewifery seriously as work and kitchen utensils and appliances seriously as technologies, opens up the whole panorama of production and consumption in a domestic setting. The influx of new appliances, and in a more convenient form old materials (such as powdered soap) in the early decades of the 20th century worked to, in a sense, “industrialize” the home. Unlike factory workers, however, housewives were unpaid, isolated, and unspecialized. Their managerial role shrank (hired help disappeared from most homes)  and rather than being drained of meaning, like the work of factory hands, theirs became burdened with portentous implications of love, devotion, and creativity. Finally, as housework became “easy,” standards rose. At one time changing the bed might have amounted to putting the bottom sheet in the wash and the top sheet on the bottom,… show more.

Gretchen Long’s book Doctoring Freedom includes remarkable stories not only of how Black people were abused and left out of American health care, such as it was in the 19th century, but centers the book on Black Americans’ efforts to support their health and their citizenship while being denied both. Long’s finely detailed case studies of Black doctors, such as John Donalson Austin who had been an enslaved herbal healer who was denied the right to practice when free, is one of many stories Long uncovers as she details the ways Black healers and doctors used clinics, hospitals, and dispensaries as sites of resistance to both medical and political authorities.

Jim Downs offers an essential corrective to the view of emancipation as a kind of liberal or progressive “triumphalist narrative.” Downs approaches the illness and death that the freed people suffered during and after the Civil War as a major public health crisis. He does not question the historical necessity or the morality of emancipation, but he shows that the disruptions and chaos that attended emancipation—often exacerbated by federal policy—also resulted in immeasurable human suffering and countless deaths. Historians have long recognized that emancipation was a messy affair. But what I find especially compelling is that Downs raises the question of whether the hardship caused by federal emancipation policy was intrinsic to that policy (however unintentional) or incidental—what we might call today “collateral damage.”

Though it was wealthy white planters who built plantations, the enslaved people who worked them imbued these landscapes with their own meanings. With over 200 photographs and drawings of Antebellum plantations, Vlach leads readers on a tour of plantation outbuildings, providing examples of how slaves used these spaces despite—and in defiance of—their masters’ intentions. Testimonies of former slaves (drawn from the Federal Writers’ Project collection) give the reader a sense of what it was like to live and work in these settings.

Mindfulness is a powerful practice, proven to decrease stress and help us live more in the present moment. Acclaimed psychologist and researcher Dr. Lori Brotto is the brilliant pioneer to apply mindfulness to sexuality.

Dr. Brotto had been using mindfulness with great success to help her patients and she thus wrote a book to spread the word more broadly. In this book, she explains the reasons people have sexual problems and provides easy, effective exercises to help them. And, even if a reader doesn’t have a sexual problem, mindfulness can simply enhance sexual pleasure and satisfaction.

I have recommended this book to countless clients and students. I meditate each morning and practice mindfulness myself, inside and outside of the bedroom, and I’ve learned a lot from Dr. Brotto’s work.

This is the best book I’ve read on the science behind canine nutrition and helping someone's dog live a long and happy life. Rodney Habib and veterinarian Karen Becker create a prescriptive plan that integrates nutritional health sciences through the study of the most long-lived canines. They incorporate environmental principles, stress reduction, and the principles of an overall healthy lifestyle with preeminent science about what nutrients dogs require. They emphasize stress, isolation, and psychological factors, how even exposure to negative energy—insults and mean behavior—can so badly affect dogs and their owners alike.

The authors also dig deep into the subject of what pet food manufacturers don’t want customers to know about. They help the reader get out from the matrix of how we typically feed our canine companions, with information about how standard pet foods are made with the lowest quality ingredients, based on how large corporations do not consider… show more.

Suzanne Antonetta’s Body Toxic epitomizes what I call the “material memoir,” a mode of writing autobiography that seeks to understand the self through connections to places and substances. Antonetta bravely examines her own physical and mental health, grappling with scientific data: “I choked facts and they choked me back, they stuck like Legos—clingy but hard to build into anything real.” Recalling the nuclear warhead that caught fire nearby her childhood home, spraying radioactive particles, she notes that her entire family, bizarrely, has somehow forgotten this incident. Body Toxic is fascinating, chilling, and unnerving, but also beautifully written in unflinching yet poetic prose. Body Toxic convinced me that our life stories are incomplete if they ignore how places and substances have affected us.