Chronic Illness
Jennifer Wright — Get Well Soon (Book Review)
Jennifer Wright balances aspects of medicine, science, and social history in her 2017 book, Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them. Perhaps I connected most strongly to the human and social elements because of experiencing the COVID-19...
MeiLan Han, MD — Breathing Lessons (Book Review)
Dr. MeiLan Han transfers years of knowledge as a lung doctor, or pulmonologist, to the printed word in her upcoming book Breathing Lessons: A Doctor’s Guide to Lung Health. With this book, she offers explanations of many lung-related conditions including asthma,...
James Nestor — Breath (Book Review)
James Nestor combines scientific exploration and his own experiences in Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. The two aspects keep the book from being entirely memoir or entirely an academic treatise. At its heart, Nestor asks why breath matters. We breathe...
Anne Fadiman — The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (Book Review)
Author Anne Fadiman combines multiple narratives in her fabulous ethnography The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. Most importantly, it’s both an immigration and a medical story of one Hmong...
Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything by Lydia Kang, MD and Nate Pedersen (Book Review)
Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything by Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen is two parts gasping at astounding purported medical cures. It’s also one part rubbernecker can’t look away no matter how yucky the example might be. I thoroughly enjoyed...
Our Malady by Timothy Snyder—Healthcare, Freedom & Politics (Book Review)
Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary by Timothy Snyder is just under 200 pages. While it’s not long, it covers topics we all face daily whether we know it or not—our health and freedom. A Yale professor, historian, and writer, Snyder was not well at...
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