Medical Mysteries & Thrilling HistoriesUnpublished

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Thomas Mu tter was an audacious medical innovator who pioneered the use of ether as anaesthesia, the sterilisation of surgical tools and a compassion-based vision for helping the severely deformed, which clashed with the sentiments of the mid-nineteenth century. Brilliant, outspoken and handsome,...

"A best memoir of 2020" --BookPage The darkly funny memoir of Sarah Ramey's years-long battle with a mysterious illness that doctors thought was all in her head--but wasn't. A revelation and an inspiration for millions of women whose legitimate health complaints are...

The body is the most complex machine in the world, and the only one for which you cannot get a replacement part from the manufacturer. For centuries, medicine has reached for what's available--sculpting noses from brass, borrowing skin from frogs and hearts from pigs, crafting eye parts from jet...

James A. Garfield was one of the most extraordinary men ever elected president. Born into abject poverty, he rose to become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War hero, and a renowned and admired reformist congressman. Nominated for president against his will, he engaged in a fierce battle with the...

Drawing on her own medical experience as well as fifteen years of interviews with doctors, patients, researchers, and public health experts, O'Rourke's incisive new work speaks to an urgent subject: the epidemic scale of autoimmune disease in America (even greater with the advent of 'Long Covid')...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR * A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. From...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "The story of modern medicine and bioethics--and, indeed, race relations--is refracted beautifully, and movingly."--Entertainment Weekly NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM HBO® STARRING OPRAH WINFREY AND ROSE BYRNE * ONE OF THE "MOST...

A highly infectious, deadly virus from the central African rain forest suddenly appears in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There is no cure. In a few days 90 percent of its victims are dead. A secret military SWAT team of soldiers and scientists is mobilized to stop the outbreak of this exotic "hot"...

Selected as One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, adapted as a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, this New York Times bestseller is "an extraordinary achievement" (The New Yorker)--a magnificent,...

Stiff is an oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem. For two thousand years, cadavers--some willingly, some unwittingly--have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They've tested France's first guillotines,...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * ONE OF GQ's TOP 50 BOOKS OF LITERARY JOURNALISM IN THE 21st CENTURY * The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in...

One of the New York Times's Best Ten Books of the Year Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Winner of the 2014 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize,...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER * The gripping story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos--one of the biggest corporate frauds in history--a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley, rigorously reported by the prize-winning journalist. With a new Afterword.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for NonfictionWhen three-month-old Lia Lee Arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao...

Most people want to avoid thinking about death, but Caitlin Doughty--a twenty-something with a degree in medieval history and a flair for the macabre--took a job at a crematory, turning morbid curiosity into her life's work. Thrown into a profession of gallows humor and vivid characters (both...

A Best Book of 2021 by Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Time, and The Washington Post The bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs returns with a "compelling" (The Washington Post) account of how Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna...

A gripping memoir and medical suspense story about a young New York Post reporter's struggle with a rare and terrifying disease, opening a new window into the fascinating world of brain science. One day in 2009, twenty-four-year-old Susannah Cahalan woke up alone in a...

New York Times Bestseller New York Times Notable Book of 2016 * NPR Great Read of 2016 * Named a Best Book of 2016 by The Economist, Smithsonian, NPR's Science Friday, MPR, Minnesota Star Tribune, Kirkus Reviews,...

"America's funniest science writer" (Washington Post) takes us down the hatch on an unforgettable tour. The alimentary canal is classic Mary Roach terrain: the questions explored in Gulp are as taboo, in their way, as the cadavers in Stiff and every bit as surreal as the universe of zero gravity...

"Valiant and timely .... reintroduces its subject as a hero for this moment." ―The New York Times How Victorian male doctors used false science to argue that women were unfit for anything but motherhood--and the brilliant doctor who defied them ...

The #1 NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller The basis for the PBS Ken Burns Documentary The Gene: An Intimate History From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies--a fascinating history of the gene and "a magisterial account of...

Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Deborah Blum follows New York City's first forensic scientists to discover a fascinating Jazz Age story of chemistry and detection, poison and murder. Deborah Blum, writing with the high style and skill for suspense that is characteristic of...

A thrilling account of the worst cholera outbreak in Victorian London and a brilliant exploration of how Dr John Snow's solution revolutionised the way people think about disease, cities, science and the modern world. This is an endlessly fascinating and compelling account of the summer of 1854,...

Val McDermid is one of the finest crime writers we have, whose novels have captivated millions of readers worldwide with their riveting narratives of characters who solve complex crimes and confront unimaginable evil. In the course of researching her bestselling novels McDermid has become...

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...

No disease the world has ever known even remotely resembles the great influenza epidemic of 1918. Presumed to have begun when sick farm animals infected soldiers in Kansas, spreading and mutating into a lethal strain as troops carried it to Europe, it exploded across the world with unequaled...

The mesmerizing basis of the movie starring Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain⁠--a "stunning book...that should and does bring to mind In Cold Blood"--takes you inside the mind of America's most prolific serial killer, whose 16-year long "nursing" career left as many as 400 dead....

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * An urgent wake-up call about the future of emerging viruses and a gripping account of the doctors and scientists fighting to protect us, told through the story of the deadly 2013-2014 Ebola epidemic   "Crisis in the Red Zone...

Winner of the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award Named a Best Book of Summer by The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Publishers Weekly, and Book Riot The Observer (London)'s Summer Reads Select In this...

An "incredible, humane, insightful" (Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize winner) account of humankind's battles with epidemic disease, and their outsized role in deepening inequality along racial, ethnic, class, and gender lines--in the vein of Medical Apartheid and ...

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian comes a riveting history of New York's iconic public hospital that charts the turbulent rise of American medicine. Bellevue Hospital, on New York City's East Side, occupies a colorful and horrifying place in the public imagination: a den of...

National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction A brilliant and courageous doctor reveals, in gripping accounts of true cases, the power and limits of modern medicine. Sometimes in medicine the only way to know what is truly going on in a patient is to operate,...

Winner of the Christopher Award 2024 NPR Science Friday Best Summer Beach Reads 2024 Gotham Book Finalist 2024 NASW Science in Society Journalism Award Finalist 2024 PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize Finalist 2024 "An incredible story...the writing is phenomenal." -...

At twelve, Howard Dully was guilty of the same crimes as other boys his age: he was moody and messy, rambunctious with his brothers, contrary just to prove a point, and perpetually at odds with his parents. Yet somehow, this normal boy became one of the youngest people on whom Dr. Walter Freeman...

The Instant New York Times best seller! Riveting. ... [Marsh] gives us an extraordinarily intimate, compassionate and sometimes frightening understanding of his vocation. - The New York Times Winner of the PEN Ackerley Prize Shortlisted for both the...

The classic account of survivors of the sleeping-sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I--and their return to the world after decades of "sleep." *  From the distinguished neurologist and the bestselling author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife...

A young girl is perched on the cold chrome of yet another doctor’s examining table, missing yet another day of school. Just twelve, she’s tall, skinny, and weak. It’s four o’clock, and she hasn’t been allowed to eat anything all day. Her mother, on the other hand, seems...

A New York Times 2016 Notable Book The definitive history of the successful battle to halt the AIDS epidemic--from the creator of, and inspired by, the seminal documentary How to Survive a Plague. A riveting, powerful telling of the story of the...

Nowhere is there another lab like Dr. Bill Bass's: On a hillside in Tennessee, human bodies decompose in the open air, aided by insects, bacteria, and birds, unhindered by coffins or mausoleums. At the "Body Farm," nature takes its course, with corpses buried in shallow graves, submerged...

A riveting true crime story that vividly recounts the birth of modern forensics. At the end of the nineteenth century, serial murderer Joseph Vacher, known and feared as “The Killer of Little Shepherds,” terrorized the French countryside. He eluded authorities for years...

"Oliver Sacks meets Stephen King"* in this propulsive, haunting journey into the life of the most studied human research subject of all time, the amnesic known as Patient H.M., a man who forever altered our understanding of how memory works--and whose treatment raises deeply unsettling questions...

The Occasional Human Sacrifice is an intellectual inquiry into the moral struggle that whistleblowers face, and why it is not the kind of struggle that most people imagine. Carl Elliott is a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota who was trained in medicine as well as philosophy. For...

The untold story of how America's Progressive-era war on smallpox sparked one of the great civil liberties battles of the twentieth century. At the turn of the last century, a powerful smallpox epidemic swept the United States from coast to coast. The age-old disease spread...

"Ridley leaps from chromosome to chromosome in a handy summation of our ever increasing understanding of the roles that genes play in disease, behavior, sexual differences, and even intelligence. . . . . He addresses not only the ethical quandaries faced by contemporary scientists but the...

"Stories of human behavior at its most extreme....With humor, compassion, empathy, and insight, Small searches for and finds the humanity that lies hidden under even the most bizarre symptoms." --Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive and A Whole New Mind A psychiatrist's stories of...

* A People Best Book of the Year * Time and The Washington Post's Most Anticipated List * Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence * From the MacArthur genius, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and playwright, this "captivating, insightful...

"Delightfully horrifying."--Popular Science One of Mental Floss's Best Books of 2018 One of Science Friday's Best Science Books of 2018 This wryly humorous collection of stories about bizarre medical treatments and cases offers a unique portrait of a bygone era in...

"An unforgettable nonfiction thriller, expertly reported....A tremendously revealing and twisted ride, where life and death are now mere cold cash commodities." --Michael Largo, author of Final Exits Award-winning investigative journalist and contributing Wired...

For Chinese immigrant Wong Chut King, surviving in San Francisco meant a life in the shadows. His passing on March 6, 1900, would have been unremarkable if a city health officer hadn't noticed a swollen black lymph node on his groin--a sign of bubonic plague. Empowered by racist pseudoscience,...

In The Genome Odyssey, Dr. Euan Ashley, Stanford professor of medicine and genetics, brings the breakthroughs of precision medicine to vivid life through the real diagnostic journeys of his patients and the tireless efforts of his fellow doctors and scientists as they hunt to prevent,...

An award-winning investigative journalist's horrifying true crime story of America's deadliest drug contamination outbreak and the greed and deception that fueled it. Two pharmacists sit in a Boston courtroom accused of murder. The weapon: the fungus Exserohilum rostratum. The death count: 100 and...

In his acclaimed memoir Intern, Sandeep Jauhar chronicled the formative years of his residency at a prestigious New York City hospital. Doctored, his New York Times bestselling harrowing follow-up, observes the crisis of American medicine through the eyes of an attending...

How We Do Harm exposes the underbelly of healthcare today--the overtreatment of the rich, the under treatment of the poor, the financial conflicts of interest that determine the care that physicians' provide, insurance companies that don't demand the best (or even the least expensive) care...

In the bestselling tradition of In the Heart of the Sea, The Colonyreveals the untold history of the infamous American leprosy colony on Molokai and of the extraordinary people who struggled to survive under the most horrific circumstances. In 1866, twelve men and women and one small child were...

BRILLIANTLY EXPLORING TODAY'S CUTTING-EDGE BRAIN RESEARCH,MIND WIDE OPENIS AN UNPRECEDENTED JOURNEY INTO THE ESSENCE OF HUMAN PERSONALITY, ALLOWING READERS TO UNDERSTAND THEMSELVES AND THE PEOPLE IN THEIR LIVES AS NEVER BEFORE.Using a mix of experiential reportage, personal storytelling, and fresh...

"In Better for All the World, Harry Bruinius charts the little-known history of eugenics in America - a movement that began in the early twentieth century and resulted in the forced sterilization of more than 65,000 Americans. Bruinius tells the stories of Emma and Carrie Buck, two women trapped in...