A dazzling, evidence-based account of one man’s quest to heal from complex PTSD by turning to endangered coral reefs and psychedelic plants after traditional therapies failed—and his awakening to the need for us to heal the planet as well. Professor Greg Wrenn likes to tell his nature-writing students, “The ecological is personal, and the personal is ecological.” What he’s never told them is how he’s lived out those correspondences to heal from childhood abuse at the hands of his...

Sociologist Neil M. Gong explains why mental health treatment in Los Angeles rarely succeeds, for the rich, the poor, and everyone in between. In 2022, Los Angeles became the US county with the largest population of unhoused people, drawing a stark contrast with the wealth on display in its opulent neighborhoods. In Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles (U Chicago Press, 2024), sociologist Neil M. Gong traces the divide between the haves and...

Brynn Quick speaks with Erin Mulpur about how hospitals can better support patients from linguistic minority backgrounds. The conversation addresses the barriers to both communication and healthcare faced by linguistic minority patients. Drawing on Erin’s 2021 paper “Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance During a Pandemic," the focus is on Houston Methodist Hospital’s innovative use of language assistance technologies during the first waves of Covid-19. For additional resources, show...

Can you really die from laughing too hard? Between 1870 and 1920, hundreds of women suffered such a fate—or so a slew of sensationalist obituaries would have us believe. How could laughter be fatal, and what do these reports of women’s risible deaths tell us about the politics of female joy? In Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2024), Dr. Maggie Hennefeld reveals the forgotten histories of “hysterical laughter,” exploring how women’s amusement has...

In 1995, a scandal erupted when the New York Times revealed that the Smithsonian possessed a century's worth of nude "posture" photos of college students. In this riveting history, Beth Linker tells why these photos were only a small part of the incredible story of twentieth-century America's largely forgotten posture panic--a decades-long episode in which it was widely accepted as scientific fact that Americans were suffering from an epidemic of bad posture, with potentially catastrophic...

In the middle of the second century AD, Rome was at its prosperous and powerful apex. The emperor Marcus Aurelius reigned over a vast territory that stretched from Britain to Egypt. The Roman-made peace, or Pax Romana, seemed to be permanent. Then, apparently out of nowhere, a sudden sickness struck the legions and laid waste to cities, including Rome itself. This fast-spreading disease, now known as the Antonine plague, may have been history’s first pandemic. Soon after its arrival, the...

In a world of often confusing and terrifying global problems, how should we make choices in our everyday lives? Does anything on the individual level really make a difference? In Catastrophe Ethics: How to Choose Well in a World of Tough Choices (Dutton, 2024), Travis Rieder tackles the moral philosophy puzzles that bedevil us. He explores vital ethical concepts from history and today and offers new ways to think about the “right” thing to do when the challenges we face are larger and more...

Kristine M. McCusker's book Just Enough to Put Him Away Decent: Death Care, Life Extension, and the Making of a Healthier South, 1900-1955 (U Illinois Press, 2023) takes, as its focus, the combined history of death and health in the American South between 1900 and 1955. The text is ambitious in scope, and weaves together multiple oral histories to create a nuanced and engaging narrative. McCusker charts the ways in which low life expectancy in the South was regarded as problematic by...

How did men cope with sexual health issues in early modern England? In Men's Sexual Health in Early Modern England (Amsterdam University Press, 2023), Dr. Jennifer Evans presents a vivid history that investigates how sexual, reproductive, and genitourinary conditions were understood between 1580 and 1740. Drawing on medical sources and personal testimonies, it reveals how men responded to bouts of ill health and their relationships with the medical practitioners tasked with curing them. In...

Mary Woodard Lasker had a singular goal: saving lives by increasing medical research. Together with her husband, advertising genius Albert, they created the Lasker Foundation, bestowing the Lasker Awards. Known as the "American Nobels," these became the most prestigious research awards in America. The Laskers' next step was transforming the sleepy and ineffectual American Society for the Control of Cancer, reinventing it as the American Cancer Society in 1944. But the real increase in medical...

Through a creative focus on skin, in Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam (Duke UP, 2021), Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu examines the ongoing influence of the Vietnam War on contemporary ideas about race and beauty. Framing skin as the site around which these ideas have been formed, Tu foregrounds the histories of militarism in the production of US biomedical knowledge and commercial cosmetics. She uncovers the efforts of wartime scientists in the US Military Dermatology...

An enduring paradox of urban public health is that many communities around hospitals are economically distressed and, counterintuitively, medically underserved. In The City and the Hospital two sociologists, Jonathan R. Wynn and Berkeley Franz, and a political scientist, Daniel Skinner, track the multiple causes of this problem and offer policy solutions. Focusing on three urban hospitals—Connecticut’s Hartford Hospital, the flagship of the Hartford Healthcare system; the Cleveland Clinic,...

In The French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalisation of Women's Ageing (Oxford University Press, 2022), Alison Downham Moore discusses her contribution to the history of women's ageing. Doctors writing about menopause in France vastly outnumbered those in other cultures throughout the entire nineteenth century. The concept of menopause was invented by French male medical students in the aftermath of the French Revolution, becoming an important pedagogic topic and a common theme of...

Trauma surgeon and professor Dr. Brian H. Williams has seen it all: gunshot wounds, stabbings, and traumatic brain injuries. In The Bodies Keep Coming: Dispatches from a Black Trauma Surgeon on Racism, Violence, and How We Heal (Broadleaf Books, 2023), Williams ushers us into the trauma bay, where the wounds of a national emergency amass. As a Harvard-trained physician, Williams learned to keep his head down and his scalpel ready. As a Black man, he learned to swallow the rage when patients...

Dr Pierce Salguero is interviewed by James Bae on the Buddhist Medicine & Yoga Podcast. In this extensive and in-depth conversation, we talk about differentiating religion from medicine, what Buddhist medicine can teach contemporary clinicians, current trends in the field of Buddhist studies, and hybridity versus tradition. We also explore Buddhist medicine in America, different kinds of Buddhist healers in the US, and how Buddhist medicine circulates in the contemporary era. Along the...

A provocative chronicle of how US public health has strayed from its liberal roots. The Covid-19 response was a crucible of politics and public health—a volatile combination that produced predictably bad results. As scientific expertise became entangled with political motivations, the public-health establishment found itself mired in political encampment. It was, as Sandro Galea argues, a crisis of liberalism: a retreat from the principles of free speech, open debate, and the pursuit of...

Cosmetic surgery was once associated with a one-size-fits-all approach, modifying patients to conform to a single standard of beauty. As this surgery has become more accessible worldwide, changing beauty trends have led to a proliferation of beauty standards for members of different racial groups. In Refashioning Race: How Global Cosmetic Surgery Crafts New Beauty Standards (University of California Press, 2023) Dr. Alka V. Menon enters the world of cosmetic surgeons, journeying from a...

Medicine carries the burden of its own troubling history. Over centuries, women’s bodies have been demonised and demeaned until we feared them, felt ashamed of them, were humiliated by them. But as doctors, researchers, campaigners and most of all as patients, women have continuously challenged medical orthodoxy. Medicine’s history has always been, and is still being, rewritten by women’s resistance, strength and incredible courage. In this ground-breaking history Dr. Elinor Cleghorn unpacks...

First published in Venice in 1502, Camillo Leonardi’s Speculum Lapidum is an encyclopedic summary of all classical and medieval sources of lithotherapy. Today Jana Byars talks to Liliana Leopardi about her new translation, Speculum Lapidum: A Renaissance Treatise on the Healing Properties of Gemstones (Penn State University Press, 2023). In early modern Europe precious and semiprecious stones were valued not only for their beauty and rarity but also for their medical and magical properties....

As a trans history of Argentina, a country that banned medically assisted gender affirmation practices and punished trans lives, A Body of One’s Own: A Trans History of Argentina (University of Texas Press, 2024) places the histories of trans bodies at the core of modern Argentinian history. Dr. Patricio Simonetto documents the lives of people who crossed the boundaries of gender from the early twentieth century to the present. Based on extensive archival research in public and...

Sunita Puri is a writer, a palliative medicine physician, and an associate professor at the UMass Chan Medical School. In her memoir, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour (Penguin, 2020), she explores her journey of helping patients and families redefine what it means to live and die well in the face of serious illness. In her article in Tricycle’s Winter 2023 issue, “A Gift,” she explores how she has learned to navigate love and loss through the lens of...

The first wealth is health, according to Emerson. Among health’s riches is its political potential. Few know this better than environmentalists. In her debut book, The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health (UNC Press, 2019), historian Jennifer Thomson revisits canonical figures and events from the environmental movement in the United States and finds everywhere talk of health. At its best, viewing the environment through the lens of health encouraged...

On this episode of the Economic and Business History channel I spoke with Dr. Chinmay Tumbe, Assistant Professor of Economics at the Indian Institute of Management. He was Alfred D Chandler Jr. International Visiting Scholar in Business History, Harvard Business School in 2018. Dr, Tumbe has published academic articles in Management and Organizational History and in the Journal of Management History. He has written two books, one in 2018 India Moving: A History of Migration, which talks about...