"When Dr. Arthur Kleinman, an eminent Harvard psychiatrist and social anthropologist, began caring for his wife, Joan, after she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, he found just how far the act of caregiving extended beyond the boundaries of medicine. In The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor, Kleinman delivers a deeply humane and inspiring story of his life in medicine and his marriage to Joan, and he describes...

Presents unique emergency medical cases and explores the ethical questions medical personnel have to ask themselves when caring for a stranger in their moment of crisis.

The story of the gene begins in earnest in an obscure Augustinian abbey in Moravia in 1856 where Gregor Mendel, a monk working with pea plants, stumbles on the idea of a "unit of heredity." It intersects with Darwin's theory of evolution, and collides with the horrors of Nazi eugenics in the 1940s. The gene transforms postwar biology. It invades discourses concerning race and identity and provides startling answers to some of the most potent questions...

"The gripping story of a physician who suddenly became a dying patient, and a riveting exploration into the worlds of personal loss and faltering medical care. Dr. Rana Awdish never imagined that an emergency trip to the hospital would result in hemorrhaging nearly all of her blood volume and losing her unborn child. Awdish spent months fighting for her life, enduring consecutive major surgeries and multiple overlapping organ failures. At each step...

American taxpayers spend $30 billion annually funding biomedical research. By some estimates, half of the results from these studies can't be replicated elsewhere -- the science is simply wrong. Often, research institutes and academia emphasize publishing results over getting the right answers, incentivizing poor experimental design, improper methods, and sloppy statistics. Bad science doesn't just hold back medical progress, it can sign the equivalent...

"The mesmerizing biography of a brilliant and eccentric surgeon and his quest to transplant the human soul. In the early days of the Cold War, a spirit of desperate scientific rivalry birthed a different kind of space race: not the race to outer space that we all know, but a race to master the inner space of the human body. While surgeons on either side of the Iron Curtain competed to become the first to transplant organs like the kidney and heart,...

This is the account of torture and murder by experiment in the name of scientific research and patriotism. The author describes the experience of being in bombed-out, dangerous, post-war Nuremberg, where she lived for two years while working on the trial. Once a Nazi sympathizer tossed bombs into the dining room of the hotel where she lived moments before she arrived for dinner. She takes us into the courtroom to hear the dramatic testimony and see...

"Ready or not, medical practice is changing. Advances in the field of genomics--the study of how our DNA is constructed and functions--have made it easier for physicians to diagnose, treat, and even predict today's many pressing health concerns. With the emergence of genomic sequencing and DNA analysis, this is an exciting moment in science, medicine, and personal health. But it's also an uncertain time, one fraught with understandable and uncomfortable...