Category: Medicine and Pharmacy

Pandemic Planet – How Diseases Impact Our World by Anna Claybourne

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The Blurb On The Back:

Pandemic Planet

Beginning in late 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic spread rapidly around the world, causing the deaths of millions of people and leading to closed schools, empty streets and shuttered businesses.

But viruses and pandemics have been part of human history for thousands of years, from the Black Death to SARS.  PANDEMIC PLANET looks at what pandemics are, how they spread and how we deal with them.  It explores how we arm ourselves against dangerous diseases, from developing groundbreaking new vaccines to simple, individual measures such as washing your hands and wearing a face mask.  It also looks at how and what we learn from pandemics, as well as some of their surprisingly positive outcomes.

Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.

You can order PANDEMIC PLANET by Anna Claybourne from Amazon UK, Waterstone’s or Bookshop.org UK.  I earn commission on any purchases made through these links.

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The Organ Thieves by Chip Jones

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Virginia, 1968.  In the segregated American South, surgeons raced to do what many still thought was impossible: transplant a human heart.  After Bruce Tucker, a black man, was admitted to the state’s top hospital with a head injury, he never left the hospital alive: but his heart did, in the chest of a white man.

The decades of scandal and investigation which followed uncovered a long, gruesome history of human experimentation and racial inequality, of body-snatching and cover-ups stretching back to the nineteenth century and still resonating today.  The story is told here for the first tie in full by Pulitzer Prize-nominated reporter Chip Jones.

You can order The Organ Thieves by Chip Jones from Amazon UK, Waterstone’s or Bookshop.org UK.  I earn commission on any purchases made through these links.

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The Atlas Of Disease by Sandra Hempel

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The Atlas Of Disease gives a unique perspective on how epidemics have spread throughout history, from the fourteenth-century plague that devastated Europe and the lethal outbreaks of cholera in the nineteenth century, right up to the AIDs epidemic of the 1980s and the catastrophic spread of zika in Brazil.

Interweaving new maps based on the latest available data with historical charts alongside intriguing, often unsettling, contemporary illustrations, this extraordinary book plots the course of some of the most virulent and deadly pandemics around the world.  Discover how diseases have changed the course of history, stimulated advances in medicine and how mapping has played a key role in prevention and cure, shaping countless lives. 

You can order The Atlas Of Disease by Sandra Hempel from Amazon UK, Waterstone’s or Bookshop.org UK.  I earn commission on any purchases made through these links.

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Dear Life by Rachel Clarke

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It takes courage to love the things of this world when all of them, without fail, are fleeting, fading, no more than a spark against the darkness of deep time.  Yet when everything you have been and done and meant to the world is being prised from your grasp, human connections are the vital medicine.  It is other people who make the difference.

Rachel Clarke grew up spellbound by her father’s stories of practising medicine.  Then, when she became a doctor, one specialising in palliative medicine, she found herself contemplating all her training had taught her in the face of her own father’s mortality.

Dear Life is the inspiring, sometimes heartbreaking and yet deeply uplifting story f the doctor we would all want to have by our side in a crisis.  The hospice where Rachel works is, of course, a world haunted by loss and grief, but it is also teeming with life.

If there is a difference between people who know they are dying and the rest of us, it is simply this: that the terminally ill know their time is running out, while we live as though we have all the time in the world.  In a hospice, therefore, there is more of what matters in life – more love, more strength, more kindness, more smiles, more dignity, more joy, more tenderness, more grace, more compassion – than you could ever imagine.

Dear Life is a love letter – to a father, to a profession, to life itself.

You can order DEAR LIFE by Rachel Clarke from Amazon UK, Waterstone’s or Bookshop.org UK.  I earn commission on any purchases made through these links.

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Bitter Pills: The Global War On Counterfeit Drugs by Muhammad H. Zaman

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Long the scourge of developing countries, fake pills are now increasingly common in the United States.  The explosion of Internet commerce, coupled with globalisation and increased pharmaceutical use has led to an unprecedented vulnerability in the U.S. drug supply.  Today, an estimated 80% of our drugs are manufactured overseas, mostly in India and China.  Every link along this supply chain offers an opportunity for counterfeiters, and increasingly, they are breaking in.  In 2008, fake doses of the blood thinner Heparin killed 81 people worldwide and resulted in hundreds of severe allergic reactions in the United States.  In 2012, a counterfeit version of the cancer drug Avastin, containing no active chemotherapy ingredient, was widely distributed in the United States.  In early 2013, a drug trafficker named Francis Ortiz Gonzalez was sentenced to prison for distributing an assortment of counterfeit, Chinese-made pharmaceuticals across America.  By the time he was arrested, he had already sold over 140,000 fake pills to customers.

Even when the U.S. system works, as it mostly does, consumers are increasingly circumventing the safeguards.  Skyrocketing health care costs in the U.S. have forced more Americans to become “medical tourists” seeking drugs, life-saving treatments and transplants abroad, sometimes in countries with rampant counterfeit drug problems and no FDA.  Bitter Pills will heighten the public’s awareness about counterfeit and substandard drugs, critically examine the historical context of the problem and discuss possible technical solutions, and help people protect themselves.  Author Muhammad H. Zaman pays special attention to the science and engineering behind both poor quality and good quality drugs, and the role of a “technological fix” for the fake drug problem.  Increasingly, fake drugs affect us all.  

You can order Bitter Pills: The Global War On Counterfeit Drugs by Muhammad H. Zaman from Amazon USA, Amazon UK, Waterstone’s or Bookshop.org UK.  I earn commission on any purchases made through these links.

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In Pursuit Of Memory: The Fight Against Alzheimer’s by Joseph Jebelli

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”When I was twelve, my grandfather began to act strangely. It started with inexplicable walks. He’d leave the dinner table and we would find him, half an hour later, aimlessly wandering. His smiles were gradually replaced by a fearful, withdrawn expression; he looked increasingly like someone who’d lost something irreplaceable. Before long, he didn’t recognise any of us.”

Alzheimer’s is the great global epidemic of our time, affecting millions worldwide. In 2016, it overtook heart disease as the number one cause of death in England and Wales.

It is also a story as compelling as any detective novel, taking us to nineteenth-century Germany and post-war England, to the jungles of Papua New Guinea and the technological proving grounds of Japan; through America, India, China, Iceland, Sweden and Colombia. Its heroes are expert scientists from around the world – but also the incredibly brave patients and families who have changed the way that those scientists think about the disease. This is a pandemic that has taken us centuries to track down and now we are racing against time to find a cure. 

You can order IN PURSUIT OF MEMORY: THE FIGHT AGAINST ALZHEIMER’S by Joseph Jebelli from Amazon USA, Amazon UK, Waterstone’s or Bookshop.org UK.  I earn commission on any purchases made through these links.

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Narcocapitalism by Laurent de Sutter

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What do the invention of anaesthetics in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Nazis’ use of cocaine, and the development of Prozac have in common?  The answer is that they’re all products of the same logic that defines out contemporary era: ‘the age of anaesthesia’.  Laurent de Sutter shows how large aspects of our lives are now characterised by the management of our emotions through drugs, ranging from the everyday use of sleeping pills to hard narcotics.  Chemistry has become so much a part of us that we can’t even see how much it has changed us.

In this era, being a subject doesn’t simply mean being subjected to powers that decide our lives: it means that our very emotions have been outsourced to chemical stimulation.  Yet we don’t understand why the drugs that we take are unable to free us from fatigue and depression, and from the absence of desire that now characterises our psycho-political condition.  We have forgotten what it means to be excited because our only excitement has become drug-induced.  We have to abandon the narcotic stimulation that we’ve come to rely on and find a way back to the collective excitement that is narcocapitalism’s greatest fear. 

You can order NARCOCAPITALISM by Laurent de Sutter from Amazon USA, Amazon UK, Waterstone’s or Bookshop.org UK.  I earn commission on any purchases made through these links.

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The Pharmaceutical Studies Reader edited by Sergio Sismondo and Jeremy A. Greene

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The Blurb On The Back:

The Pharmaceutical Studies Reader is an engaging examination of this new and growing field, bringing together provocative, multidisciplinary articles to look at the interplay of medical science, clinical practice, consumerism, and the healthcare marketplace.  Ranging far beyond the simple discussion of patients, symptoms, and pills, this reader offers important insights into contemporary cultures of health and illness and the social life of pharmaceuticals.

Drawing on anthropological, historical, and sociological research, it delves into the production, circulation, and consumption of pharmaceuticals.  The coverage here is broad and compelling with discussion of topics such as the advent of oral contraceptives, taxonomies of disease, the evolution of prescribing habits, the ethical dimension of pharmaceuticals, clinical trials, and drug production in the age of globalisation.  Placing a strong focus on context, this collection exposes readers to a variety of approaches, ideas, and frameworks and provides them with an appreciation and understanding of the complex roles pharmaceuticals play in society today.  

You can order THE PHARMACEUTICAL STUDIES READER edited by Sergio Sismondo and Jeremy A. Greene from Amazon USA, Amazon UK, Waterstone’s or Bookshop.org UK.  I earn commission on any purchases made through these links.

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Your Life In My Hands: A Junior Doctor’s Story by Rachel Clarke

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”I am a junior doctor.  It is 4 a.m.  I have run arrest calls, treated life-threatening bleeding, held the hand of a young woman dying of cancer, scuttled down miles of dim corridors wanting to sob with sheer exhaustion, forgotten to eat, forgotten to drink, drawn on every fibre of strength that I possess to keep my patients safe from harm.”

Rachel Clarke’s incredible memoir follows her journey as a junior doctor, offering a glimpse into a life spent between the dissection room and the mortuary, the bedside and the doctors’ mess, exposing stark realities about today’s NHS and what it means to be entrusted with carrying another’s life in your hands.

Rachel was at the forefront of the historic junior doctor strikes in 2016, campaigning against the government and arguing across the press that imposing a contract on young doctors would irrevocably damage the NHS.

This book affects us all.

You can order YOUR LIFE IN MY HANDS: A JUNIOR DOCTOR’S STORY by Rachel Clarke from Amazon USA, Amazon UK, Waterstone’s or Bookshop.org UK.  I earn commission on any purchases made through these links.

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Fragile Lives by Stephen Westaby

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Some patients will live.

Some patients will die.

But while their lives hang by a thread …

The heart surgeon will do everything he can to save them.

The day his grandfather died, Steve Westaby vowed to become a heart surgeon.

Today, as one of the world’s most eminent heart surgeons, Professor Steve Westaby shares the stories of the lives he has fought to save. 

You can order FRAGILE LIVES by Stephen Westaby from Amazon USA, Amazon UK, Waterstone’s or Bookshop.org UK.  I earn commission on any purchases made through these links.

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