Bernard Cribier, Bruno Haliloua, Jean Revuz, Gérard Tilles
"Quelques cas historiques en dermatologie"
Sp ringer | 2011 | ISBN: 2817800311 | 196 pages

La médecine foisonne de syndromes ou de maladies qui portent le nom de médecins célèbres. La dermatologie n'échappe pas à ce constat. Alibert, Besnier, Brocq-Pautrier, Kaposi, Lyell, Sabouraud ou Verneuil font partie de ces grands noms de la dermatologie française dont les travaux sont mis en lumière dans ce livre. Les auteurs qui ont écrit sur ces maladies sont des praticiens chevronnés mais également des passionnés de l'histoire de la médecine. Ils s'attachent à décrire le contexte de l'époque, de la découverte clinique et en ce sens font oeuvre d'historien. En mettant en lumière quelques anecdotes, parfois cocasses, ils facilitent et rendent agréable la lecture à celui qui cherche avant tout qu'on lui raconte une histoire. A l'ère des développements continus du progrès technologique, il reste impératif pour tout médecin de garder en mémoire la connaissance des découvertes de ses prédécesseurs. Ceux dont les noms figurent dans tant de livres et de publications ont connu doutes et errements. Leur parcours scientifique et éthique demeure une source de réflexion où tradition et progrès, loin de se combattre, peuvent coexister et se compléter harmonieusement. A propos d'une maladie à laquelle est attaché un nom devenu célèbre, un expert contemporain rapporte et analyse la publication princeps, puis livre sa réflexion sur l'évolution des idées relatives à cette affection. II dépeint également les traits de caractère, les petites manies ou les grands défauts de ce personnage illustre. Dans un texte mêlant science, histoire et humour, nous est présenté l'essentiel de ce qu'il ne faut pas oublier.

Michael Willrich
"Pox: An American History"
ISBN: 1594202869 | 2011 | 400 pages

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 smallpox epidemic swept the United States from coast to coast. In this gripping account, award- winning historian Michael Willrich chronicles the government's fight against the outbreak and the ensuing clash of modern medicine, civil liberties, and state power. Pox introduces readers to memorable characters on both sides of the debate-from the doctors and club- wielding police charged with enforcing the law to vaccinate every citizen to the anti-vaccinationists, who stood up for their individual freedoms but were often dismissed as misguided cranks. Riveting and thoroughly researched, Pox delivers a masterful examination of progressive-era history that resonates powerfully today

Michael Stolberg - Experiencing Illness and the Sick Body in Early Modern Europe
Published: 2011-12-06 | ISBN: 0230243436 | 304 pages

Illness was ubiquitous in early modern society. Health was constantly threatened and medicine often proved powerless. Based on his analysis of contemporary autobiographical writing, of thousands of letters which the sick and their relatives sent to physicians of the time and of a wide range of other sources, Michael Stolberg describes how early modern people coped with pain and disease, how they interacted with physicians and other healers and how they tried to make sense of their suffering. He presents the ideas and imagesthat peopleassociated with commonly diagnosed diseases such as phthisis, gout, cancer, dropsy or fever. The first thorough and comprehensive overview of the early modern experience and lay interpretation of illness, Stolberg also traces the impact of new medical theories on ordinary people's medical views.

To Cast Out Disease: A History of the International Health Division of Rockefeller Foundation (1913-1951) by John Farley
English | ISBN: 0195166310 | edition 2003 | 336 pages

Traces the history, challenges, internal struggles, and conflicts of the international health division of the Rockefeller Foundation. Includes sketches of the personalities and prejudices of those working in the division and their belief of disease being root cause of ill health and poverty. Also discusses its role in the establishment of the World Health Organizations.

Nathan Belofsky, "Strange Medicine: A Shocking History of Real Medical Practices Through the Ages"
ISBN: 0399159959 | 2013 | 224 pages

Strange Medicine casts a gimlet eye on the practice of medicine through the ages that highlights the most dubious ideas, bizarre treatments, and biggest blunders. From bad science and oafish behavior to stomach-turning procedures that hurt more than helped, Strange Medicine presents strange but true facts and an honor roll of doctors, scientists, and dreamers who inadvertently turned the clock of medicine backward:

• The ancient Egyptians applied electric eels to cure gout.
• Medieval dentists burned candles in patients’ mouths to kill invisible worms gnawing at their teeth.
• Renaissance physicians timed surgical procedures according to the position of the stars, and instructed epileptics to collect fresh blood from the newly beheaded.
• Dr. Walter Freeman, the world’s foremost practitioner of lobotomies, practiced his craft while traveling on family camping trips, cramming the back of the station wagon with kids—and surgical tools—then hammering ice picks into the eye sockets of his patients in between hikes in the woods.

Strange Medicine is an illuminating panorama of medical history as you’ve never seen it before.

Kevin Fong, "Extreme Medicine: How Exploration Transformed Medicine in the Twentieth Century"
English | ISBN: 1594204705 | 2014 |

Little more than one hundred years ago, maps of the world still boasted white space: places where no human had ever trod. Within a few short decades the most hostile of the world's environments had all been conquered. Likewise, in the twentieth century, medicine transformed human life. Doctors took what was routinely fatal and made it survivable. As modernity brought us ever more into different kinds of extremes, doctors pushed the bounds of medical advances and human endurance. Extreme exploration challenged the body in ways that only the vanguard of science could answer. Doctors, scientists, and explorers all share a defining trait: they push on in the face of grim odds. Because of their extreme exploration we not only understand our physiology better; we have also made enormous strides in the science of healing.

Drawing on his own experience as an anesthesiologist, intensive care expert, and NASA adviser, Dr. Kevin Fong examines how cutting-edge medicine pushes the envelope of human survival by studying the human body's response when tested by physical extremes. Extreme Medicine explores different limits of endurance and the lens each offers on one of the systems of the body. The challenges of Arctic exploration created opportunities for breakthroughs in open heart surgery; battlefield doctors pioneered techniques for skin grafts, heart surgery, and trauma care; underwater and outer space exploration have revolutionized our understanding of breathing, gravity, and much more. Avant-garde medicine is fundamentally changing our ideas about the nature of life and death.

Through astonishing accounts of extraordinary events and pioneering medicine, Fong illustrates the sheer audacity of medical practice at extreme limits, where human life is balanced on a knife's edge. Extreme Medicine is a gripping debut about the science of healing, but also about exploration in its broadest sense—and about how, by probing the very limits of our biology, we may ultimately return with a better appreciation of how our bodies work, of what life is, and what it means to be human.