New Books in Medicine

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.

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Science
976
Linda Craighead, “The Appetite Awareness Workbo...
Many people who either overeat, chronically diet, or feel a loss of control over food, have reduced awareness of their body’s internal signals of hunger and fullness. As children, most of us tend to eat when we are hungry and stop eating when we are st...
44 min
977
Kathleen McAuliffe, “This is Your Brain on Para...
Kathleen McAuliffe‘s This is Your Brain on Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society (Mariner Books, 2017) unveils the world of parasites. From the influence of parasites on the ability to transform rats brains to be easil...
38 min
978
Norman Ohler, “Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reic...
Norman Ohler’s Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) explores the drug culture of Nazi Germany. Far from being a nation of physical and mental purity portrayed by Goebbels’s propaganda machine,
50 min
979
Ericka Johnson, ed. “Gendering Drugs: Feminist ...
On the frontier of feminist technoscience research, Ericka Johnson’s collaborative project Gendering Drugs: Feminist Studies of Pharmaceuticals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) explores how the gendered body is produced in and by medical technologies.
33 min
980
Matthew James Crawford, “The Andean Wonder Drug...
Matthew James Crawford’s new book is a fascinating history of an object that was central to the history of science, technology, and medicine in the early modern Spanish Atlantic world. The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the S...
61 min
981
Andrew Scull, “Madness in Civilization: A Cultu...
The wish to understand mental suffering is universal and requires an appreciation for its history. Since Biblical times, humans have understood madness, or other deviations from normal mental functioning, in diverse and unique ways.
52 min
982
Projit Bihari Mukharji, “Doctoring Traditions: ...
Projit Bihari Mukharji’s new book explores the power of small, non-spectacular, and everyday technologies as motors or catalysts of change in the history of science and medicine. Focusing on practices of Ayurveda in British Bengal between about 1870-19...
64 min
983
Philip Rosenbaum, “Making our Ideas Clear: Prag...
Pragmatism, as a philosophical concept, is often misunderstood and misapplied. Fortunately, I had the chance to speak with Philip Rosenbaum, psychoanalyst and editor of the book Making our Ideas Clear: Pragmatism in Psychoanalysis (Information Age Publ...
48 min
984
Elizabeth Barnes, “The Minority Body: A Theory ...
We are all familiar with the idea that some persons are disabled. But what is disability? What makes it such that a condition–physical, cognitive, psychological–is a disability, rather than, say, a disease or illness?
67 min
985
Claudia Malacrida, “A Special Hell: Institution...
In A Special Hell: Institutional Life in Alberta’s Eugenic Years (University of Toronto Press, 2015), Claudia Malacrida explores the practices of the Michener Center in Red Deer, Northern Alberta, to uncover a close relationship between the institution...
55 min
986
Ann Bracken, “Mind, Body, Baby” (Yellow Kite Bo...
When trying to conceive doesn’t go as planned, many women and couples are faced with difficult decisions about which interventions to pursue. Treatment of infertility, whether natural or high-tech, comes with stress and feelings of isolation when your ...
46 min
987
Alisha Brosse, “End the Insomnia Struggle” (New...
Every night around the world, millions of people lie in bed at night, struggling to fall asleep. Experts suggest that about one in three people struggle with at least mild insomnia. Paradoxically, their efforts to control their sleep may actually resul...
43 min
988
Jessica van Horssen, “A Town Called Asbestos” (...
In 2012, Canada stopped mining and exporting asbestos. Once considered a miracle mineral for its fireproof qualities, asbestos came to be better known as a carcinogenic, hazardous material banned in numerous countries around the world.
38 min
989
Robert Aronowitz, “Risky Medicine: Our Quest to...
Statistics have been on the minds of more people than usual in the run-up and post-mortem of this past U.S. presidential election; some feel as though they were misled by numbers intended to lend a modicum of certainty to the complex calculus of modern...
69 min
990
Ruth Rogaski, “Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of ...
Since it was published in 2004, Ruth Rogaski’s Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (University of California Press, 2014 reprint) has won four major prizes in fields ranging from history of medicine to East Asian his...
47 min
991
Jean-Germain Gros, “Healthcare Policy in Africa...
In Healthcare Policy In Africa: Institutions and Politics from Colonialism to the Present (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), Jean-Germain Gros argues that healthcare policy should be the black box rather than the black hole of African Studies.
93 min
992
Anthony M. Petro, “After the Wrath of God: AIDS...
Emerging in the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic was not just a public health crisis. It was a moral crisis too, argues Anthony M. Petro in his new book, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (Oxford University Press, 2015).
50 min
993
Robert Brain, “The Pulse of Modernism: Physiolo...
“Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” Oscar Wilde famously observed. Wilde’s waning romanticism can be read in stark contrast with Nietzsche, who argued around the same time, “art is nothing but a kind of applied physiology.
67 min
994
Orna Ophir, “On the Borderland of Madness: Psyc...
When it comes to the history of psychoanalysis and psychiatry in the United States, to paraphrase Luce Irigaray, one never stirs without the other. While Freud sent Theodore Reik across the ocean to promote lay analysis, A.A. Brill,
60 min
995
Robert Peckham, “Epidemics in Modern Asia” (Cam...
Robert Peckham’s Epidemics in Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores the crucial yet under-explored role that epidemics have played in both colonial and postcolonial Asia. At once broad in sweep and nuanced in analysis,
47 min
996
Roman Sieler, “Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets: Med...
Roman Sieler’s

 Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets: Medicine and Martial Arts in South India (Oxford University Press, 2015) is a fine-grained ethnographic study of varmakkalai–the art of vital spots, a South Indian practice that encompasses both martial and...
75 min
997
Ahmed Ragab, “The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Me...
In his shining new book The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion, and Charity (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Ahmed Ragab, Assistant Professor of Religion and Science at Harvard Divinity School,
34 min
998
James Pennebaker and Joshua Smyth, “Opening Up ...
Many people carry around unresolved feelings and thoughts tied to difficult experiences, with no idea what to do with them. When left unattended for too long, these pent up feelings can lead to a variety of physical and mental health issues: sleep prob...
54 min
999
Greg Eghigian, “The Corrigible and the Incorrig...
When I first read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish as an undergrad, I remember wondering, “What does this look like, though? How might the disciplining of the body play out in different places?” Greg Eghigian,
47 min
1000
Andrew Schulman, “Waking the Spirit: A Musician...
What do the musical compositions of Bach, Gershwin, and the Beatles all have in common? Besides being great pieces of music, according to Andrew Schulman, they promote healing in intensive care (ICU) settings.
47 min