This is a concise, yet scholarly view of Florence Nightingale's extraordinary life and career that gets to the heart of her range of interests and achievements. Florence Nightingale is one of the most famous figures in modern history. Yet much of what we know of her emanates from unreliable second-hand accounts, and from a misreading of the primary sources. "Florence Nightingale at First Hand" by Lynn McDonald, editor of "Nightingale's Collected Works", and the world's foremost Nightingale autho...
Joseph Carey Merrick, born in Leicester on 5th August 1852, is better known as the Elephant Man. Through horrible physical deformities which were almost impossible to describe, he spent much of his life exhibited as a fairground freak until even nineteenth-century sensibilities could take no more. Hounded, persecuted and starving, he ended up one day at Liverpool Street Station where he was rescued, housed and fed by the distinguished surgeon Frederick Treves. To Treves' surprise, he discovere...
WHEN THIS DOCTOR TALKS, YOU SHOULD LISTEN. Thousands of people make an early exit each year and arrive on medical examiner Jan Garavaglia’s table. What is particularly sad about this is that many of these deaths could easily have been prevented. Although Dr. Garavaglia, or Dr. G, as she’s known to many, could not tell these individuals how to avoid their fates, we can benefit from her experience and profound insight into the choices we make each day. In How Not to Die, Dr. G acts as a medical...
This is the story of a champion of cancer treatment and care, Sheila Kussner, and her best-known achievement, Hope & Cope, a pioneering, peer-based support service for cancer patients. Sheila also raised tens of millions of dollars to create the oncology department of McGill University. But as this biography explores, fundraising only scratches the surface of the character and deeds of this remarkable figure. A survivor of bone cancer that claimed a leg at age 14, Sheila Kussner has been a visio...
A raccoon bite on the arm doesn’t seem that serious, but it soon becomes a life-or-death medical crisis for Melissa Loomis. After days of treatment for recurring infection, it becomes obvious that her arm must be amputated. Dr. Ajay Seth, the son of immigrant parents from India and a local orthopaedic surgeon in private practice, performs his first-ever amputation procedure. In the months that follow, divine intervention, combined with Melissa’s determination and Dr. Seth’s disciplined commitmen...
What Next, Doctor? (The Dr Clifford Chronicles)
by Dr Robert Clifford
Clown Doctors work in hospitals around Australia, and overseas, to give children, especially, the opportunity to play, laugh and sing at a time when everything else in their lives is painful. Actors by training, the Clown Doctors sees the mood around the sick-bed, and in pairs they fall into routines that will relieve some tension and entertain, or they will simply be there to listen.The Clown Doctors touch the lives of over 85 000 people every year, and are now a familiar - and welcome - part o...
When the beautiful home that Janita Sakoschek had built for her family burned down it caused a catastrophic breakdown. She lost everything she owned: her clothes and furniture, her diaries and photographs, her antiques and paintings and, ultimately, her sanity. We find her rooted to a borrowed sofa, chain-smoking, and blackly depressed. Friends and family try to intervene but she only resents the intrusions and the humiliations.When she finally agrees to see a psychologist, she gets incarcerated...
How I Became a Human Being (Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography)
by Mark O'Brien and Gillian Kendall
In September 1955, six-year-old Mark O'Brien moved his arms and legs for the last time. He came out of a 30-day coma to find himself in an iron lung, the machine in which he would live for much of the rest of his life. This volume is O'Brien's account of his struggles to lead an independent life despite a lifelong disability. He describes growing up without the use of his limbs, his adolescence struggling with physical rehabilitation and suffering the bureaucracy of hospitals and institutions, a...
In April 2014, Deputy Editorial Director at BuzzFeed Lara Parker opened up to the world in an article on the website: she suffers from endometriosis. And beyond that - She let the whole world know that she wasn’t having any sex, as sex was excruciatingly painful. Less than a year before, she received not only the diagnosis of endometriosis, but also a diagnosis of pelvic floor dysfunction, vulvodynia, vaginismus, and vulvar vestibulitis. Combined, these debilitating conditions have wreaked havoc...
