In his new book Drugs: The Story of Pharmacology (Yale University Press, 2026), Rod Flower, Emeritus Professor of Biochemical Pharmacology at Queen Mary University of London, offers a grand-sweeping account of how humans have come to know and use medicines as we do in the present day. Throughout the book’s twenty-two chapters, Flower guides the…
Category: Book Reviews
“What Kind of Mother” by Judy Sandler: the beautiful, incomplete puzzle of life
“Addiction issues, mental illness, attempts at recovery, progress, setbacks: a mother tries to make sense of her son’s troubled life journey in light of her own history. Without sentimentality and from an unvarnished self-oriented perspective, Judy Sandler allows herself to explore how her son’s type II bipolar disorder has affected not only his life, but hers as well.”
Book Review: The Clinical Witness, edited by Nicolas Barnett, Nicholas Chare, and Dominic Williams
Nicolas Barnett, Nicholas Chare, and Dominic Williams, eds. The Clinical Witness: Conflict, Catastrophe and Medical Testimony. London and New York: Routledge, 2026. 291 pp. Paperback, DOI 10.4324/9781032668369 – A tragedy will unfold in 2027. We can take our pick. Say there’s a hurricane in a place that never used to get hurricanes. There’s a shooting spree….
Book Review: Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel (2023) by Livia Arndal Woods
Pregnant bodies rarely appear in Victorian novels. When they are revealed, they are metonymy, metaphor, or symbol that represent ideology around womanhood, instructing morality or medical judgment, according to Livia Arndal Woods. Indeed, Woods observes that visible pregnant bodies often signal transgression of boundaries for a “modest” woman, while the “ideal” woman’s body is veiled….
Review of Suicide in Popular Media and Culture: Studies in Framing a Social Catastrophe
Suicide in Popular Media and Culture: Studies in Framing a Social Catastrophe responds to a particular mode of cultural interpretation that frames readings of death beyond the physical and more as an enactment of societal norms. The anthology aligns with the concerns of the Death and Culture series by centering its theme on suicidology and…
Book Review: Black Epistles by Shanda McManus
In Brother Epistles, Shanda McManus, a family medicine physician, pens a memoir that encapsulates the Black lived experience across an array of topics, including residential segregation, the prison-industrial complex, environmental injustice, and health disparities, among others, laying bare the personal consequences of systemic inequity. McManus also unpacks how black guilt takes shape for those, like…
A Portrait of Care in Motion: Lauren W. Westerfield’s Woman House
Accompanying her mother for her ECT treatment at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane, Washington, Lauren W. Westerfield devours Jean Frémon’s Now, Now, Louison over two consecutive nights. Frémon’s book, as he states and Westerfield herself echoes, is a “portrait in motion.” Rather than a crude biography, it is composed as the inner dialogue…
Narrative, Measured
Who is healed when a story is told? In 2001, the physician and literary scholar Rita Charon published an essay in the Journal of the American Medical Association arguing that medicine required something she called “narrative competence”: “the ability to acknowledge, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories and plights of others.” Charon drew on…
Book Review: Field Guide to Falling Ill by Jonathan Gleason
Medical interpreters occupy a contradictory position: present at a patient’s most vulnerable moments, they are expected to remain invisible, rendering one language into another without leaving a trace of themselves in the exchange. In Field Guide to Falling Ill (Yale UP, 2026), Jonathan Gleason takes that role as both literal subject and critical methodology. Across…
Book Review: Fear and Motherhood in The Heart Folds Early by Jill Christman
When an 18-week ultrasound revealed that her son had only developed half of his heart, Jill Christman did not know what to do. In her 2026 memoir, The Heart Folds Early, Christman unspools her ultimate decision to terminate the pregnancy, shedding light on the various heart-wrenching reasons a mother might choose not to carry a…