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…
Tag: Health
Book Review: A Monument of Charity: St. Vincent’s Hospital and Catholic Health Care in New York City by Thomas F. Rzeznik
In A Monument of Charity: St. Vincent’s Hospital and Catholic Health Care in New York City (New York University Press, 2026), Professor Thomas F. Rzeznik offers a comprehensive look into the daily operations of the long-standing, titular hospital. Through this process, Rzeznik celebrates some of the more influential women among the ranks of the Sisters…
Book Review: Narrative Medicine: Trauma & Ethics by Anders Juhl Rasmussen and Morten Sodenmann
The co-editors of Narrative Medicine: Trauma and Ethics, Anders Juhl Rasmussen and Morten Sodenmann, open their introduction with their goal for this text to “reposition narrative medicine with trauma studies and ethics in a global context” (xv). The book contains 20 chapters from scholars of medicine/healthcare, narrative medicine, trauma-informed care, ethics, literature/writing, philosophy, anthropology, arts…
Life Made Possible: Migrant Care, Settler Health, and Colonial Futurities
Rachel Brown’s Unsettled Labors: Migrant Care Work in Palestine/Israel (2024) theorizes migrant, home-based eldercare as a critical yet underexamined component of the economic, cultural, biological, and discursive reproduction of settler colonialism in Israel and Palestine, where almost 70,000 migrant caregivers are currently working (3). After the first Intifada in 1987, the Israeli government began granting visas to migrant workers…
The Birth of the Wellness-Industrial Complex: Justus von Liebig’s Extractum carnis as Exemplar
Baron Justus von Liebig carved out his name among one of the most influential yet now-forgotten figures in the history of chemistry. A major contributor to the development of fertilizer and its techniques for use, Liebig made an equally indelible mark on the landscape of mass-marketed foodstuffs, with his development of dried milk, his investigations…
Ghosts and Angels: The Supernatural in Illness Narratives
Image Credit: Angels in America, Millennium Approaches (1993) Poster, sourced from Wikimedia Commons under fair use license. Illness narratives often explore experiences that defy medical explanation. Sociologist Arthur Frank, writing about narrative and illness experience, argues that “telling stories is the attempt, instigated by the body’s disease, to give voice to an experience that medicine…
Seeing the world “as we are”: Can storytelling guide us to better health?
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are” (a quote often attributed to writer Anais Nin) succinctly describes the idea that our individual interpretations of the world deeply shape our realities. In modern psychotherapy, we often refer to these interpretive filters as “lenses” and highlight the impact they have on…
An Advent Meditation: Acknowledge Pain, Nurture Hope
I found myself tearing up at a church service on the first Sunday of the Advent season because a choir was onstage. The small choir, harmonious voices, and dedicated conductor prompted thoughts of my own father, who for years had led the choir at our small, Asian-American community church where I grew up. He now…
“Venereal Peril”: ‘Controlled’ Prostitution and French Regulationism After 1945
Penicillin and the French regulationist system The advent of penicillin in the 1930s marked a significant breakthrough that revolutionized the therapeutic landscape for diverse bacterial infections, including those causing venereal diseases (Brandt, Jones 1999). The use of penicillin during World War Two led to a decline in the incidence of syphilis and allowed for more…
Book Review: Ohio Under Covid – Lessons from America’s Heartland in Crisis
Despite the incredible loss, turmoil, and uncertainty wrought by Covid-19, life has seemingly returned to “normal”. Federal (CDC) and global (UN) health agencies have declared an end to the public health emergency, and many of us have returned to work, gone back to school, and now interact without masks or social distancing. The media no…