On a cold January afternoon in 2018, 18-year-old Sara locates me in the crowd at the train station. Together we take the bus to her home in a small village in rural Denmark. Sara tells me that she is excited to be training for her driver’s license. However, she is worried that her application for the license will be scrutinized …
Yesenia was born with congenital heart disease in 2000, a time in Honduras when heart defects meant certain, if not sudden, death for most children. Owing to surgical advances dating back to the 1950s, most children in more resourced countries could by then be diagnosed and treated in a timely manner, significantly improving their chances of long-term survival. In Honduras, …
Broken Hearts: The Tangled History of Cardiac Care
by David S. Jones
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, 336 pages.
My first encounter with David S. Jones’ Broken Hearts was in April of 2016. I had packed it in my carry-on luggage as on-plane entertainment while traveling to Minneapolis, MN for the eighty-ninth annual meeting of the American Association …
Racial Prescriptions: Pharmaceuticals, Difference, and the Politics of Life
Ashgate, 2014, 148 pages.
Racial Prescriptions provides an eloquent and theoretically-engaged account of the story of BiDil, a pharmaceutical that has become an iconic case for scholars of race in science and medicine. When BiDil was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in …
Writing in The Lancet, Richard Horton called historians of medicine “invisible, inaudible, and … inconsequential”. Historian of medicine Carsten Timmermann responds. This piece is being simultaneously cross-posted at The H Word, a history of science blog hosted by The Guardian.
In a comment published in the medical journal The Lancet, ‘The moribund body of medical history’ …