Kirjahaku

A writer renowned for his insight into the mysteries of the body now gives us a lambent and profoundly moving book about the mysteries of family. At its center lies Sherwin Nuland's Rembrandtesque portrait of his father, Meyer Nudelman, a Jewish garment worker who came to America in the early years of the last century but remained an eternal outsider. Awkward in speech and movement, broken by the premature deaths of a wife and child, Meyer ruled his youngest son with a regime of rage, dependency, and helpless love that outlasted his death. In evoking their relationship, Nuland also summons up the warmth and claustrophobia of a vanished immigrant New York, a world that impelled its children toward success yet made them feel like traitors for leaving it behind. Full of feeling and unwavering observation, Lost in America deserves a place alongside such classics as Patrimony and Call It Sleep.

An analysis of nineteenth-century Viennese doctor Ignac Semmelweis's reforms of the medical establishment describes his discovery of the correlation between hand washing and reduced infection, recounting how his early work contributed to the subsequent establishment of germ theory. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER - NATIONAL BESTSELLER - The definitive resource on perhaps the single most universal human concern: death.Even more relevant than when it was first published, this edition addresses contemporary issues in end-of-life care and includes an all-embracing and incisive afterword that examines the state of health care and our relationship with life as it approaches its terminus. How We Die also discusses how we can take control of our own final days and those of our loved ones."Nuland's work acknowledges, with unmatched clarity, the harsh realities of how life departs... There is compassion, and often wisdom, in every page." --San Francisco Examiner

How does medical science advance? Popular historians would have us believe that a few heroic individuals, possessing superhuman talents, lead an unselfish quest to better the human condition. But as renowned Yale surgeon and medical historian Sherwin B. Nuland shows in this brilliant collection of linked life portraits, the theory bears little resemblance to the truth.Through the centuries, the men and women Who have shaped the world of medicine have been not only very human people but also very much the products of their own times and places. Presenting compelling studies of great medical innovators and pioneers, Doctors gives us the extraordinary story of the development of modern medicine -- told through the lives of the physician-scientists whose deeds and determination paved the way. Ranging from the legendary Father of Medicine, Hippocrates, to Andreas Vesalius, whose Renaissance masterwork on anatomy offered invaluable new insight into the human body, to Helen Taussig, founder of pediatric cardiology and co-inventor of the original "blue baby" operation, here is a volume filled with the spirit of ideas and the thrill of discovery. Says The New York Times, "Doctors can be warmly recommended. Dr. Nuland succeeds in bringing his subjects vividly to life, and he leaves you with a much better understanding of what they achieved." "An erudite history of medicine...a welcome addition to any medical collection." -- Booklist"Eloquent, informed, deeply committed." -- Los Angeles Times

Having won the National Book Award for How We Die, his best-selling inquiry into the causes and modes of death, Sherwin Nuland now turns his attention to the miraculous resiliency of human life. For this lucid, wonderful, and wonder-filled new book explores the body's mysterious capacity to marshal disparate organs and processes in the interests of survival. Like its predecessor, How We Live is filled with gripping medical case histories: a woman is pulled back from the brink of death from inexplicable internal bleeding; another patient triumphs over breast cancer; the "routine" removal of a polyp triggers a nearly lethal medical crisis. For Nuland, each of these cases serves to illustrate the extraordinary responsiveness and adaptability of the human organism. We learn how the aorta's baroreceptors monitor blood pressure and respond to its minutest fluctuations. We follow the intricate chain of electrochemical command that makes us leap out of the path of a speeding car. We discover why the stomach--which is capable of breaking down everything from porridge to pizza--refrains from digesting itself. Informed by sympathy for human suffering and an erudition that includes poetry and the Talmud as well as the medical canon, How We Live is science writing of the rarest kind--lucid, poetic, and genuinely uplifting.

In this gripping exploration of the organs of the body and the myths associated with them, Sherwin B. Nuland M.D., the author of the award winning HOW WE DIE (Vintage), once again displays his ability to combine clarity, compassion, and knowledge to shed light on the working of our bodies from a surgeon's perspective. Dr. Nuland recounts legends about the functions and 'personalities' of the stomach, liver, heart, spleen, and uterus, and, in riveting vignettes of the surgery he has performed, describes the actual surgery and explains the connections between myth and reality. He reflects on humanity's impulse to invent explanations for things we don't understand and shows we have never abandoned long-held superstitions. Eloquent and informative, THE MYSTERIES WITHIN is an extraordinary synthesis of science and folklore, medicine and myth.

"A kaleidoscope of creativity ...unsentimental and sometimes unpredictable."-Journal of the American Medical Association Founded just six years ago, Bellevue Literary Review is already widely recognized as a rare forum for emerging and celebrated writers-among them Julia Alvarez, Raphael Campo, Rick Moody, and Abraham Verghese-on issues of health and healing. Gathered here are poignant and prizewinning stories, essays, and poems, the voices of patients and those who care for them, which form the journal's remarkable dialogue on "humanity and the human experience." Danielle Ofri, MD, author of Incidental Findings and Singular Intimacies, is the editor in chief of Bellevue Literary Review. She lives in New York City.