By Jarlin Espinal, Technical Services Assistant

Below is a selection of some of our recently acquired secondary sources in the history of medicine, along with blurbs about each book. Make an appointment to come and use them!

Nine of the library’s new acquisitions. Click to enlarge.

Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology – Monica H. Green

“Green has painstakingly studied the content and circulation of medieval texts on women’s medicine…[and] disproves popular ideas of the Middle Ages as a Golden Age for women’s control over their own bodies.” – Medical History

The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580–1720 – Hannah Newton

“The Sick Child in Early Modern England is a powerful exploration of the treatment, perception, and experience of illness in childhood from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. At this time, the sickness or death of a child was a common occurrence—over a quarter of young people died before the age of fifteen—and yet this subject has received little scholarly attention.”

Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England – Mary E. Fissell

“Making babies was a mysterious process in early modern England. Mary Fissell employs a wealth of popular sources—ballads, jokes, witchcraft pamphlets, Prayer Books, popular medical manuals—to produce the first account of women’s productive bodies in early-modern cheap print.”

Headache: Through the Centuries – Mervyn J. Eadie

“Nobody is better suited to provide a history of headache than Mervyn Eadie, a distinguished neurologist, historian and established author. Here he provides a beautifully written, lucid account of headaches from the time of ancient Greece and Egypt to 2000 A.D.”– J. M. S. Pearce, MD, FRCP, Emeritus Consultant Neurologist, Hull Royal Infirmary, Yorkshire, England

The Perils of Peace: The Public Health Crisis in Occupied Germany – Jessica Reinisch

“In The Perils of Peace, Jessica Reinisch considers how the four occupiers—Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States—attempted to keep their own troops and the ex-enemy population alive. While the war was still being fought, German public health was a secondary consideration for them: an unaffordable and undeserved luxury. But once fighting ceased and the occupation began, it rapidly turned into an urgent priority. Public health was then recognized as an indispensable component of creating order, keeping the population governable, and facilitating the reconstruction of German society.”

William Harvey: A Life in Circulation – Thomas Wright

“Thomas Wright’s book opens brilliantly and bloodily and continues in the same vein … a captivating, intellectually gripping journey into [England’s] scientific past.” – Druin Burch, Mail on Sunday

Medicine’s Michelangelo: The Life & Art of Frank H. Netter, MD – Francine Mary Netter

“This delightful book traces the extraordinary career of Frank Netter, who gave his gift of unparalleled medical knowledge to generations of medical student and their preceptors. This memoir, by his daughter Francine, helps us appreciate his lucid, lifelike art, from which we build our growing knowledge of the healing arts.” – Joseph B. Martin, PhD, MD, Edward R. and Anne G. Lefler Professor of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School

Virus Hunt: The Search for the Origin of HIV – Dorothy H. Crawford

“This is not a book about AIDS as a disease. Rather, Dorothy H. Crawford gives us a scientific detective story. She tells how, over the past 20 years or so, scientists tracked down the origin of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.”

Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination – Alondra Nelson

“In Body and Soul, Alondra Nelson combines careful research, deep political insight, and passionate commitment to tell the little-known story of the Black Panther Party’s health activism in the late 1960s. In doing so, and in showing how the problems of poverty, discrimination, and access to medical care remain hauntingly similar more than forty years later, Nelson reminds us that the struggle continues, particularly for African Americans, and that social policies have profound moral implications.” Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks