Medicine

All the Living and the Dead: From Embalmers to Executioners, an Exploration of the People Who Have Made Death Their Life's Work

All the Living and the Dead: From Embalmers to Executioners, an Exploration of the People Who Have Made Death Their Life's Work

$29.99
More Info

A deeply compelling exploration of the death industry and the people--morticians, detectives, crime scene cleaners, embalmers, executioners--who work in it and what led them there.

We are surrounded by death. It is in our news, our nursery rhymes, our true-crime podcasts. Yet from a young age, we are told that death is something to be feared. How are we supposed to know what we're so afraid of, when we are never given the chance to look?

Fueled by a childhood fascination with death, journalist Hayley Campbell searches for answers in the people who make a living by working with the dead. Along the way, she encounters mass fatality investigators, embalmers, and a former executioner who is responsible for ending sixty-two lives. She meets gravediggers who have already dug their own graves, visits a cryonics facility in Michigan, goes for late-night Chinese with a homicide detective, and questions a man whose job it is to make crime scenes disappear.

Through Campbell's incisive and candid interviews with these people who see death every day, she asks: Why would someone choose this kind of life? Does it change you as a person? And are we missing something vital by letting death remain hidden? A dazzling work of cultural criticism, All the Living and the Dead weaves together reportage with memoir, history, and philosophy, to offer readers a fascinating look into the psychology of Western death.

Allergy A to Z (USED)

Allergy A to Z (USED)

$12.00
More Info
Possibly the most comprehensive book on allergies for the general public. Sections include: Allergy Symptoms, Why Are Allergies On The Increase, and a detailed and comprehensive A to Z of possible allergens. Designed as an easy-to-use reference book with extensive cross-listings. Written by an author who has helped literally thousands of people with allergy related symptoms.
product image

Beautiful Journey : Finding Purpose Through Cancer

$19.95
More Info

In The Beautiful Journey, Andrea takes you on an emotional rollercoaster as she chronicles her journey through cancer. You'll laugh (yes, laugh), cry, and cheer her on as she battles to become victorious over this disease. Andrea shares her raw, honest experiences as she is forced to make heavy, life-saving decisions.

However, The Beautiful Journey is more than a story about cancer. Andrea includes many valuable lessons she learns as a result of facing this adversity, including:

- How to overcome fear

- How blessings can be found in adversity

- The difference between living a successful life vs. one of significance

- The importance of living...on purpose

- Finding the beauty in all things

- The importance of listening to your body

As you follow Andrea's story of how she claims victory over cancer, you'll be able to go on your own "beautiful journey" of self-discovery and awareness.

Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons

Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons

$17.99
More Info

A riveting thriller reminiscent of The Hot Zone, this true story dives into the mystery surrounding one of the most controversial and misdiagnosed conditions of our time--Lyme disease--and of Willy Burgdorfer, the man who discovered the microbe behind it, revealing his secret role in developing bug-borne biological weapons, and raising terrifying questions about the genesis of the epidemic of tick-borne diseases affecting millions of Americans today.

While on vacation on Martha's Vineyard, Kris Newby was bitten by an unseen tick. That one bite changed her life forever, pulling her into the abyss of a devastating illness that took ten doctors to diagnose and years to recover: Newby had become one of the 300,000 Americans who are afflicted with Lyme disease each year.

As a science writer, she was driven to understand why this disease is so misunderstood, and its patients so mistreated. This quest led her to Willy Burgdorfer, the Lyme microbe's discoverer, who revealed that he had developed bug-borne bioweapons during the Cold War, and believed that the Lyme epidemic was started by a military experiment gone wrong.

In a superb, meticulous work of narrative journalism, Bitten takes readers on a journey to investigate these claims, from biological weapons facilities to interviews with biosecurity experts and microbiologists doing cutting-edge research, all the while uncovering darker truths about Willy. It also leads her to uncomfortable questions about why Lyme can be so difficult to both diagnose and treat, and why the government is so reluctant to classify chronic Lyme as a disease.

A gripping, infectious page-turner, Bitten will shed a terrifying new light on an epidemic that is exacting an incalculable toll on us, upending much of what we believe we know about it.

Kick-off book for Season 4 of Peculiar Book Club! Read for the 1/12/23 meeting.
See the Peculiar website for more details.

Black  Death:  A  Biological  Reappraisal

Black Death: A Biological Reappraisal

$75.00
More Info
1st American edition; dust jacket in protective cover; black cloth with gilt lettering on spine; binding tight; text clean and bright. VG+/VG+
Dignity for Deeply Forgetful People: How Caregivers Can Meet the Challenges of Alzheimer's Disease

Dignity for Deeply Forgetful People: How Caregivers Can Meet the Challenges of Alzheimer's Disease

$26.95
More Info

For caregivers of deeply forgetful people: a book that combines new ethics guidelines with an innovative program on how to communicate and connect with people with Alzheimer's.

How do we approach a deeply forgetful loved one so as to notice and affirm their continuing self-identity? For three decades, Stephen G. Post has worked around the world encouraging caregivers to become more aware of--and find renewed hope in--surprising expressions of selfhood despite the challenges of cognitive decline.

In this book, Post offers new perspectives on the worth and dignity of people with Alzheimer's and related disorders despite the negative influence of hypercognitive values that place an ethically unacceptable emphasis on human dignity as based on linear rationality and strength of memory. This bias, Post argues, is responsible for the abusive exclusion of this population from our shared humanity. With vignettes and narratives, he argues for a deeper dignity grounded in consciousness, emotional presence, creativity, interdependence, music, and a self that is not gone but differently abled. Post covers key practical topics such as:

- understanding the experience of dementia
- noticing subtle expressions of continuing selfhood, including paradoxical lucidity
- perspectives on ethical quandaries from diagnosis to terminal care and everything in between, as gleaned from the voices of caregivers
- how to communicate optimally and use language effectively
- the value of art, poetry, symbols, personalized music, and nature in revealing self-identity
- the value of trained dementia companion dogs

At a time when medical advances to cure these conditions are still out of reach and the most recent drugs have shown limited effectiveness, Post argues that focusing discussion and resources on the relational dignity of these individuals and the respite needs of their caregivers is vital. Grounding ethics on the equal worth of all conscious human beings, he provides a cautionary perspective on preemptive assisted suicide based on cases that he has witnessed. He affirms vulnerability and interdependence as the core of the human condition and celebrates caregivers as advocates seeking social and economic justice in an American system where they and their loved ones receive only leftover scraps. Racially inclusive and grounded in diversity, Dignity for Deeply Forgetful People also includes a workshop appendix focused on communication and connection, A Caregiver Resilience Program, by Rev. Dr. Jade C. Angelica.

Dr. Mutter's Marvels : A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine

Dr. Mutter's Marvels : A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine

$17.00
More Info

A mesmerizing biography of the brilliant and eccentric medical innovator who revolutionized American surgery and founded the country's most famous museum of medical oddities

 

Imagine undergoing an operation without anesthesia, performed by a surgeon who refuses to sterilize his tools--or even wash his hands. This was the world of medicine when Thomas Dent Mütter began his trailblazing career as a plastic surgeon in Philadelphia during the mid-nineteenth century.

 

Although he died at just forty-eight, Mütter was an audacious medical innovator who pioneered the use of ether as anesthesia, the sterilization of surgical tools, and a compassion-based vision for helping the severely deformed, which clashed spectacularly with the sentiments of his time. Brilliant, outspoken, and brazenly handsome, Mütter was flamboyant in every aspect of his life. He wore pink silk suits to perform surgery, added an umlaut to his last name just because he could, and amassed an immense collection of medical oddities that would later form the basis of Philadelphia's renowned Mütter Museum.

 

Award-winning writer Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz vividly chronicles how Mütter's efforts helped establish Philadelphia as a global mecca for medical innovation--despite intense resistance from his numerous rivals. (Foremost among them: Charles D. Meigs, an influential obstetrician who loathed Mütter's "overly modern" medical opinions.) In the narrative spirit of The Devil in the White City, Dr. Mütter's Marvels interweaves an eye-opening portrait of nineteenth-century medicine with the riveting biography of a man once described as the "[P. T.] Barnum of the surgery room."

Empire of Pain

Empire of Pain

$32.50
More Info
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR - A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. From the prize-winning and bestselling author of Say Nothing.

A real-life version of the HBO series Succession with a lethal sting in its tail...a masterful work of narrative reportage." - Laura Miller, Slate

The history of the Sackler dynasty is rife with drama--baroque personal lives; bitter disputes over estates; fistfights in boardrooms; glittering art collections; Machiavellian courtroom maneuvers; and the calculated use of money to burnish reputations and crush the less powerful. The Sackler name has adorned the walls of many storied institutions--Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, but the source of the family fortune was vague--until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis.

Empire of Pain is the saga of three generations of a single family and the mark they would leave on the world, a tale that moves from the bustling streets of early twentieth-century Brooklyn to the seaside palaces of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Cap d'Antibes to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. It follows the family's early success with Valium to the much more potent OxyContin, marketed with a ruthless technique of co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug's addictiveness. Empire of Pain chronicles the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and the scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade accountability.

A masterpiece of narrative reporting, Empire of Pain is a ferociously compelling portrait of America's second Gilded Age, a study of impunity among the super-elite and a relentless investigation of the naked greed that built one of the world's great fortunes.

Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science

Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science

$29.00
$13.99
$13.99 - $29.00
More Info

From a New York Times bestselling author comes the gripping, untold history of science's darkest secrets, "a fascinating book [that] deserves a wide audience" (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Science is a force for good in the world--at least usually. But sometimes, when obsession gets the better of scientists, they twist a noble pursuit into something sinister. Under this spell, knowledge isn't everything, it's the only thing--no matter the cost. Bestselling author Sam Kean tells the true story of what happens when unfettered ambition pushes otherwise rational men and women to cross the line in the name of science, trampling ethical boundaries and often committing crimes in the process.

The Icepick Surgeon masterfully guides the reader across two thousand years of history, beginning with Cleopatra's dark deeds in ancient Egypt. The book reveals the origins of much of modern science in the transatlantic slave trade of the 1700s, as well as Thomas Edison's mercenary support of the electric chair and the warped logic of the spies who infiltrated the Manhattan Project. But the sins of science aren't all safely buried in the past. Many of them, Kean reminds us, still affect us today. We can draw direct lines from the medical abuses of Tuskegee and Nazi Germany to current vaccine hesitancy, and connect icepick lobotomies from the 1950s to the contemporary failings of mental-health care. Kean even takes us into the future, when advanced computers and genetic engineering could unleash whole new ways to do one another wrong.

Unflinching, and exhilarating to the last page, The Icepick Surgeon fuses the drama of scientific discovery with the illicit thrill of a true-crime tale. With his trademark wit and precision, Kean shows that, while science has done more good than harm in the world, rogue scientists do exist, and when we sacrifice morals for progress, we often end up with neither.

Introduction to Bioregulatory Medicine (USED)

Introduction to Bioregulatory Medicine (USED)

$30.00
More Info

A user-friendly handbook on the theory and practice of bioregulatory medicine

Written by international experts in the field, this book provides a comprehensive introduction to the fundamental principles and clinical practice of bioregulatory medicine. It opens with an overview of core concepts in homotoxicology, including the human body's defense and regulation systems, followed by a chapter on the development and evolution of illness. The authors cover the different preparation groups and discuss in detail the basic principles of antihomotoxic therapy: drainage and detoxification, immunomodulation, and cell and organ support. The final chapter focuses on the practical aspects of bioregulatory treatment, including the selection and availability of medications, indications, contraindications, and therapeutic strategies for a variety of common diseases.

Highlights:

  • Insights from renowned experts in homotoxicology
  • Poster-size version of the Disease Evolution Table (DET), a key tool in daily practice
  • Plant-, mineral-, and organ-based medications--how they work
  • Practical information on various treatment methods, such as ointment dressings, injection therapies, and biopuncture
  • 80 high-quality illustrations and diagrams that demonstrate key concepts
  • Introduction to Bioregulatory Medicine is a valuable textbook for medical students, medical doctors, naturopathic physicians, homeopaths, and other health care professionals who wish to expand their knowledge in this field.