Category: Books & Reviews
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Book review: Life Unseen: A Story of Blindness
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom In her new book, Selina Mills, an award-winning journalist who is legally blind, takes us on a journey through the cultural history of visual impairment and blindness. It is both informative and empowering, weaving together research and the author’s personal experience. Throughout time, loss of sight has been associated with…
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Book review: Sir Thomas Browne: The Opium of Time
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, UK Sir William Osler was a great admirer of Sir Thomas Browne’s 1643 Religio Medici, one of his favorite books and on his recommended reading list for medical men. Browne influenced many writers, such as Samuel Johnson, WG Sebald, Jorge Luis Borges, Joseph Conrad, and EM Forster. In this slim volume, Gavin…
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Book review: Fighting for Life: The Twelve Battles That Made Our NHS, and the Struggle for Its Future
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, UK The United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) was born on July 5, 1948, and on the seventy-fifth anniversary of its existence, British journalist and broadcaster Isabel Hardman has produced a book using military analogies to focus on the many political battles and political contests that have shaped its current form. The…
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Polluting puberty, monstrous menstruation, and fatal femininity
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “[If] men could menstruate…menstruation would become an enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event.”1—Gloria Steinem, journalist and political activist Ancient history has shown us that men sometimes looked upon women’s menstrual periods with perplexity, wonder, and fear.2 While it has been suggested that some men have “vagina envy” and “womb envy,” and feel left out…
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Depression in Little Miss Sunshine
Emily AtashkariDublin, Ireland The 2006 film Little Miss Sunshine1 follows the dysfunctional Hoover family as they journey from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Redondo Beach, California, in their old Volkswagen van to bring seven-year-old Olive to the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant. One member of the Hoover family is Frank, who has recently attempted suicide. Frank…
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Book review: Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, UK I do not use superlatives lightly, but this is an extraordinary book. It is ambitious in scope and seeks to describe the progress of humanity from earliest times with an emphasis on the role of infectious diseases in our cultural, economic, political, and scientific development. Drawing from disciplines as diverse as…
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Book review: The Guru, the Bagman and the Sceptic: A story of science, sex and psychoanalysis
Robert KaplanSydney, Australia As a cultural icon of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis has loomed large in the public imagination. What makes it unique is the focus on the central figure, who set up a movement to promote it while constantly proclaiming it a science. Sigmund Freud is inextricable from psychoanalysis, which bears his imprimatur to…
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Book review: My Years with the British Red Cross
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom The Red Cross is known worldwide as a great humanitarian achievement. The charity was founded by Swiss businessman Henri Dunant, who was moved by the lack of care available to people who had been wounded in the Battle of Solferino, Italy, in 1859. His idea was to produce national societies…
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Book review: The Soul of Medicine: Tales from the Bedside
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Life is short, and the art long; the occasion fleeting, experience fallacious, and judgment difficult.”—Hippocrates The Soul of Medicine is a slender (200-page) book by surgeon-author Sherwin B. Nuland. It contains twenty-one essays, each one based on a “tale” told to Nuland by either a medical student (one), or by physicians in…
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Book review: A History of Women in Medicine and Medical Research
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, UK Research and writing on women’s contributions to science and medicine are needed and welcome. Books about science and medical advances have often concentrated primarily on men’s achievements and have a distinctly Western bias. This new book on the history of women in medicine and medical research is a superb addition to…