New Books in Medicine
919 episodes - English - Latest episode: 6 days ago - ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Medicine about their New Book
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Fumilayo Showers, "Migrants Who Care: West Africans Working and Building Lives in U.S. Health Care" (Rutgers UP, 2023)
April 21, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourAs the U.S. population ages and as health care needs become more complex, demand for paid care workers in home and institutional settings has increased. This book draws attention to the reserve of immigrant labour that is called on to meet this need. Migrants Who Care: West Africans Working and Building Lives in U.S. Health Care (Rutgers University Press, 2023) by Dr. Fumilayo Showers tells the little-known story of a group of English-speaking West African immigrants who have become central ...
Susan Partovi, "Renegade M.D.: A Doctor's Stories from the Streets" (Bookbaby, 2024)
April 21, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourDr. Susan Partovi first experienced poverty medicine volunteering at a dump site in Tijuana during high school. There, she recognized the need for all people to have access to quality medical care. Over the years, she has worked in various facilities around Los Angeles County, incorporating her renegade method of going the extra mile for her patients. As Medical Director of Homeless Health Care Los Angeles, she works to provide a safety net of care for the underserved skid row community and s...
Jessica Cox, "Confinement: The Hidden History of Maternal Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Britain" (The History Press, 2023)
April 21, 2024 08:00 - 41 minutesCovering a fascinating period of population growth, high infant mortality and deep social inequality, rapid medical advances and pseudoscientific quackery, Confinement: The Hidden History of Maternal Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Britain (The History Press, 2023) by Dr. Jessica Cox is the untold history of pregnancy and childbirth in Victorian Britain. During the nineteenth century, having children was frequently viewed as a woman’s central function and destiny – and yet the pregnant and postn...
Coreen McGuire, "Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal: Setting the Standards for Disability in the Interwar Period" (Manchester UP, 2020)
April 20, 2024 08:00 - 28 minutesMeasurements, and their manipulation, have been underestimated as crucial historical forces motivating and guiding the way we think about disability. Using measurement technology as a lens, and examining in particular the measurement of hearing and breathing, Coreen McGuire's book Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal: Setting the Standards for Disability in the Interwar Period (Manchester UP, 2020) draws together several existing discussions on disability, phenomenology, healthcare, medical...
Bobby Cherayil, "The Logic of Immunity: Deciphering an Enigma" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)
April 16, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourMost of us appreciate the importance of the immune system yet have very little knowledge about how it actually works. If you fall into this camp and are curious to learn more about this intricate system, Bobby Cherayil's book is an excellent resource. The Logic of Immunity: Deciphering an Enigma was published in January 2024 by John Hopkins University Press. It gives a great overview of this complex system, including several findings from the recent years. It also points out the many areas of...
Lawson R. Wulsin, "Toxic Stress: How Stress Is Making Us Ill and What We Can Do About It" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
April 15, 2024 08:00 - 28 minutesOur stress response system is magnificent - it operates beneath our awareness, like an orchestra of organs playing a hidden symphony. When we are healthy, the orchestra plays effortlessly, but what happens when our bodies face chronic stress, and the music slips out of tune? The alarming rise of stress-related conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes, and depression, show the price we're paying for our high-pressure living, while global warming, pandemics and technology have brought new k...
Rupa Marya and Raj Patel, "Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice" (FSG, 2021)
April 10, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourRaj Patel, the renowned political economist and New York Times bestselling author of The Value of Nothing, teams up with the physician Rupa Marya to offer a radical new cure: the deep medicine of decolonization. Decolonizing heals what has been divided, reestablishing our relationships with the Earth and one another. Combining the latest scientific research and scholarship on globalization with the stories of Marya's work with patients in marginalized communities, activist passion, and the wi...
Tana Jean Welch, "Advancing Medical Posthumanism Through Twenty-First Century American Poetry" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024)
April 10, 2024 08:00 - 57 minutesAdvancing Medical Posthumanism Through Twenty-First Century American Poetry (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024) places contemporary poetics in dialogue with posthumanism and biomedicine in order to create a framework for advancing a posthuman-affirmative ethics within the culture of medical practice. This book makes a case for a posthumanist understanding of the body—one that sees health and illness not as properties possessed by individual bodies, but as processes that connect bodies to their social ...
Bishnupriya Ghosh, "The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media" (Duke UP, 2023)
April 10, 2024 08:00 - 51 minutesIn The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (Duke UP. 2023), Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh theorizes "epidemic media" to show how epidemics are mediated in images, numbers, and movements through the processes of reading test results and tracking infection and mortality rates. Scientific, artistic, and activist epidemic m...
Greg Wrenn, "Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis" (Regalo Press, 2024)
March 27, 2024 08:00 - 52 minutesA dazzling, evidence-based account of one man’s quest to heal from complex PTSD by turning to endangered coral reefs and psychedelic plants after traditional therapies failed—and his awakening to the need for us to heal the planet as well. Professor Greg Wrenn likes to tell his nature-writing students, “The ecological is personal, and the personal is ecological.” What he’s never told them is how he’s lived out those correspondences to heal from childhood abuse at the hands of his mother. Mot...
Neil Gong, "Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
March 27, 2024 08:00 - 41 minutesSociologist Neil M. Gong explains why mental health treatment in Los Angeles rarely succeeds, for the rich, the poor, and everyone in between. In 2022, Los Angeles became the US county with the largest population of unhoused people, drawing a stark contrast with the wealth on display in its opulent neighborhoods. In Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles (U Chicago Press, 2024), sociologist Neil M. Gong traces the divide between the haves and ...
Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance in Hospital
March 25, 2024 08:00 - 23 minutesBrynn Quick speaks with Erin Mulpur about how hospitals can better support patients from linguistic minority backgrounds. The conversation addresses the barriers to both communication and healthcare faced by linguistic minority patients. Drawing on Erin’s 2021 paper “Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance During a Pandemic," the focus is on Houston Methodist Hospital’s innovative use of language assistance technologies during the first waves of Covid-19. For additional resources, show notes...
Maggie Hennefeld, "Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema" (Columbia UP, 2024)
March 25, 2024 08:00 - 59 minutesCan you really die from laughing too hard? Between 1870 and 1920, hundreds of women suffered such a fate—or so a slew of sensationalist obituaries would have us believe. How could laughter be fatal, and what do these reports of women’s risible deaths tell us about the politics of female joy? In Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2024), Dr. Maggie Hennefeld reveals the forgotten histories of “hysterical laughter,” exploring how women’s amusement has...
Beth Linker, "Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America" (Princeton UP, 2024)
March 21, 2024 08:00 - 30 minutesIn 1995, a scandal erupted when the New York Times revealed that the Smithsonian possessed a century's worth of nude "posture" photos of college students. In this riveting history, Beth Linker tells why these photos were only a small part of the incredible story of twentieth-century America's largely forgotten posture panic--a decades-long episode in which it was widely accepted as scientific fact that Americans were suffering from an epidemic of bad posture, with potentially catastrophic hea...
Colin Elliott, "Pox Romana: The Plague That Shook the Roman World" (Princeton UP, 2024)
March 19, 2024 08:00 - 50 minutesIn the middle of the second century AD, Rome was at its prosperous and powerful apex. The emperor Marcus Aurelius reigned over a vast territory that stretched from Britain to Egypt. The Roman-made peace, or Pax Romana, seemed to be permanent. Then, apparently out of nowhere, a sudden sickness struck the legions and laid waste to cities, including Rome itself. This fast-spreading disease, now known as the Antonine plague, may have been history’s first pandemic. Soon after its arrival, the Empi...
Travis Rieder, "Catastrophe Ethics: How to Choose Well in a World of Tough Choices" (Dutton, 2024)
March 13, 2024 08:00 - 37 minutesIn a world of often confusing and terrifying global problems, how should we make choices in our everyday lives? Does anything on the individual level really make a difference? In Catastrophe Ethics: How to Choose Well in a World of Tough Choices (Dutton, 2024), Travis Rieder tackles the moral philosophy puzzles that bedevil us. He explores vital ethical concepts from history and today and offers new ways to think about the “right” thing to do when the challenges we face are larger and more co...
Jennifer Evans, "Men's Sexual Health in Early Modern England" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
March 02, 2024 09:00 - 48 minutesHow did men cope with sexual health issues in early modern England? In Men's Sexual Health in Early Modern England (Amsterdam University Press, 2023), Dr. Jennifer Evans presents a vivid history that investigates how sexual, reproductive, and genitourinary conditions were understood between 1580 and 1740. Drawing on medical sources and personal testimonies, it reveals how men responded to bouts of ill health and their relationships with the medical practitioners tasked with curing them. In do...
Kristine M. McCusker, "Just Enough to Put Him Away Decent: Death Care, Life Extension, and the Making of a Healthier South, 1900-1955" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
March 02, 2024 09:00 - 55 minutesKristine M. McCusker's book Just Enough to Put Him Away Decent: Death Care, Life Extension, and the Making of a Healthier South, 1900-1955 (U Illinois Press, 2023) takes, as its focus, the combined history of death and health in the American South between 1900 and 1955. The text is ambitious in scope, and weaves together multiple oral histories to create a nuanced and engaging narrative. McCusker charts the ways in which low life expectancy in the South was regarded as problematic by commerci...
Judith Pearson, "Crusade to Heal America: The Remarkable Life of Mary Lasker" (Mayo Clinic Press, 2023)
February 27, 2024 09:00 - 58 minutesMary Woodard Lasker had a singular goal: saving lives by increasing medical research. Together with her husband, advertising genius Albert, they created the Lasker Foundation, bestowing the Lasker Awards. Known as the "American Nobels," these became the most prestigious research awards in America. The Laskers' next step was transforming the sleepy and ineffectual American Society for the Control of Cancer, reinventing it as the American Cancer Society in 1944. But the real increase in medical...
Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, "Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam" (Duke UP, 2021)
February 26, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourThrough a creative focus on skin, in Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam (Duke UP, 2021), Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu examines the ongoing influence of the Vietnam War on contemporary ideas about race and beauty. Framing skin as the site around which these ideas have been formed, Tu foregrounds the histories of militarism in the production of US biomedical knowledge and commercial cosmetics. She uncovers the efforts of wartime scientists in the US Military Dermatology Resea...
Daniel Skinner et al., "The City and the Hospital: The Paradox of Medically Overserved Communities" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
February 21, 2024 09:00 - 40 minutesAn enduring paradox of urban public health is that many communities around hospitals are economically distressed and, counterintuitively, medically underserved. In The City and the Hospital two sociologists, Jonathan R. Wynn and Berkeley Franz, and a political scientist, Daniel Skinner, track the multiple causes of this problem and offer policy solutions. Focusing on three urban hospitals—Connecticut’s Hartford Hospital, the flagship of the Hartford Healthcare system; the Cleveland Clinic, wh...
Alison M. Downham Moore, "The French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalisation of Women's Ageing" (Oxford UP, 2022)
February 14, 2024 09:00 - 45 minutesIn The French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalisation of Women's Ageing (Oxford University Press, 2022), Alison Downham Moore discusses her contribution to the history of women's ageing. Doctors writing about menopause in France vastly outnumbered those in other cultures throughout the entire nineteenth century. The concept of menopause was invented by French male medical students in the aftermath of the French Revolution, becoming an important pedagogic topic and a common theme of doct...
Brian H. Williams, "The Bodies Keep Coming: Dispatches from a Black Trauma Surgeon on Racism, Violence, and How We Heal" (Broadleaf Books, 2023)
February 10, 2024 09:00 - 37 minutesTrauma surgeon and professor Dr. Brian H. Williams has seen it all: gunshot wounds, stabbings, and traumatic brain injuries. In The Bodies Keep Coming: Dispatches from a Black Trauma Surgeon on Racism, Violence, and How We Heal (Broadleaf Books, 2023), Williams ushers us into the trauma bay, where the wounds of a national emergency amass. As a Harvard-trained physician, Williams learned to keep his head down and his scalpel ready. As a Black man, he learned to swallow the rage when patients t...
Buddhist Medicine in Contemporary Times (with Pierce Salguero)
February 09, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourDr Pierce Salguero is interviewed by James Bae on the Buddhist Medicine & Yoga Podcast. In this extensive and in-depth conversation, we talk about differentiating religion from medicine, what Buddhist medicine can teach contemporary clinicians, current trends in the field of Buddhist studies, and hybridity versus tradition. We also explore Buddhist medicine in America, different kinds of Buddhist healers in the US, and how Buddhist medicine circulates in the contemporary era. Along the way, w...
Alka Vaid Menon, "Refashioning Race: How Global Cosmetic Surgery Crafts New Beauty Standards" (U California Press, 2023)
January 28, 2024 09:00 - 50 minutesCosmetic surgery was once associated with a one-size-fits-all approach, modifying patients to conform to a single standard of beauty. As this surgery has become more accessible worldwide, changing beauty trends have led to a proliferation of beauty standards for members of different racial groups. In Refashioning Race: How Global Cosmetic Surgery Crafts New Beauty Standards (University of California Press, 2023) Dr. Alka V. Menon enters the world of cosmetic surgeons, journeying from a sprawl...
Elinor Cleghorn, "Unwell Women: A Journey Through Medicine and Myth in a Man-Made World" (Dutton, 2022)
January 28, 2024 09:00 - 55 minutesMedicine carries the burden of its own troubling history. Over centuries, women’s bodies have been demonised and demeaned until we feared them, felt ashamed of them, were humiliated by them. But as doctors, researchers, campaigners and most of all as patients, women have continuously challenged medical orthodoxy. Medicine’s history has always been, and is still being, rewritten by women’s resistance, strength and incredible courage. In this ground-breaking history Dr. Elinor Cleghorn unpacks ...
Sandro Galea, "Within Reason: A Liberal Public Health for an Illiberal Time" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
January 28, 2024 09:00 - 28 minutesA provocative chronicle of how US public health has strayed from its liberal roots. The Covid-19 response was a crucible of politics and public health—a volatile combination that produced predictably bad results. As scientific expertise became entangled with political motivations, the public-health establishment found itself mired in political encampment. It was, as Sandro Galea argues, a crisis of liberalism: a retreat from the principles of free speech, open debate, and the pursuit of knowl...
Camillo Leonardi, "Speculum Lapidum: A Renaissance Treatise on the Healing Properties of Gemstones" (Penn State UP, 2023)
January 23, 2024 09:00 - 52 minutesFirst published in Venice in 1502, Camillo Leonardi’s Speculum Lapidum is an encyclopedic summary of all classical and medieval sources of lithotherapy. Today Jana Byars talks to Liliana Leopardi about her new translation, Speculum Lapidum: A Renaissance Treatise on the Healing Properties of Gemstones (Penn State University Press, 2023). In early modern Europe precious and semiprecious stones were valued not only for their beauty and rarity but also for their medical and magical properties. L...
Patricio Simonetto, "A Body of One's Own: A Trans History of Argentina" (U Texas Press, 2024)
January 15, 2024 09:00 - 54 minutesAs a trans history of Argentina, a country that banned medically assisted gender affirmation practices and punished trans lives, A Body of One’s Own: A Trans History of Argentina (University of Texas Press, 2024) places the histories of trans bodies at the core of modern Argentinian history. Dr. Patricio Simonetto documents the lives of people who crossed the boundaries of gender from the early twentieth century to the present. Based on extensive archival research in public and community-base...
Sunita Puri, "That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour" (Penguin, 2020)
January 14, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourSunita Puri is a writer, a palliative medicine physician, and an associate professor at the UMass Chan Medical School. In her memoir, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour (Penguin, 2020), she explores her journey of helping patients and families redefine what it means to live and die well in the face of serious illness. In her article in Tricycle’s Winter 2023 issue, “A Gift,” she explores how she has learned to navigate love and loss through the lens of impermanence. In th...
Jennifer Thomson, "The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health" (UNC Press, 2019)
January 10, 2024 09:00 - 47 minutesThe first wealth is health, according to Emerson. Among health’s riches is its political potential. Few know this better than environmentalists. In her debut book, The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health (UNC Press, 2019), historian Jennifer Thomson revisits canonical figures and events from the environmental movement in the United States and finds everywhere talk of health. At its best, viewing the environment through the lens of health encouraged decentr...
Chinmay Tumbe, "The Age Of Pandemics (1817-1920): How They Shaped India and the World" (Harper Collins, 2020)
January 03, 2024 09:00 - 49 minutesOn this episode of the Economic and Business History channel I spoke with Dr. Chinmay Tumbe, Assistant Professor of Economics at the Indian Institute of Management. He was Alfred D Chandler Jr. International Visiting Scholar in Business History, Harvard Business School in 2018. Dr, Tumbe has published academic articles in Management and Organizational History and in the Journal of Management History. He has written two books, one in 2018 India Moving: A History of Migration, which talks about...
Lenny A. Ureña Valerio, "Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840-1920" (Ohio UP, 2019
January 02, 2024 09:00 - 53 minutesIn Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840-1920 (Ohio University Press, 2019), Lenny Ureña Valerio offers a transnational approach to Polish-German relations and nineteenth-century colonial subjectivities. She investigates key cultural dynamics in the history of medicine, colonialism, and migration that bring Germany and Prussian Poland closer to the colonial and postcolonial worlds in Africa and Latin America...
Helena Vissing, "Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Trauma Treatment for Perinatal Mental Health" (Routledge, 2023)
December 27, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourToday we spoke with Dr. Helena Vissing about her new book Somatic Maternal Healing Psychodynamic and Somatic Trauma Treatment for Perinatal Mental Health (Routledge, 2023). What does the research of neuro science, immunology and biology tell us about the complex links between trauma, stress, inflammatory responses, and postpartum depression? What are the somatic counter transferences specific to the perinatal transition? What is the difference between empowered mothering and feminist motherin...
Nessette Falu, "Unseen Flesh: Gynecology and Black Queer Worth-Making in Brazil" (Duke UP, 2023)
December 24, 2023 10:00 - 58 minutesIn Unseen Flesh: Gynecology and Black Queer Worth-Making in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2023) Nessette Falu explores how Black lesbians in Brazil define and sustain their well-being and self-worth against persistent racial, sexual, class, and gender-based prejudice. Focusing on the trauma caused by interactions with gynecologists, Falu draws on in-depth ethnographic work among the Black lesbian community to reveal their profoundly negative affective experiences within Brazil’s deeply biase...
Anne E. Linton, "Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
December 22, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourA compelling study of medical and literary imaginations, Anne Linton's Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press, 2022) examines the complex relationship between modes of seeing, thinking, and writing intersex bodies and lives. In this project, Linton brings a rich archive of medical cases from 1800 to 1902 into dialogue with canonical nineteenth-century authors (Honoré de Balzac, Théophile Gautier, and Emile Zola), as well as an impressive ran...
Adrienne E. Strong, "Documenting Death: Maternal Mortality and the Ethics of Care in Tanzania" (U California Press, 2020)
December 21, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourDocumenting Death: Maternal Mortality and the Ethics of Care in Tanzania (University of California Press, 2020) is a gripping ethnographic account of the deaths of pregnant women in a hospital in a low-resource setting in Tanzania. Through an exploration of everyday ethics and care practices on a local maternity ward, anthropologist Adrienne E. Strong untangles the reasons Tanzania has achieved so little sustainable success in reducing maternal mortality rates, despite global development supp...
Jenny Trinitapoli, "An Epidemic of Uncertainty: Navigating HIV and Young Adulthood in Malawi" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
December 20, 2023 09:00 - 41 minutesA decade-long study of young adulthood in Malawi demonstrates the impact of widespread HIV status uncertainty, laying bare the sociological implications of what is not known. An Epidemic of Uncertainty: Navigating HIV and Young Adulthood in Malawi (U Chicago Press, 2023) advances a new framework for studying social life by emphasizing something social scientists routinely omit from their theories, models, and measures–what people know they don’t know. Taking Malawi’s ongoing AIDS epidemic as...
Wayne Soon, "Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History" (Stanford UP, 2020)
December 19, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourToday I talked to Wayne Soon about his book Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History (Stanford UP, 2020). In 1938, one year into the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese military found itself in dire medical straits. Soldiers were suffering from deadly illnesses, and were unable to receive blood transfusions for their wounds. The urgent need for medical assistance prompted an unprecedented flowering of scientific knowledge in China and Taiwan throughout the twentieth century. Wayne Soon...
Cristina A. Pop, "The Cancer Within: Reproduction, Cultural Transformation, and Health Care in Romania" (Rutgers UP, 2022)
December 17, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn The Cancer Within: Reproduction, Cultural Transformation, and Health Care in Romania (Rutgers UP, 2022), Cristina Pop examines cervical cancer in Romania as a point of entry into an anthropological reflection on contemporary health care, especially in the post-communist context. Cervical cancer prevention reveals the inner workings of emerging post-communist medicine, which aligns the state and the market, public and private health care providers, policy makers, and ordinary women. Fashion...
Katherine D. Von Schaik, "How to Be Healthy: An Ancient Guide to Wellness" (Galen) (Princeton UP, 2024)
December 17, 2023 09:00 - 34 minutesThe second-century Greek physician Galen—the most famous doctor in antiquity after Hippocrates—is a central figure in Western medicine. A talented doctor, surgeon, writer, philosopher, teacher, pharmacologist, and inventor, Galen attended the court of Marcus Aurelius, living through outbreaks of plague (likely smallpox) that devastated the Roman Empire. He also served as physician for professional gladiators, boasting that only two fighters died during his first year (his predecessor had lost...
David Carey, Jr., "Health in the Highlands: Indigenous Healing and Scientific Medicine in Guatemala and Ecuador" (U California Press, 2023)
December 13, 2023 09:00 - 46 minutesHealth in the Highlands: Indigenous Healing and Scientific Medicine in Guatemala and Ecuador (University of California Press, 2023) explores how, in the early to mid-twentieth century, the governments of Ecuador and Guatemala sought to expand Western medicine within their countries, with the goals of addressing endemic diseases and improving infant and maternal health. These efforts often clashed with indigenous medical practices, particularly in the rural highlands. Drawing on extensive, ori...
Alexandra Kitty, "A Different Track: Hospital Trains of the Second World War" (Heritage House, 2023)
December 11, 2023 09:00 - 29 minutesRailroads played an integral role in the Second World War. Trains brought food, munitions, and essential supplies. They transported troops. They were a means of escape for those fleeing persecution. At the same, they were used to transport innocent people to their deaths. Yet there was one kind of train that improved the chances of survival every time they rolled through the battle-worn towns and cities of the European theatre of war. Hospital trains were not a new concept in the Second World...
Mark Munsterhjelm, "Forensic Colonialism: Genetics and the Capture of Indigenous Peoples" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023)
December 10, 2023 09:00 - 33 minutesForensic genetic technologies are popularly conceptualized and revered as important tools of justice. The research and development of these technologies, however, has been accomplished through the capture of various Indigenous Peoples' genetic material and a subsequent ongoing genetic servitude. In Forensic Colonialism: Genetics and the Capture of Indigenous Peoples (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023), Mark Munsterhjelm explores how controversial studies of Indigenous Peoples have been used to develop...
The Future of Predictions: A Discussion with Christopher E. Mason
December 09, 2023 09:00 - 32 minutesPredictive algorithms are changing the world – that is the claim of Christopher E. Mason who has co-authored (with Igor Tulchinsky) the book The Age of Prediction: Algorithms, AI, and the Shifting Shadows of Risk (MIT Press, 2023). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently w...
Self Help
December 07, 2023 09:00 - 20 minutesIn this episode of High Theory, Angela Hume tells us about Self Help, not the neoliberal strategy of self-actualization through consumer choices, but the radical political movement of gynecological self-help, that flourished in the late twentieth century and created a set of portable political tactics based in anarchist feminist philosophy. In the episode, she references Alondra Nelson’s book Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (Minnesota UP, 20...
Linda Eckert, "Enough: Because We Can Stop Cervical Cancer" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
December 05, 2023 09:00 - 24 minutesCervical cancer kills almost 350,000 women each year. What's more horrifying, is that millions have died of this disease that's nearly 100% preventable. It's no secret that healthcare is full of inequities, with a severe lack of accessible screening programs. But women's health care is also impeded by cultural, gender, and political barriers, issues that have combined to create devastating consequences. In Enough: Because We Can Stop Cervical Cancer (Cambridge UP, 2024), Dr Linda Eckert take...
Emma K. Sutton, "William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
December 05, 2023 09:00 - 37 minutesEmma K. Sutton's William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician (U Chicago Press, 2023) is the first book to map William James's preoccupation with medical ideas, concerns, and values across the breadth of his work. William James is known as a nineteenth-century philosopher, psychologist, and psychical researcher. Less well-known is how his interest in medicine influenced his life and work, driving his ambition to change the way American society conceived of itself in body, mind, and...
Coleen T. Murphy, "How We Age: The Science of Longevity" (Princeton UP, 2023)
December 01, 2023 09:00 - 31 minutesAll of us would like to live longer, or to slow the debilitating effects of age. In How We Age: The Science of Longevity (Princeton UP, 2023), Coleen Murphy shows how recent research on longevity and aging may be bringing us closer to this goal. Murphy, a leading scholar of aging, explains that the study of model systems, particularly simple invertebrate animals, combined with breakthroughs in genomic methods, have allowed scientists to probe the molecular mechanisms of longevity and aging. U...
Stephanie Convery, "After the Count: The Death of Davey Browne" (Penguin Australia, 2020)
November 27, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutesToday we are joined by Stephanie Convery, inequality editor at Guardian Australia, and author of After the Count: The Death of Davey Browne (Penguin Australia, 2020). In our conversation, we discussed the history of boxing in Australia, the failures that explain Davey Browne’s death in Sydney in 2015, the nature of violence in sport, and the future of boxing. In After the Count, Convery blends the genres of history, reportage, and memoir to explore the death of Davey Browne and shows how this...