Michael Stamm’s book Dead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in Twentieth-Century North America (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) begins with the simple but thought-provoking premise that, not too long ago, newspapers were almost exclusively physical objects made out of paper. This meant that producing a newspaper implied industrial production, mills, and a distribution system that could deliver daily-produced issues to individual consumers. But most of all, it meant trees. Lots and lots of trees. Newspapers acquired timber lands, chopped down trees, and managed international supply chains. A simple premise then opens up an entire world of industrial processes that might appear distant from us denizens of the digital age.

In this highly innovative work of media history, Stamm, a Professor of history at Michigan State University, pulls readers into that world, guiding them through newspaper boardrooms in big American cities, lumber camps and company towns across Canada, and laboratories that were experimenting with newsprint waste so as to synthesize new products and squeeze ever more revenue out of the process (who knew that the parent company of the Chicago Tribune was one of the largest manufacturers of synthetic vanilla in the 1950s?). The book will interest communications scholars, media historians, historical scholars of political economy, and many others.

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One was a teenage Jewish girl, forcibly transported from her home in Hungary to a Nazi concentration camp. The other was a British doctor, whose experiences serving in two world wars could not compare to the horrors he saw at the end of the war.

In her book All the Horrors of War: A Jewish Girl, a British Doctor, and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020), Bernice Lerner describes their lives – one of them her mother, the other one of the people who helped save her – and how they intersected when British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen in April 1945. For Rachel Genuth, her life began to change when Hungarian troops marched into the formerly Romanian town of Sighet in September 1940. From that point onward, her family’s lives and those of her neighbors were increasingly restricted until they were deported to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944. While she struggled to survive, H. L. Glyn Hughes, the deputy director of medical services for the British VIII Corps, participated in the Allied liberation of western Europe, an experience that brought him to the Bergen-Belsen camp, where Rachel had been marched ahead of the Soviet advance to the east. Hughes spent the next several months organizing an unprecedented relief operation, trying desperately to save lives of thousands suffering from starvation and disease. Among them was Rachel, who was subsequently evacuated to Sweden, where she began the slow process of restarting her live after having survived so much death.

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In Episode 3 of the Hearing Tracker Podcast, we had the pleasure of interviewing Nicholas Reed, AuD, assistant professor in the Departments of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.   

Dr. Reed discusses his recent work with the ACHIEVE Trial, which is exploring the causal effect that may exist between hearing loss and dementia. He also talks about the importance of best-practice audiological care, especially as it relates to the oncoming over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aid era. Lastly, Dr. Reed highlights the importance of hearing loss accessibility in healthcare settings, with some actionable suggestions for administrators looking to improve accessibility. 

Guest: Dr. Nick Reed, Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins School of Health.

Topic: The Significance of Johns Hopkins' ACHIEVE Trial

Nick joins Dave on the podcast to talk through one of the recent findings from the Lancet Commission on Dementia, which states that one of the strongest preventative actions to stunt the onset and rate of dementia is to encourage use of hearing aids for hearing loss. 

As the two discuss, while this call to action seems very straightforward, the challenge is that the general medical community needs clinical validation in order to buy into the idea of mass screening for hearing loss (i.e. at one's physician checkup). That's what the ACHIEVE trial is set out to answer - whether or not there's a definitive link between hearing aids providing a some sort of positive effect to the rate of cognitive decline and dementia. 

Nick outlines why this randomized control trial has the potential to serve as one of the most significant driving forces to impacting the broad perception surrounding the comorbidities linked to hearing loss and the preventative measures that can be taken to mitigate said comorbidities.

In The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Christopher Newfield diagnoses what he sees as a crisis in American public higher education.

He argues that since roughly the 1980s, American public universities have entered into a devolutionary cycle of defunding brought about by privatization. The influence of private sector practices on public higher education, Newfield argues, has fundamentally shifted the view of higher education in American society from a public good to a private good.

Despite this bleak assessment, Newfield’s book provides a roadmap for how to fix this crisis in public higher education. A central component of his plan is recognizing the university as a public good by acknowledging its wide range of benefits to society and democracy more generally.

Newfield’s book will interest scholars from many disciplines, including higher education, U.S. political history, and the history of inequality in America.

Christopher Newfield is a professor of literature and American studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the history of Latin American student migration to the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. You can reach him at steven.p.rodriguez@vanderbilt.edu and follow his twitter at @SPatrickRod.

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Psychiatry has lagged behind many clinical specialties in recognizing the importance of narrative for understanding and effectively treating disease. With this book, Bradley Lewis makes the challenging and compelling case that psychiatrists need to promote the significance of narrative in their practice as well.

Narrative already holds a prominent place in psychiatry. Patient stories are the foundation for diagnosis and the key to managing treatment and measuring its effectiveness. Even so, psychiatry has paid scant scholarly attention to the intrinsic value of patient stories. Fortunately, the study of narrative outside psychiatry has grown exponentially in recent years, and it is now possible for psychiatry to make considerable advances in its appreciation of clinical stories. Narrative Psychiatry: How Stories Can Shape Clinical Practice (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011) picks up this intellectual opportunity and develops the tools of narrative for psychiatry. Lewis explores the rise of narrative medicine and looks closely at recent narrative approaches to psychotherapy. He uses philosophic and fictional writings, such as Anton Chekhov’s play Ivanov, to develop key terms in narrative theory (plot, metaphor, character, point of view) and to understand the interpretive dimensions of clinical work. Finally, Lewis brings this material back to psychiatric practice, showing how narrative insights can be applied in psychiatric treatments―including the use of psychiatric medications.

Nothing short of a call to rework the psychiatric profession, Narrative Psychiatry advocates taking the inherently narrative-centered patient-psychiatrist relationship to its logical conclusion: making the story a central aspect of treatment.

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School. His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com

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Medical students and physicians-in-training embark on a long journey that, although steeped in scientific learning and technical skill building, includes little guidance on the emotional and interpersonal dimensions of becoming a healer.

On Becoming a Healer: The Journey from Patient Care to Caring about Your Patients (Johns Hopkins University Press) is written for anyone in the health care community who hopes to grow emotionally and cognitively in the way they interact with patients, On Becoming a Healer explains how to foster doctor-patient relationships that are mutually nourishing.

Dr. Saul J. Weiner, a physician-educator, argues that joy in medicine requires more than idealistic aspirations―it demands a capacity to see past the "otherness" that separates the well from the sick, the professional in a white coat from the disheveled patient in a hospital gown. Weiner scrutinizes the medical school indoctrination process and explains how it molds the physician's mindset into that of a task completer rather than a thoughtful professional. Taking a personal approach, Weiner describes his own journey to becoming an internist and pediatrician while offering concrete advice on how to take stock of your current development as a physician, how to openly and fully engage with patients, and how to establish clear boundaries that help defuse emotionally charged situations.

Readers will learn how to counter judgmentalism, how to make medical decisions that take into account the whole patient, and how to incorporate the organizing principle of healing into their practice. Each chapter ends with questions for reflection and discussion to help personalize the lessons for individual learners.

Saul J. Weiner, MD is a professor of medicine, pediatrics, and medical education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the deputy director of the Veterans Health Administration's Center of Innovation for Complex Chronic Healthcare, and the cofounder of the Institute for Practice and Provider Performance Improvement (I3PI).

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School.

His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com

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The Sunday Times tech correspondent brings on Dr Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security, to talk about what we’ve learned about coronavirus (2:55), why we should be wearing face shields (8:25), whether we should sanitise our groceries (11:05), why outdoors is better (12:25), the second wave (13:45), lockdowns (15:05), the differences from 1918 (18:25), how who is getting sick influences the response (23:00), why he’s confident a vaccine is coming (26:45), living with risk (29:25), the importance of leadership (33:00), and what we know about immunity (36:40).

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Professor Clive Shiff is an entomologist who shares fascinating insight into his work. Tune in to discover:

• What sleeping sickness is and how it’s transmitted  
• What it was like living in the African Bush for over two years and coming face-to-face with wild animals
• Where schistosomiasis is found, how it is contracted, and what it does to the body

For two years, Shiff lived in the African bush, where he encountered elephants, rhinoceros, leopards, hippopotamuses, and many other animals face-to-face. He shares his experiences, what he learned during this time, and what he did to avoid deadly parasites and diseases like malaria and sleeping sickness.  

Shiff discusses the efforts to eradicate malaria in the 1950s, parasitic diseases such as sleeping sickness and schistosomiasis, what therapies and sanitations efforts have been implemented in response to schistosomiasis and why it has been so difficult to combat, and how he is trying to improve diagnostics for parasitic diseases. Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK