Ranked #1
Paul Offit, “Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All” (Basic Books, 2011)
Paul Offit, “Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All” (Basic Books, 2011)
If a parent decides not to vaccinate their children, is that an individual choice, or is it a serious threat to the publ... Read more
25 Mar 2011
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38mins
Ranked #2
Keith Wailoo, “Pain: A Political History” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014)
Keith Wailoo, “Pain: A Political History” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014)
Is pain real? Is pain relief a right? Who decides? In Pain: A Political History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014),K... Read more
20 Jan 2015
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45mins
Ranked #3
Londa Schiebinger, “Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World” (Stanford UP, 2017)
Londa Schiebinger, “Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World” (Stanford UP, 2017)
Londa Schiebinger‘s new book Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Wor... Read more
27 Jun 2018
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42mins
Ranked #4
Hillel D. Braude, “Intuition in Medicine: A Philosophical Defense of Clinical Reasoning” (U Chicago Press, 2012)
Hillel D. Braude, “Intuition in Medicine: A Philosophical Defense of Clinical Reasoning” (U Chicago Press, 2012)
Can we define ‘clinical reasoning’? Is it the ability to marshal the best available evidence to come to adecision within... Read more
12 May 2015
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55mins
Ranked #5
Matthew James Crawford, “The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630-1800” (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2016)
Matthew James Crawford, “The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630-1800” (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2016)
Matthew James Crawford’s new book is a fascinating history of an object that was central to the history of science, tech... Read more
23 Feb 2017
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1hr 3mins
Ranked #6
George E. Vaillant, “Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study” (Harvard UP, 2012)
George E. Vaillant, “Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study” (Harvard UP, 2012)
There are very few studies like the Harvard Grant Study. Started in 1938, it has been following its approximately 200 p... Read more
27 Mar 2014
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51mins
Ranked #7
Robert Aronowitz, “Risky Medicine: Our Quest to Cure Fear and Uncertainty” (U. Chicago Press, 2015)
Robert Aronowitz, “Risky Medicine: Our Quest to Cure Fear and Uncertainty” (U. Chicago Press, 2015)
Statistics have been on the minds of more people than usual in the run-up and post-mortem of this past U.S. presidential... Read more
9 Dec 2016
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1hr 10mins
Ranked #8
Joe Miller, "US of AA: How the Twelve Steps Hijacked the Science of Alcoholism" (Chicago Review Press, 2019)
Joe Miller, "US of AA: How the Twelve Steps Hijacked the Science of Alcoholism" (Chicago Review Press, 2019)
In the aftermath of Prohibition, America’s top scientists joined forces with members of a new group, called Alcoholics A... Read more
7 Jan 2020
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51mins
Ranked #9
Mark Navin, “Values and Vaccine Refusal: Hard Questions in Epistemology, Ethics, and Health Care” (Routledge, 2016)
Mark Navin, “Values and Vaccine Refusal: Hard Questions in Epistemology, Ethics, and Health Care” (Routledge, 2016)
Communities of parents who refuse, delay, or selectively decline to vaccinate their children pose familiar moral and pol... Read more
1 Jul 2016
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1hr 4mins
Ranked #10
David Sinclair, "LifeSpan: Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To" (Simon and Schuster, 2019)
David Sinclair, "LifeSpan: Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To" (Simon and Schuster, 2019)
Today's guest is David Sinclair, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the Paul Glenn Cente... Read more
4 Oct 2019
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1hr
Ranked #11
Eric Topol, "Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again" (Basic Books, 2019)
Eric Topol, "Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again" (Basic Books, 2019)
Medicine has lost its humanity. Doctors no longer have the time to make personal connections with their patients. In his... Read more
7 May 2019
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41mins
Ranked #12
Sally Pipes, “The Pipes Plan: The Top Ten Ways to Dismantle and Replace Obamacare” (Regnery Publishing, 2012)
Sally Pipes, “The Pipes Plan: The Top Ten Ways to Dismantle and Replace Obamacare” (Regnery Publishing, 2012)
In her new book, The Pipes Plan: The Top Ten Ways to Dismantle and Replace Obamacare (Regnery Publishing, 2012), Sally C... Read more
20 Apr 2012
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36mins
Ranked #13
Alex Broadbent, "Philosophy of Medicine" (Oxford UP, 2019)
Alex Broadbent, "Philosophy of Medicine" (Oxford UP, 2019)
Alex Broadbent's Philosophy of Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2019) asks two central questions about medicine: what... Read more
19 Jul 2019
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28mins
Ranked #14
Paul Offit, “Bad Advice: Or Why Celebrities, Politicians, and Activists Aren’t Your Best Source of Health Information” (Columbia UP, 2018)
Paul Offit, “Bad Advice: Or Why Celebrities, Politicians, and Activists Aren’t Your Best Source of Health Information” (Columbia UP, 2018)
You should never trust celebrities, politicians, or activists for health information. Why? Because they are not scientis... Read more
17 Aug 2018
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50mins
Ranked #15
Hilary A. Smith, “Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine” (Stanford UP, 2017)
Hilary A. Smith, “Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine” (Stanford UP, 2017)
Hilary A. Smith’s new book examines the evolution of a Chinese disease concept, foot qi (jiao qi) from its documented or... Read more
25 Sep 2018
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1hr 10mins
Ranked #16
David Wright, “Downs: The History of a Disability” (Oxford UP, 2011)
David Wright, “Downs: The History of a Disability” (Oxford UP, 2011)
David Wright‘s 2011 book Downs: The History of a Disability (Oxford University Press, 2011), offers readers a history th... Read more
30 Sep 2014
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59mins
Ranked #17
Edward Khantzian, “Treating Addiction: Beyond the Pain” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018)
Edward Khantzian, “Treating Addiction: Beyond the Pain” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018)
Treatment of addiction often focuses on abstinence or ‘harm reduction.’ While many people benefit greatly from such appr... Read more
23 Jul 2018
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48mins
Ranked #18
Anita Guerrini, “The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
Anita Guerrini, “The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
Anita Guerrini‘s wonderful new book explores Paris as a site of anatomy, dissection, and science during the reign of Lou... Read more
4 Nov 2015
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1hr 6mins
Ranked #19
Dorothy H. Crawford, “Virus Hunt: The Search for the Origin of HIV” (Oxford UP, 2013)
Dorothy H. Crawford, “Virus Hunt: The Search for the Origin of HIV” (Oxford UP, 2013)
If you think about it, pretty much everything has a history insofar as everything exists in time. Historians, however, u... Read more
16 Oct 2013
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42mins
Ranked #20
Oscar Fernandez, “The Calculus of Happiness” (Princeton UP, 2017)
Oscar Fernandez, “The Calculus of Happiness” (Princeton UP, 2017)
The book discussed here is entitled The Calculus of Happiness: How a Mathematical Approach to Life Adds Up to Health, We... Read more
11 Jun 2017
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53mins