This is a fantastic book. I know, I’m late to the game on this one, and I’m not sure why it took me so long to get to it. The premise bummed me out, a little. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is three stories. First, it’s the life story of Henrietta Lacks, a woman who died of cancer at age 31 and whose cells were cultured for use in tissue research. Next, it’s the story of what happened to those cells, whose remarkable ability […]
Going Home
Last summer, as part of my job as a health educator, I visited a woman at her home who had recently given birth. Newborn tests showed that the baby may have had a serious hemoglobin disorder. The woman spoke no English, and in fact her native language was spoken by such a small population that it had taken a lot of work to find an interpreter, who I had on speaker phone. At one point I asked the interpreter to define hemoglobin, explain that her […]
Fault Lines
This book was a huge disappointment. I’m a public health nerd, and my standards for a book about infectious disease is pretty low. Rising Plague didn’t meet them. The book starts with an introduction to multi-drug resistant bacteria, which is illustrated with stories of real patients Dr. Spellberg has treated, and then moves into an exploration of the pharmaceutical industry, and the barriers to creating new antibiotics. This section was pretty successful. The patient case studies are interesting, and I learned quite a bit about pharmaceutical companies, […]
Every moment points toward the aftermath
If you were asked to name every president who was assassinated, would you remember James Garfield? He was president for only a matter of months, part of a generally undistinguished cohort that served between Grant and McKinley. There is no great legislation that we credit to Garfield, no famous speeches or charismatic wife. On the surface, Garfield was nothing more than a generally decent man, a loving father, a good husband–an ineffectual president, although to be fair he spent a third of his term in office dying of a […]
John Snow Knows How to Save the World
London, 1849, you are a doctor and the dreaded disease, Cholera, is literally hitting the city the like the Bubonic plague. Your neighbor was fighting fit on Monday, and Wednesday morning you watched him go out on the corpse cart. The epidemic will go on to take over 50,000 lives before petering out a few months later. But based on its track record, you know it will be back. What do you do? If you’re John Snow, anesthesiologist and part-time medical investigator, you march through […]