The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump: John Snow and the Mystery of Cholera Review

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(More customer reviews)Broad Street Pump is a good book about how the mystery of the Cholera outbreaks was solved by a determined doctor. During the 19th Century, there were 3 great pandemics that killed large numbers of people in Asia & Europe. The primary killer was cholera, a disease for which there was no known cure.
One physician who sought a cure for cholera was John Snow who was a disciplined individual who suffered from the disdain of the British medical profession. Snow's research led him to the conclusion that cholera's spread was through contaminated drinking water.
In Snow's "grand experiment" he identified a contaminated pump and disabled it and by doing so began the defeat of the disease in London. Snow's work also furthered the development of germ theory and helped debunk the widely held theory of spontaneous generation of diseases.
This is a good book.

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Operators and Promoters: The Story of Molecular Biology and Its Creators Review

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(More customer reviews)Hatch Echols was a well-known biologist. He spent years working on a personal history of his field. After his untimely death, his widow completed the manuscript. This book is the result. It is a history of molecular biology from about 1948 to about 1990. By molecular biology he means the attempt to understand biology using the tools of physics and chemistry. It is a superb book, as makes a fine compiment to the OTHER definitive history of molecular biology, Horace Freeland Judson's "Eighth Day of Creation". Judson's 1979(I think) book was a detailed account of three or four episodes in molecular biology, and stopped at 1970. Echols'book gives a much broader overview, focusing on the questions that arose and the people who answered them. The margins are graced by line drawings of the the major actors, done by the author. The result is a fine account of both the science (briefly) and those who made it. Most of the participants were his friends, and it shows. On the other hand, unlike most books, I am unaware of any animosity or basic unfairness towards any of the participants. Those of you looking for revelations of scandal had best look elsewhere. This is an idyll of discovery. Having studied the subject through textbooks, I enjoyed finding out about the twist and turns, the false starts and blind alleys and leaps in the dark that really lay behind the development of the most exciting science of the last half of the twentieth century. Highly recommended.
This book seems to be languishing in obscurity, and I think Judson's book is out of print. This is deplorable. Another reason to purchase it is because feel Operators and Promoters is a good book to dip into and read a few chapters here and a few there, so you will want to have a copy about the house.
Worth purchasing? Definitely

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Learning to Heal: Development of American Medical Education Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is highly recommended to members of the academic medical profession and in particular those who sit on admission committees. As the author notes in the introduction, the reason for the book was to bring to the fore the fact that medical school was an educatiional process of learning to heal and not a technical training institute. This initial phase is critical for it must last a lifetime.
The fourteen chapters, some of which are previous articles, move from early days to the present. He comments and describes the education scene in early America, the role of the German system, the birth of modern academic medicine and its associated teaching hospital and some assorted ones on finance, state laws, and organized medicine.
The writting is relaxed and clear allowing the book to be read with pleasure and value. The facts are clearly presented in support of his story of the developement of American medical education, warts and all. There are some wonderful word pictures of early days when medical education was not what what we would like to think was in our past.
Hihgly recommended to all MD's but in particular to those with a concern for education and the selection of candidates.

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Frank Julian Sprague: Electrical Inventor and Engineer (Railroads Past and Present) Review

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(More customer reviews)An excellent piece of work about one of the US' most brilliant engineers who has been pretty much under the radar for generations. Sprague belongs on the same stage with Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse as one of those key geniuses that brought the world into the era of electricity and high speed transportation. What they did for their time was as amazing as what electronics has done for our time. And nothing they did has been obsoleted by new discovery or invention, it's only been improved on. Frank Julian Sprague: Electrical Inventor and Engineer (Railroads Past and Present)

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Frank Julian Sprague invented a system for distributing electricity tostreetcars from overhead wires. Within a year, electric streetcars had begun toreplace horsecars, sparking a revolution in urban transportation. Sprague(1857--1934) was an American naval officer turned inventor who worked briefly forThomas Edison before striking out on his own. Sprague contributed to the developmentof the electric motor, electric railways, and electric elevators. His innovationswould help transform the urban space of the 20th century, enabling cities to growlarger and skyscrapers taller. The Middletons' generously illustrated biography isan engrossing study of the life and times of a maverick innovator. (2010)

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Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs Review

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(More customer reviews)Let me preface my remarks by mentioning that I am a practicing radiologist and I also serve as Editor in Chief for the American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR), a scholarly, scientific journal that has been in existence for more than 100 years.
In 1995, an article titled "Science, Creativity, and Serendipity" by Morton A. Meyers was published in the AJR [1]. This was the Glen W. Hartman Lecture of the Society of Gastrointestinal Radiologists of that year. The AJR's Editor at that time, Robert Berk, believed it to be one of the most outstanding papers published during his tenure and commented that "Residents will be fortunate to have this information at the beginning of their careers" (M. A. Meyers, personal communication). Fortunately for us, Dr. Meyers has maintained a continuing interest in the role of serendipity as it applies to major medical breakthroughs, and he published a book on this very topic in March 2007, titled "Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs--When Scientists Find What They're NOT Looking For" [2].
It was my good fortune recently to pick up Dr. Meyers' book and casually begin to leaf through it. To my astonishment, almost everything important in medicine that has developed over the past two centuries came about, to a large extent, through pure serendipity. The book is divided into four parts. Let me list them here in order so you can appreciate Dr. Meyers' approach to this topic:
Part I: The Dawn of a New Era: Infectious Diseases and Antibiotics, the Miracle Drugs
Part II: The Smell of Garlic Launches the War on Cancer
Part III: A Quivering Quartz String Penetrates the Mystery of the Heart
Part IV: The Flaw Lies in the Chemistry, Not the Character: Mood-Stabilizing Drugs, Antidepressants, and Other Psychotropics
Dr. Meyers draws some conclusions at the end of the book that are extremely thought provoking and left me wondering about the current system that exists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for supporting research and funding specific programs. What is most enjoyable about this compelling book is that Dr. Meyers writes this story with exceptional literary skill and without bogging down into highly technical jargon. While this book will be absolutely fascinating to everyone in the medical field, it can be equally appreciated and enjoyed by the interested layperson as well.
Over the years, I have heard a few of the stories to which Dr. Meyers alludes, but never in their entirety and never appreciating how purely serendipitous was the outcome of a particular diverted research project. The author reflects on his own personal experiences during his distinguished career as an abdominal radiologist. Let me quote directly from Dr. Meyers' Preface, page xii: "Most people have had at least one experience in which an unintentional action or inadvertent observation, or perhaps even simple neglect, led to a happy outcome--to something they could not, or would not, have been able to accomplish even if they had tried."
Quoting further from the Preface, page xiii: "This is the essence of serendipity. Although the term has become popularized to serve as the synonym for almost any pleasant surprise, it actually refers to searching for something but stumbling upon an unexpected finding of even greater value--or, less commonly, finding what one is looking for in an unexpected way...But serendipity is not a chance event alone. It is a process in which a chance event is seized upon by a creative person who chooses to pay attention to the event, unravel its mystery, and find a proper application for it."
In the Introduction of the book, page 6, Meyers reflects on "accidents and sagacity." "Sagacity--defined as penetrating intelligence, keen perception, and sound judgment--is essential to serendipity. The men and women who seized on lucky accidents that happened to them are anything but mindless. In fact, their minds typically had special qualities that enabled them to break out of established paradigms, imagine new possibilities, and see that they had found a solution, often to some problem other than the one they were working on. Accidental discoveries would be nothing without keen, creative minds knowing what to do with them." As stated by Louis Pasteur and quoted by the author, "In the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind."
In reading this book, I learned of the very common and recurring theme that the discoverers of major breakthroughs were often reluctant to reveal the chance events that led to their ultimate breakthrough. The true story of what actually occurred often did not surface until late in the investigator's career, sometimes during a Nobel Laureate's acceptance speech. By revealing to us the critical role that chance plays in four major fields of medical advances, infectious disease, cancer, heart disease, and mental illness, Dr. Meyers raises important fundamental questions about how the nation's research dollars are currently spent. In his concluding remarks, he emphasizes the need to foster rather than stifle creativity and for the funders of research not to be so rigid and proscriptive in the way research studies are conducted and research dollars allocated.
For those of you who are involved with medical students and physicians during the formative years of their training, I urge you to obtain this book, read it, and absorb the message, and incorporate it into your views of how creative research should be stimulated and supported. This remarkable book by a fellow abdominal imager will change the way you think as well as provide you with a wonderful reading experience.
[...]

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Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science (Great Discoveries) Review

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(More customer reviews)I still remember the day when, as a kid, I first came across the irrepressible Richard Feynman's memoirs "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman". Within a few hours I was laughing so hard that tears were coming out of my eyes. Whether he was fixing radios 'by thinking', devising novel methods of cutting string beans in a restaurant or cracking the safes at Los Alamos, Feynman was unlike any scientist I had ever come across. Feynman died in 1988 and James Gleick's engaging and masterful biography of him appeared in 1993. Jagdish Mehra's dense, authoritative scientific biography came out in 1996. Since then there has been a kind of "Feynman industry" in the form of tapes, books, transcripts, interviews and YouTube video clips. While this has kept Feynman alive, it has also turned him into a kind of larger-than-life legend who is more famous in the public mind for his pranks and other exploits than for his science. Most laymen will tell you that Feynman was a brilliant scientist but would be hard-pressed to tell you what he was famous for. It's time that we were again reminded of what most contributed to Richard Feynman's greatness- his science. Lawrence Krauss's biography fulfills this role. You could think of Gleick's biography as a kind of Renaissance painting, an elaborate piece of work where he gets everything accurate down to the eyebrows of the men, women and Gods. Krauss's biography is more like the evocative impressionistic art of the French masters, more of a lucid sketch that brings out the essence of Feynman the scientist.
The biography is essentially aimed at explaining Feynman's scientific contributions, their relevance, importance and uniqueness. Thus Krauss wisely avoids pondering over oft-repeated details about Feynman's personal life. He compresses descriptions of Feynman's childhood, the tragic story of his first wife's death and their extremely touching relationship and his time at Los Alamos into brief paragraphs; if we want to learn more we can look up Gleick or Feynman's own memoirs. What concerns Krauss more than anything else is what made Feynman such a great scientist. And he delivers the goods by diving into the science right away and by explaining what made Feynman so different. Perhaps Feynman's most unique and towering ability was his compulsive need to do things from scratch, work out everything from first principles, understand it inside out, backwards and forwards and from as many different angles as possible. Krauss does a great job in bringing out this almost obsessive tendency to divine the truth from the source. It manifested itself at a very early age when Richard was cranking out original solutions to algebra and arithmetic problems in school. And it was paramount in his Nobel Prize winning work.
Krauss succinctly explains how this intense drive to look at things in new ways allowed Feynman to do novel work during his PhD with John Wheeler at Princeton in which he formulated theories that described antiparticles as particles traveling backwards in time. Later Feynman also applied the same approach in using a novel method based on the principle of least action to explain the dizzying mysteries of quantum electrodynamics. Krauss does an admirable job in explaining the physics behind these contributions in layman's terms. Feynman's "sum over histories" prescription involved taking into consideration all of the infinite paths that a particle can take when getting from the beginning to the end point. This was a bizarre and totally new way of looking at things, but then quantum mechanics is nothing if not bizarre. As Krauss describes, the moment of revelation for Feynman came in a meeting where, using his techniques and intellectual prowess, he could finish in a few hours a complicated calculation for mesons that had taken another researcher several months. Krauss also narrates how Feynman brought the same freewheeling, maverick approach to thinking about superfluidity, beta decay, the strong nuclear force, gravity and computing and the book contains the most complete popular scientific treatments of Feynman's thoughts about these important problems that I have seen. The approach did not always work (as it did not in case of superconductivity) but it encouraged other physicists to think in new ways. In fact as Krauss lucidly narrates, Feynman's great influence on physics was not just through the direct impact of his ideas but also through the impact of his unconventional thinking which inspired students and other scientists to think outside the box.
As scientifically brilliant as Feynman was, Krauss also does not gloss over his professional and personal flaws and this biography is not a hagiography. Professionally, Feynman's independent spirit meant that he often would not read the literature and would stay away from mainstream interests which his colleagues were pursuing; while this greatly helped him, on more than one occasion it led to him being scooped. At the same time Feynman also did not care about priority and was generous in sharing credit. As for mentoring, while Feynman was a legendary teacher by way of example, unlike his own advisor John Wheeler he left few bonafide graduate students because of his compulsive tendency to solve problems himself. On a personal basis, probably the most shocking description concerns Feynman's womanizing. It's hard to say how much of it is true, but Krauss describes Feynman's affairs with colleagues' wives, his elaborate methods to seduce women in bars and the personal and emotional entanglements his womanizing caused. At least one fact is jarring; apparently when he was a young professor at Cornell, the boyish-looking Feynman used to pretend to be a graduate student so he could date undergraduates. This kind of behavior would almost certainly lead to strict disciplinary action in a modern university, if not something more drastic. In his early days Feynman was also known for not suffering fools gladly, although he mellowed as he grew older. Later on Krauss details Feynman's more publicly known activities, including his bongo playing, nude painting and his famous demonstration of the failure of the O-rings in the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Feynman's absolute insistence on honesty and truth in science and on reporting the negative results along with the positive ones also comes across, and should be a model for modern scientists. The biography does a good job of demonstrating that in science, true success needs fearlessness, determination and an unwavering belief in your ideas.
Ultimately, it's not Feynman's bongos, nude art and relentless clowning that make him a great man. However, since his death, he has often been perceived that way by the public largely due to the industry that has grown up around him. But Richard Feynman was defined first and foremost by his science and his striking intellectual originality that allowed him to look at the physical world in wholly unanticipated new ways. Krauss's biography performs a timely and valuable service in reminding us why, when we talk about Feynman, we should first talk about his physics.

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Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery Review

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(More customer reviews)The lurid title of Richard Hollingham's "Blood and Guts" is appropriate, considering its gruesome subject matter. The author traces the history of surgery from ancient times, with the disclaimer that he has not attempted to cover the subject in its entirety. Rather, Hollingham surveys significant events in trauma surgery, cardiac surgery, plastic surgery, transplant surgery, and neurosurgery. He points out that early surgeons, well-meaning though they may have been, probably killed more people than they saved. What chance did hapless patients have without x-rays to show the body's inner workings, anesthesia to reduce pain, and antibiotics and sterile operating rooms to prevent infection? The sick and injured were literally at the mercy of whoever was cutting them. Even if the "victim" miraculously survived, he or she was likely to come out of the operation badly mutilated.
Britain's finest surgeon in 1842 was Robert Liston. Although his operations were "messy, bloody, and traumatic," at least he knew enough to work quickly and under relatively clean conditions. Compared to his peers, he had a low mortality rate--one in six. However, he was arrogant and sometimes careless. During one of his operations, he had a three hundred percent mortality rate--two people died in addition to the patient!
We have come a long way from the days of Liston and especially from the time of the Roman physician, Galen. The latter thought that the heart is a furnace and that the body's humours needed to be rebalanced through vomiting, bloodletting, and purging. The annals of medicine are filled with ghastly mistakes, such as a hand transplant that went terribly wrong, hideously botched amputations, crude plastic surgery that disfigured rather than healed, and one of the most repugnant practices of all--prefrontal lobotomies. Some of the saddest and most poignant stories are those of severely wounded and maimed soldiers and the doctors who tried to save them.
"Blood and Guts" celebrates such heroes as Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister, who laid the groundwork for today's emphasis on antisepsis; Walter Lillehei, who with Dick DeWall, worked on a "bubble oxygenator" that served as a heart-lung machine (this would make open heart surgery safer); and Sir Harold Gillies, who dedicated his life to refining the techniques of reconstructive surgery. Richard Hollingham horrifies and fascinates us with his lively and often astonishing accounts of various experimental procedures. Although the book's themes are anything but amusing, Hollingham's crisp and occasionally tongue-in-cheek writing makes this somewhat macabre work a bit more palatable. Still, many readers will be appalled at the ways in which surgeons used human beings as guinea pigs. However risky surgery is now, going under the knife was far more dangerous when surgeons "were prepared to have a go and see what happens." If they failed, they chalked it up to experience. Pity the poor person at whose expense this knowledge was gained.


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Today, astonishing surgical breakthroughs are making limb transplants, face transplants, and a host of other previously un dreamed of operations possible. But getting here has not been a simple story of medical progress. In Blood and Guts, veteran science writer Richard Hollingham weaves a compelling narrative from the key moments in surgical history. We have a ringside seat in the operating theater of University College Hospital in London as world-renowned Victorian surgeon Robert Liston performs a remarkable amputation in thirty seconds—from first cut to final stitch. Innovations such as Joseph Lister's antiseptic technique, the first open-heart surgery, and Walter Freeman's lobotomy operations, among other breakthroughs, are brought to life in these pages in vivid detail. This is popular science writing at it's best.

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A Professor, a President, and a Meteor: The Birth of American Science Review

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(More customer reviews)A classic story in time for the classic holiday. We often think of the Manhattan Project as heralding the age of American scientific supremacy, but Prince demonstrates how that was much more the piece de resistance for our scientific enterprise than it was the opening trumpet. In an age of polemicized and politicized science, a study of how science became foundational in our society is not only enthralling, but vital. This book contributes to that project; how something we might call the scientific spirit--not unlike, or indeed any different from, the creative spirit--drove, not only discoveries, but the evolving American discourse, is a task uniquely suited for the journalistic enterprise. In that charge, Prince excels. An academic survey of the development of the scientific modernity this is not, but that's no weakness; it instead limns the zeitgeist, and the impact (to excuse the pun) one man's calling had on a society still wresting itself from the ancien. Glenn Beck, eat your heart out.

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Medical Firsts: From Hippocrates to the Human Genome Review

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(More customer reviews)As a lay person, I cautiously picked up Medical Firsts thinking I wouldn't understand a word. Surprise, surprise. I not only understood, but was blown away by what I didn't know. Adler made the lives and works of medical pioneers who laid the ground work for what we all take for granted come alive for me. Since I've actively repelled anything remotely connected to science all my life, almost every page had a "wow" factor.
The short chapters made it a lot more readable for me as a science challenged reader. With so much new info, I was grateful to pause after each one to appreciate the enormity of the discovery. I developed a reverence and gratituide to those who overcame enormous social barriers and fought, amazingly, the same hurdles that impede progress today - fear of change, fear of the unknown.
Thanks to Adler, I just might tiptoe back into new bookstore aisles.

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