Health & Medicine

A small brown mushroom travels from ritual use in the mountains of central Mexico to university labs and pharmaceutical boardrooms. Along the way it gathers many of the modern age's hopes, from mystical experience outside religion to the next profitable drug.

We like to believe that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, and research on post-traumatic growth seems to agree. This thread argues that much of that research rests on weak methods and on a story we already want to believe. Tracked over time, most people show resilience rather than growth.

Pregnancy and the postpartum remodel the brain more, or at least faster, than adolescence does, making them among the most plastic periods of adult life. The evidence takes apart three old stories about motherhood: idealization, minimization, and the famous "mommy brain."

A book of literary nonfiction, written as a letter to a late mother, that travels through a century of radical clinics: Weimar Berlin, interwar London, postwar France, 1970s Geneva, and New York at the height of the AIDS crisis. What joined them was a horizontal, anti-hierarchical way of caring, drawn from anarchism and organicism alike.

This book is about the cultural connection between love and illness—a connection often referred to in the everyday use as “lovesickness” and all too often automatically assumed. As a specialist...

It was a beautiful day in June on the campus of Mount Holyoke College. I had planned to go strawberry picking, but I found myself instead in the basement of...

I think I would like your “browsing reader” to first open the book at p. 12, and read through to p. 17—to get a quick introduction to Fred Lowe Soper,...

AsylumsIn the early nineteenth century, America, like much of Europe in the same period, embraces the idea that the proper response to serious forms of mental disorder is to put...

Becoming Batman is an examination of a superhero. I was trying to answer a simple question: Is it actually possible for any human to attain the skills and abilities of...

The Alchemy of Meth, to me, is really about the second part of the title, A Decomposition. It is steeped in the materials of meth making, but it is also...

Today’s approach to conceptualizing mental illness, embodied in DSM-IV, is subject to intensifying criticism from multiple quarters. How did such a presumably flawed approach become so immensely influential? The answer...

Before Body Modern, I had mostly focused on the earlier history and cultural politics of anatomy. In A Traffic of Dead Bodies (2002) I argued that, in the 19th century,...

Two phenomena led me to this project. A number of people close to me are recovering addicts of one sort or another, and when I attended meetings with them I...

We tend to view cosmopolitan science as a universal form that is practiced in many places. But, does modern knowledge itself become transformed in the midst of its peregrinations? Relatedly,...

A half century ago a “radical caucus” formed in the American Psychiatric Association. The group, while somewhat small, felt that mental medicine needed to change in the US. The caucus...

I’ve always had an affinity for older people. My first job as a teenager was working in a nursing home where I met a woman who had what was then...

If someone were fanning through the pages of this book at a local bookstore or library, I would encourage them to peruse the first chapter “Targeting a Single Gene: Huntington’s...

If a reader wanted to browse my book, a number of strategies suggest themselves. The introductory chapter is quite brief, but sets out the range of topics I plan to...

Vice and addiction have always been with us. The Age of Addiction shows how entrepreneurs melded vices and addictions into a global economic system of limbic capitalism, outmaneuvering reformers determined...

I call the resulting breathing culture and the architecture it produced respiratory modernism. It describes a new approach to modern architecture...

I am an economist who spent the last 35 years in a medical school training a wide range of post-doctoral fellows and undertaking applied research in an interdisciplinary setting. My...

To explore blind people’s experiences of reading in nineteenth-century Britain and America and to better understand sighted people’s reception of the advent of raised-print books, I...

First, Abandon Binaries All Ye Who Enter Here. Lived life and therefore history are more complicated than simple oppositions...

Trust in American health care has collapsed—from 78% in 1975 to 28% today—and the usual suspects (premiums, medical debt, consolidation, private equity) are treated as separate problems. What if they are all symptoms of one thing: the neoliberal turn that remade the U.S. economy in the 1980s, and swept medicine up in its wake?

While extending lives, we’re ignoring the origins of a brewing crisis. In our era of mindboggling, exorbitant therapeutic advancements, prevention remains the best medicine....

So while I am looking at things historically, I also bring them into the present, to interrogate the concept of “madness” and other states, and to ask how we can do better with mind care.

Deep brain stimulation can restore motor control in people with Parkinson’s disease. Yet access to information about a person’s brain from neuroimaging...

I think the casual reader might be surprised to discover that the military made significant contributions to over half of the vaccines developed in the twentieth century. Just as military interest...

While diligent readers who behave according to the plan should recognize the coherence of this project, it has, I admit, an inescapably far-flung character. The long chapter titles attest to...

Given the declining number of new drugs, and the crisis in the pharmaceutical industry, many are asking what can be done. The Obama administration has proposed a new initiative to help...

One of the strange things about eradication is how it repeatedly arises, phoenix-like, from its setbacks. Fred Lowe Soper paradoxically embraced the cause of disease eradication in the 1930s, just as...

The Burke and Hare anatomy murders were a sensation in their own day, the first serial killings to be reported in the popular press. The story traveled wherever newspapers were...

The standard view of medicine holds that observant clinicians discover diseases in nature. Accordingly, psychiatrists are no different from other doctors. They, too, discern forms of pathology arising from dysfunctions...

Lost to the Collective is an exploration into both the history of suicide and the elusive promises of Soviet socialism and the modern social sciences. Suicide unsettled the Soviets because it...

A Four-Eyed World is a cultural history of one of humanity’s greatest inventions—eyeglasses—that explores their origins, their future in technology, and more. Along the way, I look at everything from the history of deficient eyesight to the stigma surrounding glasses—how people really feel about those who wear them....

In researching and writing this book I did not set out to test any particular theory or promote any particular historical interpretation. The project began with the accidental discovery of...

The opioid crisis is almost always told as a uniquely American tale of corporate greed. But what if it was really the wreckage of a global system, built over more than a century to supply the world with morphine, codeine, and pain pills? This is the hidden history of legal opium—the crop that moved from hand-scored poppy fields through treaties and monopolies into the medicine cabinets of the West.

A small brown mushroom travels from ritual use in the mountains of central Mexico to university labs and pharmaceutical boardrooms. Along the way it gathers many of the modern age's hopes, from mystical experience outside religion to the next profitable drug.

We like to believe that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, and research on post-traumatic growth seems to agree. This thread argues that much of that research rests on weak methods and on a story we already want to believe. Tracked over time, most people show resilience rather than growth.

Pregnancy and the postpartum remodel the brain more, or at least faster, than adolescence does, making them among the most plastic periods of adult life. The evidence takes apart three old stories about motherhood: idealization, minimization, and the famous "mommy brain."

A book of literary nonfiction, written as a letter to a late mother, that travels through a century of radical clinics: Weimar Berlin, interwar London, postwar France, 1970s Geneva, and New York at the height of the AIDS crisis. What joined them was a horizontal, anti-hierarchical way of caring, drawn from anarchism and organicism alike.

This book is about the cultural connection between love and illness—a connection often referred to in the everyday use as “lovesickness” and all too often automatically assumed. As a specialist...

It was a beautiful day in June on the campus of Mount Holyoke College. I had planned to go strawberry picking, but I found myself instead in the basement of...

I think I would like your “browsing reader” to first open the book at p. 12, and read through to p. 17—to get a quick introduction to Fred Lowe Soper,...

AsylumsIn the early nineteenth century, America, like much of Europe in the same period, embraces the idea that the proper response to serious forms of mental disorder is to put...

Becoming Batman is an examination of a superhero. I was trying to answer a simple question: Is it actually possible for any human to attain the skills and abilities of...

The Alchemy of Meth, to me, is really about the second part of the title, A Decomposition. It is steeped in the materials of meth making, but it is also...

Today’s approach to conceptualizing mental illness, embodied in DSM-IV, is subject to intensifying criticism from multiple quarters. How did such a presumably flawed approach become so immensely influential? The answer...

Before Body Modern, I had mostly focused on the earlier history and cultural politics of anatomy. In A Traffic of Dead Bodies (2002) I argued that, in the 19th century,...

Two phenomena led me to this project. A number of people close to me are recovering addicts of one sort or another, and when I attended meetings with them I...

We tend to view cosmopolitan science as a universal form that is practiced in many places. But, does modern knowledge itself become transformed in the midst of its peregrinations? Relatedly,...

A half century ago a “radical caucus” formed in the American Psychiatric Association. The group, while somewhat small, felt that mental medicine needed to change in the US. The caucus...

I’ve always had an affinity for older people. My first job as a teenager was working in a nursing home where I met a woman who had what was then...

If someone were fanning through the pages of this book at a local bookstore or library, I would encourage them to peruse the first chapter “Targeting a Single Gene: Huntington’s...

If a reader wanted to browse my book, a number of strategies suggest themselves. The introductory chapter is quite brief, but sets out the range of topics I plan to...

Vice and addiction have always been with us. The Age of Addiction shows how entrepreneurs melded vices and addictions into a global economic system of limbic capitalism, outmaneuvering reformers determined...

I call the resulting breathing culture and the architecture it produced respiratory modernism. It describes a new approach to modern architecture...

I am an economist who spent the last 35 years in a medical school training a wide range of post-doctoral fellows and undertaking applied research in an interdisciplinary setting. My...

To explore blind people’s experiences of reading in nineteenth-century Britain and America and to better understand sighted people’s reception of the advent of raised-print books, I...

First, Abandon Binaries All Ye Who Enter Here. Lived life and therefore history are more complicated than simple oppositions...

Trust in American health care has collapsed—from 78% in 1975 to 28% today—and the usual suspects (premiums, medical debt, consolidation, private equity) are treated as separate problems. What if they are all symptoms of one thing: the neoliberal turn that remade the U.S. economy in the 1980s, and swept medicine up in its wake?

While extending lives, we’re ignoring the origins of a brewing crisis. In our era of mindboggling, exorbitant therapeutic advancements, prevention remains the best medicine....

So while I am looking at things historically, I also bring them into the present, to interrogate the concept of “madness” and other states, and to ask how we can do better with mind care.

Deep brain stimulation can restore motor control in people with Parkinson’s disease. Yet access to information about a person’s brain from neuroimaging...

I think the casual reader might be surprised to discover that the military made significant contributions to over half of the vaccines developed in the twentieth century. Just as military interest...

While diligent readers who behave according to the plan should recognize the coherence of this project, it has, I admit, an inescapably far-flung character. The long chapter titles attest to...

Given the declining number of new drugs, and the crisis in the pharmaceutical industry, many are asking what can be done. The Obama administration has proposed a new initiative to help...

One of the strange things about eradication is how it repeatedly arises, phoenix-like, from its setbacks. Fred Lowe Soper paradoxically embraced the cause of disease eradication in the 1930s, just as...

The Burke and Hare anatomy murders were a sensation in their own day, the first serial killings to be reported in the popular press. The story traveled wherever newspapers were...

The standard view of medicine holds that observant clinicians discover diseases in nature. Accordingly, psychiatrists are no different from other doctors. They, too, discern forms of pathology arising from dysfunctions...

Lost to the Collective is an exploration into both the history of suicide and the elusive promises of Soviet socialism and the modern social sciences. Suicide unsettled the Soviets because it...

A Four-Eyed World is a cultural history of one of humanity’s greatest inventions—eyeglasses—that explores their origins, their future in technology, and more. Along the way, I look at everything from the history of deficient eyesight to the stigma surrounding glasses—how people really feel about those who wear them....

In researching and writing this book I did not set out to test any particular theory or promote any particular historical interpretation. The project began with the accidental discovery of...

The opioid crisis is almost always told as a uniquely American tale of corporate greed. But what if it was really the wreckage of a global system, built over more than a century to supply the world with morphine, codeine, and pain pills? This is the hidden history of legal opium—the crop that moved from hand-scored poppy fields through treaties and monopolies into the medicine cabinets of the West.