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Interviews with doctors and scholars of medicine about their new books.
This episode features a conversation with Dr. Katie Batza on their recently published book, AIDS in the Heartland: How Unlikely Coalitions Created a B…
Mainstream psychology has long accepted that some people (like those with autism) are naturally more logical and unemotional, while others (like so-ca…
Today I’m speaking with William R. Brody about his book, Uncommon Sense: Rethinking Ordinary Problems in Extraordinary Ways (Johns Hopkins University …
What makes us who we are?Through the stories of seven of his patients, acclaimed Oxford University neurologist Masud Husain shows us how our brains cr…
For nearly a century, every Democratic president—and many Republicans—entered office promising to restructure America’s health care system. Barack Oba…
Jim Downs’ most recent book is Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine. Professor Downs is the Gilder Lehrman-Natio…
Europe's Laboratory: Climate and Health in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cornell UP, 2025) is a history of eighteenth-century naturalists and physicians …
Religion, Spirituality and Public Health: Competing and Complementary Epistemes (British Academy, 2025) focuses on exploring the role of different 'wa…
Between May 1 and May 22, 1863, Union soldiers marched nearly 200 miles through the hot, humid countryside to assault and capture the fortified city o…
Bullet bras, bazookas, bombshells, bikinis. In Atomic Bombshells: How Plastics Shaped Postwar Bodies (Duke UP, 2026), Dr. Isabelle Held challenges the…
We often think of medieval medicine as strange, unhygienic and unscientific, but The Medieval Guide to Healthy Living (Reaktion, 2026) by Dr. Katherin…
Our guest today is Steffan Blayney, the author of Health & Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body. In Heal…
With fasting at an all-time high in popularity, here is an enlightening exploration into the history, science, and philosophy behind the practice—esse…
Hypochondria: In Sickness and in Story (Reaktion, 2026) proposes a bold reimagining of a frequently dismissed condition. Dr. Susannah B. Mintz reframe…
A hard-hitting exposé of how methadone clinics fail people in recovery—and an urgent, unapologetic case for their abolition. Methadone is a life-sav…
Neuroscientific evidence increasingly shows that consciousness is a remarkable but explainable function of a machinelike brain. Alan J. McComas' discu…
In this conversation we hear about Kola’s journey as self-taught coder, business school, learning by doing, and how he is self-funding one person AI c…
Dr. Hanna Pickard has written a revolutionary new paradigm for understanding addiction. Why do people with addiction use drugs self-destructively? W…
In 99 Ways to Die: And How To Avoid Them (St. Martins Press, 2026) emergency medicine doctor Ashley Alker presents an illuminating, hilarious, and pra…
Why is cows' milk, which few nonwhite people can digest, promoted as a science-backed dietary necessity in countries where the majority of the populat…