Tag: medicine

So you’ve got a corpse. What now?

In one of the more interesting (and probably weirder) books we’ve added to the collection recently, Norman Cantor’s After We Die: The Life and Times of the Human Cadaver explores the trip of dead human bodies from end of life through into the ground. Find out what sort of social practices, legal processes, and other fun things get applied to bodies after their primary function has ceased.

It’s a morbidly interesting trip through our customs, medical, and legal systems to find out the rules for cadavers. Recommended for pre-med, pre-law, or anyone else. It’s actually pretty interesting!

Prep for this week’s House by upping your smallpox knowledge

Check out that wicked cover! That’s how you know that, in its day, smallpox was some hardcore business. The wickedly titled Angel of Death: The Story of Smallpox is brought to you by author Gareth Williams, and chronicles how smallpox ravaged humanity. Not to spoil the story or anything, but smallpox is eventually defeated by a rural doctor from the very metal sounding Gloucestershire area in the United Kingdom.

Anyway, beyond the obvious target audience of pre-med and people interested in medical things, on House this week, they’re leading us to believe that smallpox is back like the McRib, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that this is FINALLY lupus’s big week. Regardless, it might be fun to prep by finding out what the real smallpox was like.

Money over medicine in today’s book

How bad is America’s healthcare system? Many already feel that the need to make profit is more important for pharmaceutical companies, but the author of today’s book believes it to be much worse.

White Coat, Black Hat by Carl Eliot contains many purportedly true horror stories from the medical world. Companies letting money jeopardize the testing process, secretly bankrolling every-day physicians, patients as consumers with no chance for advocacy, scholarly research journals depending on drug corporations’ advertising dollars, huge gifts frequently accepted by doctors from companies… It’s a big, scary list! It should be interesting for anyone entering the medical profession, people concerned with patients’ rights and advocacy, or anyone with a shady doctor.