New Books in Medicine

• Kevin J. Tracey, "The Great Nerve: The New Science of the Vagus Nerve and How to Harness Its Healing Reflexes" (Penguin, 2025)

  The vagus nerve is fundamental to our health and vitality, coordinating critical functions from the precise heartbeat we need to exercise or rest to the balance of appetite and digestion. Made up of 200,000 fibers, the vagus nerve sends thousands of electrical signals every second between your brain and your most important organs. Yet despite its essential role in life, important vagus nerve functions have eluded centuries of scientific investigation. Now neurosurgeon and researcher Dr. Kevin Tracey has discovered the previously unknown power of the vagus nerve to reverse inflammation, balance the immune system, treat chronic illness, and keep our organs humming together in harmony.In The Great Nerve: The New Science of the Vagus Nerve and How to Harness Its Healing Reflexes (Penguin, 2025), Dr. Tracey shows us how stimulating the vagus nerve with a tiny electrical implant has the potential to reverse life-altering diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, lupus, MS, diabetes, obesity, stroke, depression, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. If this sounds too good to believe, Dr. Tracey shares stories of patients who have gone from being nearly bedridden to running and dancing, along with the science that makes possible these recoveries. He also explains the evidence for lifestyle strategies like ice baths, meditation, exercise, and breathwork that can maintain and improve vagus nerve function.By opening the door to the new field of neuroimmunology, The Great Nerve  not only revolutionizes how we understand and treat disease, it gives us unprecedented hope for our health. This is the story of your body’s ability to heal itself. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

  --------  

  32:55

  --------

  32:55
• Sarah Bull, "Selling Sexual Knowledge: Medical Publishing and Obscenity in Victorian Britain" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

  What is the relationship between medicine and commerce? In Selling Sexual Knowledge: Medical Publishing and Obscenity in Victorian Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Sarah Bull, an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University, explores the relationships between doctors, sexual reform campaigners, publishers and pornography in the Victorian era. The book charts the struggle to differentiate and define medicine from ‘quackery’, in the context of the rise of commercial forms of publishing and demands for access to contraception. The book uses richly detailed materials, including books and newspapers, court cases, and case studies of the key players who defined the era, and the years that would follow. Challenging myths of sex and Victorian society, and offering a compelling picture of conflicts over key issues such as free speech, contraception, and professional identity, the book will be of wide interest across the arts and humanities, as well as for medicine and science, and is available open access here Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Manchester. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

  --------  

  45:32

  --------

  45:32
• Improving Quality of Care for Patients with Limited English

  In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Leah Karliner. Dr. Karliner is Professor in Residence in the Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco in the United States. She is Director of the Center for Aging in Diverse Communities and Director of the Multiethnic Health Equity Research Center. She is both a practicing general internist and a health services researcher, with expertise in practice-based and communication research. An important aspect of her scholarly work centres on improving quality of care for patients with limited English proficiency, and the goal of her research agenda is aimed at achieving health equity through improved communication and clinical outcomes. In this episode, Brynn and Leah discuss a 2024 paper that Leah co-authored entitled “Language Access Systems Improvement initiative: impact on professional interpreter utilisation, a natural experiment”. The paper details a study that investigated two ways of improving the quality of clinical care for limited English proficiency (LEP) patients in English-dominant healthcare contexts, by: Certifying bilingual clinicians to use their non-English language skills directly with patients; and Simultaneously increasing easy access to professional interpreters by instituting on-demand remote video interpretation. Brynn and Leah talk about the results of this study and what they mean for improved communication with LEP patients in healthcare. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

  --------  

  41:09

  --------

  41:09
• Judith Weisenfeld, "Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery’s Wake" (NYU Press, 2025)

  In the decades after the end of slavery, African Americans were committed to southern state mental hospitals at higher rates as white psychiatrists listed “religious excitement” among the most frequent causes of insanity for Black patients. At the same time, American popular culture and political discourse framed African American modes of spiritual power as fetishism and superstition, cast embodied worship as excessive or fanatical, and labeled new religious movements “cults,” unworthy of respect. As Judith Weisenfeld argues in Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery’s Wake (NYU Press, 2025), psychiatrists’ notions of race and religion became inextricably intertwined in the decades after the end of slavery and into the twentieth century, and had profound impacts on the diagnosis, care, and treatment of Black patients. This book charts how racialized medical understandings of mental normalcy pathologized a range of Black religious beliefs, spiritual sensibilities, practices, and social organizations and framed them as manifestations of innate racial traits. Importantly, these characterizations were marshaled to help to limit the possibilities for Black self-determination, with white psychiatrists’ theories about African American religion and mental health being used to promote claims of Black people’s unfitness for freedom. Drawing on extensive archival research, Black Religion in the Madhouse is the first book to expose how racist views of Black religion in slavery’s wake shaped the rise of psychiatry as an established and powerful profession. Judith Weisenfeld is the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion and associated faculty in the Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website thereluctantamericanist.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

  --------  

  55:12

  --------

  55:12
• Ewa Herbst, "Visionaries from Lviv: The Story of a Jewish Hospital" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)

  Year 2023 marked 120 years of the Lazarus Jewish Hospital in Lviv (Lwów/Lemberg). This richly illustrated book is a tribute to its place in the once-vibrant Jewish community of the city and in the society at large during the period 1903-1939. Visionaries from Lviv: The Story of a Jewish Hospital (Academic Studies Press, 2024) presents the hospital’s history and its fascinating architecture, its doctors, and its founder, a prominent local Jewish philanthropist Maurycy Lazarus, with the background of the Jewish life in Lviv. The volume also details the history of medicine and medical education in Habsburg Galicia prior to the hospital’s founding, Jewish access to the medical profession, and the impact of Jewish doctors on the path to modernity. It also shows the struggle of women to become doctors. A moving and timely book with contributions from leading historians, scholars, and medical professionals, Visionaries from Lviv is an ode to the once thriving Jewish community in Lviv and a testament to how one person’s dream and commitment can impact the lives of so many. This publication was made possible with support from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund and Gesher Galicia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

  --------  

  1:23:13

  --------

  1:23:13

Plus de podcasts Sciences

Podcasts tendance de Sciences

À propos de New Books in Medicine

New Books in Medicine: Podcasts du groupe