Healthcare

The Epidemic: A Global History of AIDS

by Joanathan EngelCopyright (c) 2006.  Although this book is a little over a decade old, most of its history is still relevant to the equation when one speaks of HIV/AIDS. The history of the male-homosexual community combined with the history of IV-drug-user community combined with Asian/African transmissions is still locked in many of the same patterns that were present in 2006. Engel does a strong job of telling their stories and in so doing, telling…

Continue reading

Healthcare

A History of Global Health: Interventions into the Lives of Other People

bg Randall M. PackardCopyright (c) 2016. I chose this book to read because I wanted a tutorial to the field of global health, and I find that histories are interesting tutorials to subjects. The author, unknown to me, is a Johns Hopkins professor of medical history and is known for writing a work on the history of malaria. The book meets my already-high expectations. Written well, it chronicles early attempts to control disease in “foreign”…

Continue reading

Healthcare

The Fever: How Malaria has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years

by Sonia Shah(c) 2010.Especially during the later Bush years, I heard a lot about mosquito nets to prevent malaria. It was a simple intervention that provided real action. Now, I’m told many (actually, most) of those mosquito nets aren’t used to protect those that are sleeping. They are used as fish nets or on only adults, not on more vulnerable children. This little-known fact and more comprises the main storyline in Fever. Written by an…

Continue reading

Healthcare Science

The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine

by Francis S. Collins(c) 2010  My employer (Vanderbilt University Medical Center) is the world’s leader in implementing the ideas around personalized medicine, so I picked up this audiobook to educate me on what’s going on around me while I drove to and from work. In it, I found interesting stories from patients combined with weighty data from the human genome. Collins maintains a warm bedside manner as well as a writer as he does as…

Continue reading

Books Healthcare Science Software-Technology

Resources to Explore

Essential Biostatistics: A Nonmathematical Approach by Harvey MotulskyFundamentals of Biostatistics by Bernard RosnerR for Data Science: Import, Tidy, Transform, Visualize, and Model Data by Hadley Wickham and Garrett GrolemundThe Art of R Programming: A Tour of Statistical Software Design by Norman MatloffFramingham Heart StudyA History of Public Health by George Rosen and Elizabeth FeePublic Health: A Very Short Introduction by Virginia BerridgeThe History of Global Health: Intervention into the Lives of Other Peoples by Randall M. Packard

Continue reading