Books by "Paul De Kruif"
4 books found
This book offers a new history of drug use in sport. It argues that the idea of taking drugs to enhance performance has not always been the crisis or ‘evil’ we now think it is. Instead, the late nineteenth century was a time of some experimentation and innovation largely unhindered by talk of cheating or health risks. By the interwar period, experiments had been modernised in the new laboratories of exercise physiologists. Still there was very little sense that this was contrary to the ethics or spirit of sport. Sports, drugs and science were closely linked for over half a century. The Second World War provided the impetus for both increased use of drugs and the emergence of an anti-doping response. By the end of the 1950s a new framework of ethics was being imposed on the drugs question that constructed doping in highly emotive terms as an ‘evil’. Alongside this emerged the science and procedural bureaucracy of testing. The years up to 1976 laid the foundations for four decades of anti-doping. This book offers a detailed and critical understanding of who was involved, what they were trying to achieve, why they set about this task and the context in which they worked. By doing so, it reconsiders the classic dichotomy of ‘good anti-doping’ up against ‘evil doping’. Winner of the 2007 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for the best book in British sports history.
Set in a world of iron lungs, the Great Depression, and a World War, Courage to Heal is based on the true story of a young surgeon who, along with the twentieth century's boldest industrialist, changed the face of American medicine forever. History is brought to vivid life in this novel of an intransigent physician, his fight to provide health care to all, and his undying love for a beautiful nurse who marries the man determined to defeat him. At the height of the Great Depression, Doctor Sidney Garfield saw the thousands of men involved in building the Los Angeles Aqueduct as an opportunity to provide quality affordable health care for workers. He built Contractors General Hospital: a 12-bed hospital in the middle of the Mojave Desert, six miles from the tiny town of Desert Center, California, and began treating sick and injured workers. With the start of WWII, the need for health care¿for shipworkers¿was even greater. Working with industrialist Henry Kaiser, Garfield created the first true health care system in the Richmond shipyards, then opened a hospital in Oakland, still the headquarters of what is now Kaiser Permanente. When WWII was over, the doctor¿s private war began, when the AMA tried to shut down Kaiser (calling it ¿socialist¿) and take away his medical license. Through it all, Garfield persisted in his vision of affordable health care. Kaiser Permanente is the largest HMO in the U.S., serving over 8 million people.ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Paul Bernstein, MD, is a practicing Head and Neck Surgeon, Chair of the Head and Neck Division of the American Cancer Society, and founder of the Kaiser Permanente Historical Society. His novels have won awards at the San Diego Book Awards and the Asilomar Writers¿ Conference. He has appeared as a medical expert on Good Morning America, San Diego television, and was featured on the cover of MD Magazine.
Vaccines have saved more lives than any other single medical advance. Yet today only four companies make vaccines, and there is a growing crisis in vaccine availability. Why has this happened? This remarkable book recounts for the first time a devastating episode in 1955 at Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley, California, thathas led many pharmaceutical companies to abandon vaccine manufacture. Drawing on interviews with public health officials, pharmaceutical company executives, attorneys, Cutter employees, and victims of the vaccine, as well as on previously unavailable archives, Dr. Paul Offit offers a full account of the Cutter disaster. He describes the nation's relief when the polio vaccine was developed by Jonas Salk in 1955, the production of the vaccine at industrial facilities such as the one operated by Cutter, and the tragedy that occurred when 200,000 people were inadvertently injected with live virulent polio virus: 70,000 became ill, 200 were permanently paralyzed, and 10 died. Dr. Offit also explores how, as a consequence of the tragedy, one jury's verdict set in motion events that eventually suppressed the production of vaccines already licensed and deterred the development of new vaccines that hold the promise of preventing other fatal diseases.