Book Reviews

Speaking for the Dead: The Human Body in Biology and Medicine by D. Gareth Jones and Maja I. Whitaker is a thoughtful and wide-ranging examination of the ethical questions surrounding the human body in biology, anatomy, and medicine.

Medicine After the Holocaust: From the Master Race to the Human Genome and Beyond, edited by Sheldon Rubenfeld, is a powerful collection of essays that examines the relationship between medicine, ethics, human rights, and the lasting lessons of the Holocaust.

Rebecca Messbarger’s The Lady Anatomist: The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini tells the story of Anna Morandi Manzolini, an eighteenth-century wax modeler, anatomist, teacher, and scholar from Bologna, Italy. The book explores not only Morandi’s remarkable life, but also the scientific, cultural, and political world that made her work possible.

Outside the AAHM, Lister may best be remembered for the mouthwash Listerine (which he did not invent but was named after him), but within the history of medicine, he is a towering figure who helped introduce anti-septic surgery to the world. Lindsey Fitzharris tells this tale in her fast-moving popular history.

Mezrich, a transplant surgeon at Wisconsin weaves the history of his field into her personal journey as a transplant surgeon.

Jones, a veteran local journalist, relies on extensive interviews, court records, and news articles to reconstruct the first heart transplant in the south by Richard Lower, a pioneering surgeon.