Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A pandemic is no time to read about an epidemic

Polio: An American Story by David Oshinsky

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IT HAS BEEN FIFTY YEARS since Thomas Francis mounted that podium in Ann Arbor and told the world what it so desperately wanted to hear: an effective polio vaccine had finally been produced. For most Americans today, the euphoria, the pure relief that greeted his announcement, is difficult to understand. They were not alive to experience the memories of polio summers before 1955—the images of shut down movie theaters and empty swimming pools, the panicked warnings of parents to their children, the daily counts of […]

Bellevue ain’t just for crazies any more

Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America's Most Storied Hospital by David Oshinsky

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Bellevue has seen some sh*t. As New York City’s oldest public hospital, Bellevue hospital has been on the front lines of virtually every health crisis that hit our fine shores in the past 280 odd years. In this breathtakingly detailed history, Pulitzer Prize winning author, David Oshinsky (author of the equally cheerful Polio: An American Story), takes readers through this medical institution’s storied past. That description makes it sound like a bit of a snoozer. But, a textbook this is not. This well-paced tome puts […]

An Institution with an Amazing History

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Even if you don’t live in NYC, it’s possible you’ve heard of Bellevue hospital. If not by name, then by the stories told about it. It was the facility that treated the man who had Ebola in New York, and it is the one that had to evacuate patients in plastic medical sleds down over a dozen flights of stairs during Hurricane Sandy when the building lost power. And that’s just the headlines from the last five years. Bellevue is a public hospital, providing care […]



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