You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation

You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation

by Paul A. Offit MD
You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation

You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation

by Paul A. Offit MD

Hardcover

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Overview

One of America’s top physicians traces the history of risk in medicine—with powerful lessons for today
 
Every medical decision—whether to have chemotherapy, an X-ray, or surgery—is a risk, no matter which way you choose. In You Bet Your Life, physician Paul A. Offit argues that, from the first blood transfusions four hundred years ago to the hunt for a COVID-19 vaccine, risk has been essential to the discovery of new treatments. More importantly, understanding the risks is crucial to whether, as a society or as individuals, we accept them.
 
Told in Offit’s vigorous and rigorous style, You Bet Your Life is an entertaining history of medicine. But it also lays bare the tortured relationships between intellectual breakthroughs, political realities, and human foibles. Our pandemic year has shown us, with its debates over lockdowns, masks, and vaccines, how easy it is to get everything wrong. You Bet Your Life is an essential read for getting the future a bit more right.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781541620391
Publisher: Basic Books
Publication date: 09/21/2021
Pages: 272
Sales rank: 510,026
Product dimensions: 9.30(w) x 5.70(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Paul A. Offit, MD, is the director of the Vaccine Education Center, an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and a professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The author of ten works of narrative nonfiction, he lives near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  
 

Table of Contents

Introduction You Bet Your Life 1

Part I Risk 7

Chapter 1 Louis Washkansky: Heart Transplants 11

Chapter 2 Ryan White: Blood Transfusions 41

Chapter 3 Hannah Greener: Anesthesia 67

Part II Oversight 91

Chapter 4 "Jim": Biologicals 95

Chapter 5 Joan Marlar: Antibiotics 105

Chapter 6 Anne Gottsdanker: Vaccines 125

Chapter 7 Clarence Dally: X-Rays 151

Part III Serendipity 169

Chapter 8 Eleven Unnamed Children: Chemotherapy 171

Chapter 9 Jesse Gelsinger: Gene Therapy 183

Epilogue Living with Uncertainty 209

Acknowledgments 221

References 223

Index 241

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