Reviews
From time to time, a compelling little book arrives on the medical scene... Peitzman's book will be useful to a wide range of readers, from students in the biomedical sciences to researchers to laypersons.
Peitzman takes his readers through both the science and the clinical and ethical issues of transplantation. As a nephrologist himself, he know the medicine from the inside, and has great empathy for the patients he has spent his professional career treating. His mix of science and suffering makes for a fine book, always readable and often moving.
This is a general interest book that takes the reader into a highly specified field of discovery and treatment.
As a physician-historian, Peitzman composes his account of the transformations of kidney disease with an eye to both the present and the past, shifting frequently between his reconstruction of experience and understanding over the centuries with contemporary theory and therapies, often pointing out with a quip the ironies or frustrations of modern health care.
The foregrounding of the patient is not the only merit of this carefully crafted book. It also shows how other disciplines feed into medicine and medical innovation; medicine is not a scientifically isolated occupation.
Book Details
Foreword, by Charles E. Rosenberg
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Swollen with Dropsy
2. Richard Bright's New Disease
3. Sympathy and Flannel
4. Enter the Microscope and the Laboratory
5. Renal Shutdown, a Needle
Foreword, by Charles E. Rosenberg
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Swollen with Dropsy
2. Richard Bright's New Disease
3. Sympathy and Flannel
4. Enter the Microscope and the Laboratory
5. Renal Shutdown, a Needle, and the End of Bright's Disease
6. Inventing Chronic Dialysis
7. Coupled to the Artificial Kidney
8. The Gift of Life
9. Progression and Renewal
Notes
Index