Here are 100 books that Flexible Bodies fans have personally recommended if you like
Flexible Bodies.
Book DNA is a community of 13,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I’ve been interested in medicine and how stories influence the decisions that people make for as long as I can remember. Watching family and friends make choices about their own healthcare was always fascinated to me and I was always curious as to why some narratives had more staying power than others. After getting my BA in history, I was lucky enough to talk to someone who suggested that I study folklore. I ended up with both a MA and PhD in folklore and became a professor who studies the intersection of folklore and how it affects the medical decisions we all make in our own lives and the lives of others.
This is an amazing book if you want to understand that disease isn’t just medical, it’s also cultural.
Contagiousreally describes how culture influences how we understand illness and how that affects treatment and care of individuals, including who we blame and how we understand risk.
People like to think of medicine and science as being detached and objective, but this book shows that simply isn’t true.
How should we understand the fear and fascination elicited by the accounts of communicable disease outbreaks that proliferated, following the emergence of HIV, in scientific publications and the mainstream media? The repetition of particular characters, images, and story lines-of Patients Zero and superspreaders, hot zones and tenacious microbes-produced a formulaic narrative as they circulated through the media and were amplified in popular fiction and film. The "outbreak narrative" begins with the identification of an emerging infection, follows it through the global networks of contact and contagion, and ends with the epidemiological work that contains it. Priscilla Wald argues that we…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I’ve been interested in medicine and how stories influence the decisions that people make for as long as I can remember. Watching family and friends make choices about their own healthcare was always fascinated to me and I was always curious as to why some narratives had more staying power than others. After getting my BA in history, I was lucky enough to talk to someone who suggested that I study folklore. I ended up with both a MA and PhD in folklore and became a professor who studies the intersection of folklore and how it affects the medical decisions we all make in our own lives and the lives of others.
I may be a bit biased on this one since Dr. Goldstein is one of my mentors, but this book really shows the power that narrative has when it comes to understanding illness and assessing risk.
Once Upon a Virus very clearly helps us understand why looking at disease and illness from the standpoint of the community is so important. If we want to promote any type of health behavior or change, we must adapt to the specific community instead of expecting the community to change.
Listening to these stories is crucial for public health and I really wish more people would read this book and understand that!
Once Upon a Virus explores how contemporary, or "urban," legends are indicators of culturally complex attitudes toward health and illness. Tracing the rich tradition of AIDS legends in relation to current scholarship on belief, Diane Goldstein shows how such stories not only articulate widespread perceptions of risk, health care, and health policy, they also influence official and scientific approaches to the disease and its management. Notions that appear in narratives of who gets AIDS, how and why, are indicators of broad issues involving health beliefs, concerns, and needs.
I’ve been interested in medicine and how stories influence the decisions that people make for as long as I can remember. Watching family and friends make choices about their own healthcare was always fascinated to me and I was always curious as to why some narratives had more staying power than others. After getting my BA in history, I was lucky enough to talk to someone who suggested that I study folklore. I ended up with both a MA and PhD in folklore and became a professor who studies the intersection of folklore and how it affects the medical decisions we all make in our own lives and the lives of others.
When the pandemic first started and we learned that we would be teaching fully online, I snuck back into my office on campus to grab the books I knew that I would need during the pandemic. This was one of the first books I grabbed because I knew that I needed to reread it before I answered any questions about COVID.
Paula Treichler does an amazing job discussing how disease has an “epidemic of meanings” and how those meaning influence the decisions we make and how we treat others. This book clearly shows how some narratives take hold while others are obscured.
Paula A. Treichler has become a singularly important voice among the significant theorists on the AIDS crisis. Dissecting the cultural politics surrounding representations of HIV and AIDS, her work has altered the field of cultural studies by establishing medicine as a legitimate focus for cultural analysis. How to Have Theory in an Epidemic is a comprehensive collection of Treichler's related writings, including revised and updated essays from the 1980s and 1990s that present a sustained argument about the AIDS epidemic from a uniquely knowledgeable and interdisciplinary standpoint. "AIDS is more than an epidemic disease," Treichler writes, "it is an epidemic…
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
I’ve been interested in medicine and how stories influence the decisions that people make for as long as I can remember. Watching family and friends make choices about their own healthcare was always fascinated to me and I was always curious as to why some narratives had more staying power than others. After getting my BA in history, I was lucky enough to talk to someone who suggested that I study folklore. I ended up with both a MA and PhD in folklore and became a professor who studies the intersection of folklore and how it affects the medical decisions we all make in our own lives and the lives of others.
Women’s voices are often trivialized in healthcare and I’m willing to bet that most women have experienced some form of medicalized sexism while receiving healthcare (I know I have).
Anika Wilson does an amazing job of listening to women’s voices and their experiences in this book, highlighting how important rumors, legend, and gossip are to healthcare.
Informal folk narrative genres such as gossip, advice, rumor, and urban legends provide a unique lens through which to discern popular formations of gender conflict and AIDS beliefs. This is the first book on AIDS and gender in Africa to draw primarily on such narratives. By exploring tales of love medicine, gossip about romantic rivalries, rumors of mysterious new diseases, marital advice, and stories of rape, among others, it provides rich, personally grounded insights into the everyday struggles of people living in an era marked by social upheaval.
I am an author fortunate to be alive because of emergency medical treatments I received as an infant, treatments not available to one of my older sisters who died as a result. That I grew up in Rochester Minnesota—home to the world-famous Mayo Clinic where my father worked as a pediatric endocrinologist—also may have increased my awareness of how illness and its medical treatments can affect a young person’s life.
Peg Kehret brings humor and a genuine can-do attitude to her memoir about being struck by polio when she was twelve years old, leaving her paralyzed in both her arms and legs. The story of her fight to recover and to walk again is enriched by her friendship with fellow patients, the generous love of her family, and the care of a determined nurse. Peg is neither saint nor grouch—just someone you like as much as you admire. This is a feel-good book about a feel-bad topic.
Peg Kehret was stricken with polio when she was twelve years old. At first paralyzed and terrified, she fought her way to recovery, aided by doctors and therapists, a loving family, supportive roommates fighting their own battles with the disease, and plenty of grit and luck. With the humor and suspense that are her trademarks, acclaimed author Peg Kehret vividly recreates the true story of her year of heartbreak and triumph.
I’ve been researching treatment harms for 3 decades and founded RxISK.org in 2012, now an important site for people to report these harms. They’ve been reporting in their thousands often in personal accounts that feature health service gaslighting. During these years, our treatments have become a leading cause of mortality and morbidity, the time it takes to recognize harms has been getting longer, and our medication burdens heavier. We have a health crisis that parallels the climate crisis. Both Green parties and Greta Thunberg’s generation are turning a blind eye to the health chemicals central to this. We need to understand what is going wrong and turn it around.
AIDS was the pandemic before Covid. Unlike Covid, it mobilized people to take the science and efforts to find a cure into their own hands – especially people on the fringes of society. Nothing like this had ever happened before. It appeared to mark a watershed where medicine would become a servant of the people rather than people being enslaved to its commercial priorities. Sadly this is not how things worked out. The discovery of Triple Therapy was a high point of modern medicine but we have gone downhill since then with few if any drugs saving lives the way Triple Therapy did. Impure Science shows you vividly what we are up against.
In the short, turbulent history of AIDS research and treatment, the boundaries between scientist insiders and lay outsiders have been crisscrossed to a degree never before seen in medical history. Steven Epstein's astute and readable investigation focuses on the critical question of "how certainty is constructed or deconstructed," leading us through the views of medical researchers, activists, policy makers, and others to discover how knowledge about AIDS emerges out of what he calls "credibility struggles." Epstein shows the extent to which AIDS research has been a social and political phenomenon and how the AIDS movement has transformed biomedical research practices…
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
Amidst COVID-19, HIV/AIDS is a touchpoint for journalists, scholars, writers, and a public who seek a usable past in understanding the present and making an uncertain future less so. The challenge of how to love, live, and survive amidst pandemics isn't new, I play here on the title of one of the first safer sex books,How to Have Sex in an Epidemic. As someone who studies how activists document their work and how they bring those materials to life today, I'm both fascinated and troubled by pandemic comparisons. These books offer crucial stories and productive tools to think with as we navigate questions of how to survive, and maybe even thrive amidst intersecting pandemics.
One of the best academic books written at convergence of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 pandemics isThe Virus Touch.
Here, Bishnupriya Ghosh showcases how “epidemic media” inform how epidemics are understood and experienced—making this text so relevant right now. She looks at how media—images, numbers, and digital models—whether generated by scientists, artists, or activists enable us to see and understand viruses and bear witness to their effects in new ways.
What is unique about Ghosh’s scholarship is how looks to the environment to study health which illustrates the complex and tangled relationships between epidemics, humans, animals, and media. Ghosh’s rich examples, ranging from modelling viruses to reading test results to tracking infection rates and mortality numbers, ensure that Virus Touch speaks to diverse readers.
In The Virus Touch Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh theorizes "epidemic media" to show how epidemics are mediated in images, numbers, and movements through the processes of reading test results and tracking infection and mortality rates. Scientific, artistic, and activist epidemic media that make multispecies relations sensible and manageable eschew anthropocentric survival strategies and instead recast global public health crises as biological, social, and ecological catastrophes, pushing us toward a multispecies politics of health. Ghosh trains…
I began college as a science major, but then switched to literature from a minor to my major. In graduate school, as I worked on my dissertation (which became my first book), I found that metaphors of the body and health were everywhere in the literary field in the mid-nineteenth century. Suffice it to say that the sciences, including the rapid development of modern medicine, are both fundamental to this period and deeply shape its literary culture. In Mapping the Victorian Social Body, I became fascinated with the history of data visualization. Disease mapping completely transformed the ways we understand space and how our bodies exist within it.
This collection of previously published essays by Charles Rosenberg elaborates many of his ideas about how people make meaning out of epidemics, including his famous theory that epidemics are understood in a dramatic tripartite structure (see “What Is an Epidemic? AIDS in Historical Perspective”). Rosenberg shows not only how the history of medicine illuminates larger themes, but why it matters, both to those of us interested in history and those interested in medical science itself.
Medicine has always had its historians; but until recently it was a history written by and for practitioners. Charles Rosenberg has been one of the key figures in recent decades in opening up the history of medicine beyond parochial concerns and instead viewing medicine in the rich currents of intellectual and social change of the past two centuries. This book brings together for the first time in one place many of Professor Rosenberg's most important essays. The first two sections of essays, focusing on ideas and institutions, are meant at the same time to underline interactions between these realms. The…
I’ve been gay for half my life; the other half I was confused, questioning, and considered a pathologic deviant by the American Psychiatric Association. I am no longer confused, or considered pathologic or deviant. I’m a father, psychiatrist, and author who grew up in Nebraska. I was a good boy, followed all the rules, and lived the life that was expected of me. I fit in but I never felt like I belonged. I took back control of my life and threw off expectations of what I should be. I want others to believe that they can have a richer life by living the life they were meant to live.
Sometimes I regret not having experienced the sex and drugs enjoyed by my contemporaries who came out much younger in life. The Christodora brought me back to reality. The reality of those years was much darker than my fantasies.
Murphy sketches out the diverse group of intertwined characters that inhabit the Christodora, a gentrified building in Manhattan’s East Village. I wanted to be the artistic Mateo who pushes through life’s difficulties to live an actualized life. But I can’t escape that I could have been one of the AIDS victims for whom the activism Murphy describes was so critical. Or I might have been Hector, an AIDS activist who descends into substance abuse after losing his lover.
Christodora recounts the heartbreak of AIDS but ultimately is a story of the healing of broken lives.
“A sprawling account of New York lives under the long shadow of AIDS, it deals beautifully with the drugs that save us and the drugs that don’t.”—The Guardian (Best Books of the Year)
In this vivid and compelling novel, Tim Murphy follows a diverse set of characters whose fates intertwine in an iconic building in Manhattan’s East Village, the Christodora. The Christodora is home to Milly and Jared, a privileged young couple with artistic ambitions. Their neighbor, Hector, a Puerto Rican gay man who was once a celebrated AIDS activist but is now a lonely addict, becomes connected to…
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
As a critical care doctor, I love pausing when taking care of patients in a modern ICU to reflect on how far we’ve come in the care we can provide. I want to be entertained while learning about the past, and so I seek out books on medical history that find the wonder and the beauty (and the bizarre and chilling) and make it come alive. I get excited when medical history can be shared in a way that isn’t dry, or academic. These books all do that for me and capture some part of that crazy journey through time.
This is a memoir that has really stayed with me. It is beautifully written and a compulsive read.
Dr. Verghese describes the world of the deep south on the precipice of the AIDS epidemic. It is his story of being a young doctor, but also the story of the explosion in HIV cases far from the coastal cities that were the epicenters of the epidemic. I found myself crying over the cases he described, and feeling his heart-ache as he battled for individuals with HIV to gain acceptance, support, and treatments in their communities.
