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

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

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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.

ISBN-13: 9781541620391

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Basic Books

Publication Date: 09-21-2021

Pages: 272

Product Dimensions: 9.30(w) x 5.70(h) x 0.80(d)

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 non-fiction, he lives in Philadelphia, PA.

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