You Bet Your Life
From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation
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4.5 • 11 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Offit (Overkill), director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, explores nine major medical advances in this impressive look at history and technology. "Virtually every medical breakthrough has exacted a human price," he writes, and aims to prove that no medical innovations are risk-free. The nine advances he focuses on—transplants, blood transfusions, anesthesia, biologics, antibiotics, vaccines, X-rays, chemotherapy, and genetic engineering—have all "been accompanied by tragedy," and a look back at these lessons, he argues, can prevent them from being repeated. Offit first covers transplants, outlining how, in the mid-1960s, dozens of people died in attempted animal-to-human heart transplants, and early blood transfusions were similarly dangerous up until the 1900s, when blood typing began. All the men involved in early anesthesia trials "met unfortunate ends," and public opinion of biologicals was tainted when a tainted tetanus antiserum killed patients. The way Offit tells the story of each medical advance is fascinating, packed with case studies and characters, including groundbreaking scientists and near-death patients. Ultimately, Offit writes, there's risk associated with all new developments—"We can't wait until we know everything, because we never know everything." This thorough survey is as entertaining as it is informative.
