New Books in Medicine

Once upon a time, or so we’ve been told, medical ethics were confined to the patient-doctor relationship. As long as doctors were true to their Hippocratic oaths, as long as they acted with compassion and wisdom, then all expectations were met.

Life is more complicated today, and so is healthcare: an undertaking, like all others, that is influenced by social, political, legal and cultural factors.

Nothing is value-free.

In Bioethics and Biopolitics in Israel: Socio-legal, Political and Empirical Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Professor Shai Lavi and his colleagues have produced a groundbreaking work that offers a novel understanding of Israeli bioethics. It is a milestone in the comparative literature of bioethics.

Bringing together a range of experts, the book's interdisciplinary structure employs a contemporary, sociopolitical-oriented approach to bioethics issues, with an emphasis on empirical analysis, that will appeal not only to scholars of bioethics, but also to students of law, medicine, humanities, and social sciences around the world. Its focus on the development of bioethics in Israel serves as a template for cross-cultural and transcultural research into the moral, ethical, political and social aspects of bioethics.

This episode originally aired on 8/12/2019 and was republished on 8/28/2026.
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Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) was one of the foremost European
intellectuals of the twentieth century. He published hundreds of
articles on modern history and culture, and his books became canonical
works and bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic. His crystal-clear
writing, vast erudition, and ability to make his Marxist analysis
digestible to a wide audience brought him worldwide renown. Yet Hobsbawm
was no academic hermit. Through his globetrotting journalism, he was
embedded in an extraordinary web of politicians, activists, and fellow
intellectuals across Europe, South Asia, and the Americas, including
Manmohan Singh, Che Guevara, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Fernand Braudel,
E. P. Thompson, Arno Mayer, and Salvador Allende.

In The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian (Harvard University Press, 2026), Emile Chabal
traces the origins of Hobsbawm’s ideas and most famous writings by
exploring his scholarly foundations, delving deep into the archives to
uncover hidden links and unexpected conversations that shaped his
pathbreaking work. Going well beyond the Ages series of modern
history books for which Hobsbawm is best known, Chabal offers the first
substantial interpretation of Hobsbawm’s entire body of writing. Indeed,
The Age of Hobsbawm is also a trove of unique insights into
the generations of Marxist writers with whom Hobsbawm was in
conversation—authors whose work continues to shape political debates
globally.
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A series of questions have been sparked by the indigenous urgency of
the moment: What does it mean to live through a world coming undone? How
do people carry on amid rupture, loss, and grief? Decolonial Endurance: Lisu Worldmaking Against Chinese Settler Colonialism (Stanford University Press, 2026) explores
these questions through the turbulent lives of Indigenous Lisu
subsistence farmers in China’s Eastern Himalayas, bordering Myanmar and
Tibet.

Like many of China’s Indigenous borderlands, this
mountainous region has long borne the force of encroaching Chinese state
power. Since the 1980s, the Chinese state has been compelling the Lisu
to give up their subsistence lifeways, move into urban settlements, and
send their children to government boarding schools. In exchange for the
so-called gifts of development—healthcare, income, and education—they
suffer environmental and social catastrophes such as mass landslides,
strange new illnesses, and toxic food.

Drawing on over a decade
of engagement with the Lisu, Ting Hui Lau takes readers into the world
of ex-shamans, heart-pained mothers, restless spirits, and demon-mad
migrants as they grapple with the fallout from state development, which
Lau argues is the latest phase in a centuries-long project of settler
colonialism along China's Southwest frontier. At once a portrayal of
loss and an ethnography of hope, Lau chronicles Lisu worldmaking amid
this destruction, centering their quiet resistance through everyday acts
of communal caretaking. In a time of escalating geopolitical and
ecological crisis, this book calls for a new decolonial politics rooted
in the transformative power of endurance.

Ting Hui Lau (email
address: lau.th@nus.edu.sg) is Assistant Professor of Sociology and
Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. She studies
sociocultural, psychological, and medical anthropology, development and
environmental change, Indigeneity and colonialism, and the borderland
areas of East and Southeast Asia.

Yadong Li is an
anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural
Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship
and research interests can be found here.
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Once dismissed as unscientific, psychoanalytic therapy is proving to be among our most effective medical treatments of any kind - outperforming psychiatric drugs and rivaling vaccines in its power to prevent and heal. Why does it work so well?Perhaps because one of the most controversial figures in psychology was right all along. Neuroscience now confirms much of what Sigmund Freud conjectured over a century ago: our deepest struggles stem, not from chemical imbalances, but from buried memories and unconscious conflicts that no pill can touch.Using enthralling case studies and cutting-edge brain science, pioneering neuroscientist Mark Solms makes the case that psychoanalysis should resume its position as our master theory of the mind. Yet modern research also reveals where Freud got important things wrong. Could correcting these errors make therapy even more effective?As psychiatric diagnoses soar and standard treatments continue to fail many patients, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing (Pegasus, 2026) offers a revolutionary hope: a real science of healing, rooted in the radical idea that our suffering arises from truths we haven't yet faced.
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Jonathan Fuller’s The New Modern Medicine: Disease, Evidence, and Epidemiological Medicine (Oxford UP, 2025) takes the reader on a philosophical tour through scientific medicine, visiting its distinctive problems, particularly problems brought about by the twentieth century fusion of medicine with epidemiology. Drawing on the author’s training in philosophy of medicine, history and philosophy of science, and clinical medicine, the book examines the contours of the ‘epidemiological medicine’ that resulted from this fusion. It dissects several philosophical problems of the new modern medicine while exploring topics such as theories of contagion and cancer, concepts and theories of disease etiology, the nature of chronic diseases and mental disorders, concepts of medical risk, models of medical evidence and medical prediction, the problems of extrapolating from clinical research, therapeutic skepticism, and the future of modern medicine. Expansive, detailed, rigorous, insightful, and refreshingly penetrable, The New Modern Medicine is an ambitious contribution to the philosophy of medicine and to our understanding of scientific medicine. It is available online open access.

This episode is hosted by Alex Broadbent, Professor of Philosophy of Science at Durham University and Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg. He is Director of the Durham-Johannesburg Centre for Philosophy of Epidemiology, Medicine, and Public Health, and co-leads the Measurement Lab in the Institute for Medical Humanities.
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