National Network for Equitable Library Service

A dazzling memoir of chronic illness that explores the fraught intersection between pain, language, and gender, by a debut author. Emily Wells spent her childhood dancing through intense pain she assumed was normal for a ballerina pushing her body to its limits. For years, no doctor could tell Wells what was wrong with her, or they told her it was all in her head. In A Matter of Appearance, Wells traces her journey as she tries to understand and define the chronic pain she has lived with all her life.

In February 2003, an undocumented immigrant teen from Mexico lay dying in a prominent American hospital due to a stunning medical oversight—she had received a heart-lung transplantation of the wrong blood type.

With more than one in ten Americans — and more than one in five families — affected, the phenomenon of migraine is widely prevalent and often ignored or misdiagnosed. By his mid-forties, Andrew Levy's migraines were occasional reminders of a persistent illness that he'd wrestled with half his life, though he had not fully contemplated their physical and psychological influence on the individual, family, and society at large.

Essence and emblem of life—feared, revered, mythologized, and used in magic and medicine from earliest times—human blood is now the center of a huge, secretive, and often dangerous worldwide commerce. It is a commerce whose impact upon humanity rivals that of any other business—millions of lives have been saved by blood and its various derivatives, and tens of thousands of lives have been lost. Douglas Starr tells how this came to be, in a sweeping history that ranges through the centuries.

"Excellent...Tucker's chronicle of the world of 17th-century science in London and Paris is fascinating." -The Economist. In December 1667, maverick physician Jean Denis transfused calf's blood into one of Paris's most notorious madmen. Days later, the madman was dead and Denis was framed for murder.

Addiction: What's Really Going On? contains powerful true-life stories woven together to form a tapestry filled with pain, joy, defeat, and success. The entire book is molded around Deborah McCloskey's heartfelt desire for her clients to be free of drugs. Her counseling methods both endeared her as "the counselor to get" and locked her into a decade of searching for better ways to help those she felt were stuck on the merry-go-round of a methadone system.

In this unforgettable, dramatic account of one man's experience as an EMT, Peter Canning relives the nerve-racking seconds that can mean the difference between a patient's death and survival, as he struggles to make the right call, dispense the right medication, or keep a patient's heart beating long enough to reach the hospital. As Canning tells his graphic, gripping war stories—of the lives he saved and lost; of the fear, the nightmares, and the constant adrenaline-pumping thrill of action—we come away with an unforgettable portrait of what it means to be a hero.

A raw, beautiful memoir of a girl born missing an ear, a medical system insistent on saving her from herself, and our culture's desire to "fix" bodies. When Kate Gies was four years old, a plastic surgeon pressed a synthetic ear to the right side of her head and pulled out a mirror. He told her he could make her "whole" - could make her "right" - and she believed him. From the age of four to thirteen, she underwent fourteen surgeries, including skin and bone grafts, to craft the appearance of an outer ear.

Public health is diffuse, divided, and poorly understood. As a policy and practice, public health promotes and protects people and communities. As a field of academic inquiry it provides deep insights into the ways individuals and collectives can work within societies to prevent disease and promote health and health equity. Public health is a broad, intersectoral, and interdisciplinary field of scholarship, activism, policy, and practice with the potential to create and support immense change. This is a story of one hundred years of public health in Alberta.

Set boundaries to sustain yourself and your counselling practice. Setting healthy boundaries. It's a central theme in many counselling sessions, yet something that therapists often struggle to do for themselves. In a profession that is motivated by a desire to help others and relieve suffering, the pressure is always there for therapists to put others' needs before their own. For registered psychologist Nicole Perry, the conversation around therapists' own needs is conspicuously missing.