What is Diseased about?
Every disease has a story. Diseased is a book by Dr Travis Brown, host of This Medical Life, that tells twenty-six of them, one for each letter of the alphabet, from Asbestos to Zoonosis. Each chapter stands alone. Together they trace how our understanding of illness has shifted, from gods and humours to bacteria, viruses, and modern medicine.
Why an A to Z of disease?
Early civilisations believed illness came directly from the gods, which is why priests and healers were often the same person. The ancient Greeks later proposed the four humours: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile, and treated disease as an imbalance between them. It was not until the eighteenth century that scientific observation and experimentation gave us the foundations for understanding cancer, bacteria, viruses, medications, and surgery as we know them today.
Diseased follows that long arc through twenty-six specific stories. Some are funny. Some are tragic. All are true.
Who wrote it, and who reads it?
Diseased is written by Dr Travis Brown, an FRCPA-qualified General Pathologist at Clinpath Pathology and co-host of This Medical Life. The audiobook is narrated by Steve Davis, co-host of This Medical Life and an Australian Podcast Awards Silver winner for Best Interview Podcast in 2021.
A taste of the book
A is for Asbestos. A mineral the ancient Greeks called indestructible and eternal, used for everything from burial shrouds to fireproof clothing, and later linked to mesothelioma decades after exposure. Australia banned it in 2003, but it is still found in the roofs and walls of homes built in the 1960s and 1970s.
J is for Jan de Doot. A Dutch blacksmith who, in 1651, grew tired of professional stone cutters and removed his own bladder stone with a kitchen knife. He survived. The stone, the size of a hen’s egg, was mounted in gold, and a portrait of Jan holding it still hangs in the University of Leiden’s collection.
P is for Plague. From the Justinian Plague of 540 CE to the pandemic that reached Europe in 1347 and killed between 20 and 50 percent of the world’s population, this chapter draws on eyewitness accounts from the people who lived through it, including a chronicler who buried five of his own children.
The remaining chapters cover conditions and figures across the alphabet, including Burking, Cervical cancer screening, Dupuytren, Egyptian medicine, Food allergies, Gout, Haemophilia, Influenza, Kuru, Lead, Melanoma, Ovarian surgery, Q fever, Rickettsia, Smallpox, Typhoid, Urine, Von Willebrand, War, X-rays, and Yellow fever.
