With the caveat that a lot of work on “misdiagnosed” diseases is crankery, this is a very interesting-looking book, and a few doctors whose science I trust have read it and said it’s a good read, if sort of an emotion-based argument for vegetarianism in the end.

Brain Trust by Colm A. Kelleher on Amazon

Nnnoooo…not off the top of my head, at least…I mean, almost everything I have thinks shit like this is just the best idea ever:

I actually find the subject really interesting on a cellular and molecular level, but I don’t know of any good *books* on it that aren’t incredibly focused on “Nuclear power is evil blah blah blah not ionizing radiation things blah”. 

For the general scientific side of things (including accident dynamics), I’ve always found the IAEA Publications website helpful. For more radiation/medicine-based stuff, the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation and Radiation Emergency Medical Management are worth checking out. REMM has a lot of really good images and explanations if you like the weird medical effects radiation has.

If you’re into radiological accidents, shit like the THERAC-25, Clinic of Zaragoza, and the poorly-reported Costa Rica incident are really interesting. THERAC-25 in particular managed to freak me out when I first read about it a while back. The Goiânia Incident is a good example of why looting old medical clinics is probably a bad idea, no matter how much scrap metal might be in them. 

Actually, I do know a fair deal about forensic pathology, but nothing that would really go well on this blog. I posted several sets of pathology images/explanations on FYMedicalStuff when I was helping out Mariana, which you can find here: Tagged - Forensics. There are a few postmortem pathology images on this blog, as well.

As for bloodwork, I know jack all about that when it goes past cytology, unfortunately. And it’s actually a relatively new concept to actually investigate the cause of death beyond physical trauma, so I’m not sure I’d have anything even if I were good at the subject.

But! I’m currently reading a really good book that goes pretty darn  deep into forensic chemistry, and the history of medicine aspect of it! It’s called “The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York” and is by Deborah Blum. I’ll probably write a review-ish post when I finish it up. So far I can definitely say it’s a fascinating book, that’s amazingly engaging for someone who is terrible at chemistry and chemical analysis (like me), yet my chem major friends have liked it, too. :3 So if you’re looking for forensic bloodwork that involves chemical analysis AND the history of medicine, I can definitely recommend it! Sorry I couldn’t be more help - it’s a subject that fascinates me, but which I have very little on, and am quite slow to pick up in general.

Ooh, a subject I actually know about! Well, somewhat. Most of the history of biology/the biological sciences I’ve gleaned from my school textbooks, which I wouldn’t recommend people read outside of their courses…that’s just silly. But I do know some decent contemporary books about it.

On the history of biology, you can’t get better than A History of the Life Sciences, but unless you’re a bit of a super-into-biology nutter I wouldn’t recommend buying it - I only bring it up if you see it in a library somewhere. In terms of commercial books, I quite like A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology and The Evolution of Biology by MJ Sirks (though I can’t find anywhere that it’s sold :\).

When it comes to the history of medicine, there’s a whole lot out there - The History of Medicine by Bynum and The Discovery of Insulin are a couple good ones, but if you’re looking at the purely human side of medicine and want a really entertaining book, Mary Roach’s Stiff has a surprising amount about the medicine of the living in it. 

That was a bit long, eh? I love reading about this sort of stuff, and outside of medical and historical journals there’s some great literature. It’s a shame it’s not more well-known.

If you only read one book I listed, read Stiff. Seriously. It’s somehow hilarious while still being respectful and revering of the dead, and has a LOT of weird trivia that I would have never known otherwise. 

Unfortunately, the digital age hasn’t led to many reprints of exact copies of vintage illustration plates (though many of the classic illustrations of Audubon and the like are used as solitary figures), but there are some available on Amazon, if you want a collection of the plates. Your best bet is to search by author (e.g. Audubon, Haeckel, etc). There are also a few that deal with specific time periods of scientific illustration, such as Nature Illuminated.

Personally, the best one I know of is Amazing Rare Things: The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery, by David Attinborough et al, though it contains a good deal more writing about the art of scientific illustration than it does artwork itself (though it does contain a fair amount of that, too).