Best Joseph Forster Podcasts (2025)

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Jack Hartnell, "Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image" (Princeton UP, 2025) 1:04:56

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6d ago1:04:56

1:04:56

The Wound Man—a medical diagram depicting a figure fantastically pierced by weapons and ravaged by injuries and diseases—was reproduced widely across the medieval and early modern globe. In Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image (Princeton University Press, 2025), Dr. Jack Hartnell charts the emergence and endurance of this striking image, u…

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Breanne Pleggenkuhle and Joseph A. Schafer, "Crime, Corrections, and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Responses and Adaptations in the US Criminal Justice System" (Southern Illinois UP, 2025) 24:20

20d ago24:20

24:20

While COVID-19 lockdowns affected nearly everyone worldwide, feelings of anxiety and fear were exacerbated for those already entangled in the criminal justice system. Scholars recognized the unique opportunity to study crime and the justice system’s response during this period, though they soon realized that determining the pandemic’s effects would…

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Dan Roche, "Eyes by Hand: Prosthetics of Art and Healing" (MIT Press, 2025) 1:05:02

23d ago1:05:02

1:05:02

Eyes by Hand: Prosthetics of Art and Healing (MIT Press, 2025) is a book about artificial eyes—about the artisans and artists who make them, and about the life-changing and sometimes life-saving experience of wearing them, as author Dan Roche has done for 15 years. Eye making is done by hand, for one person at a time, by a very small number of ocul…

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Helen C. Epstein, "Why Live: An Anatomy of Suicide Epidemics" (Columbia Global Reports, 2025) 31:34

25d ago31:34

31:34

What causes suicide epidemics—and how can we prevent them? Many suicides are caused by biological mental illness, but sometimes the suicide rate of a particular group jumps—two-, three-, or even ten-fold—in a short time, behaving like an epidemic. Suicide epidemics unfold more slowly than microbial plagues like flu or malaria, but they happen far t…

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Agnes Arnold-Forster, "The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteenth-Century Britain" (Oxford UP, 2021) 1:01:30

1M ago1:01:30

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Agnes Arnold-Forster's book The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2021) offers the first medical, cultural, and social history of cancer in nineteenth-century Britain. It begins by looking at a community of doctors and patients who lived and worked in the streets surrounding the Middlesex Hospital in London. It fo…

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Christopher Kemp, "Dark and Magical Places: The Neuroscience of Navigation" (Norton, 2022) 50:51

1M ago50:51

50:51

Inside our heads we carry around an infinite and endlessly unfolding map of the world. Navigation is one of the most ancient neural abilities we have―older than language. In Dark and Magical Places: The Neuroscience of Navigation (Norton, 2022), Christopher Kemp embarks on a journey to discover the remarkable extent of what our minds can do. Fueled…

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Susan C. Boyd, "Heroin: An Illustrated History" (Fernwood, 2022) 45:23

1M ago45:23

45:23

Dr. Susan Boyd is a scholar/activist and Distinguished Professor emerita at the University of Victoria. Her research examines a variety of topics related to the history of drug prohibition and resistance to it, drug law and policy, including maternal drug use, maternal/state conflicts, film and culture, radio and print media, heroin assisted-treatm…

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Stacia Kalinoski, "Racing Uphill: Confronting a Life with Epilepsy" (U Minnesota Press, 2025) 31:01

1M ago31:01

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The book, Racing Uphill: Confronting a Life with Epilepsy (U of Minnesota Press, 2025), is a memoir and an educational resource, which tells the story of an Emmy Award-winning TV news Journalist, Stacia Kalinoski. The author's aim is beyond giving an account of her experience of epilepsy, her goal is to sensitize readers and inspire epileptic patie…

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Lewis A. Grossman, "Choose Your Medicine: Freedom of Therapeutic Choice in America" (Oxford UP, 2021) 42:39

2M ago42:39

42:39

Throughout American history, lawmakers have limited the range of treatments available to patients, often with the backing of the medical establishment. The country's history is also, however, brimming with social movements that have condemned such restrictions as violations of fundamental American liberties. This fierce conflict is one of the defin…

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Manuel Barcia, "The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade" (Yale UP, 2020) 48:40

2M ago48:40

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As we now know, epidemics and pandemics are not new phenomena. In her new book The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2020), Manuel Barcia offers a striking rendition of the diseases that swept through the illegal slave trade Atlantic World. In fact, Barcia argues that the h…

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Ayo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China" (U California Press, 2018) 1:12:16

2M ago1:12:16

1:12:16

From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in each of China’s twenty-two provinces, the biggest of which screen some three thousand to four thousand potential donors each year. Given the estimated one t…

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Athena Aktipis, "The Cheating Cell: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer" (Princeton UP, 2020) 57:38

2M ago57:38

57:38

When we think of the forces driving cancer, we don’t necessarily think of evolution. But evolution and cancer are closely linked because the historical processes that created life also created cancer. The Cheating Cell: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer (Princeton UP, 2020) delves into this extraordinary relationship, and shows tha…

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Melody Glenn, "Mother of Methadone: A Doctor's Quest, a Forgotten History, and a Modern-Day Crisis" (Beacon Press, 2025) 43:35

2M ago43:35

43:35

Dr. Melody Glenn was a burned-out emergency physician who had grown to resent the large population of opioid dependent patients passing through her ER. While working at a methadone clinic, she realized how effective harm reduction treatments could be and set out to discover why they weren’t used more broadly. That’s when she found Dr. Marie Nyswand…

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Judith Grisel, "Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction" (Doubleday, 2019) 1:00:13

2M ago1:00:13

1:00:13

Not a lot of authors go from spending their early twenties homeless and addicted to cocaine to becoming one of the world’s leading researchers on the neuroscience of addiction. But Dr. Judith Grisel, in her new book Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction (Doubleday, 2019), uses her personal story to illuminate the ways in which …

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Rehearsals for Dying 1:00:11

2M ago1:00:11

1:00:11

Deena stepped out of the shower and opened her towel in the steam. “Does my breast look weird?” These words irrevocably change the lives of writer Ariel Gore and her wife. As they descend into a world of doctors and tests, medications and insurance, sickness and treatments and hope and pain and more, they discover just how little they truly knew—de…

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Joseph Gfroerer, "War Stories from the Drug Survey: How Culture, Politics, and Statistics Shaped the National Survey on Drug Use and Health" (Cambridge UP, 2018) 57:27

2M ago57:27

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Joseph Gfroerer spent nearly 40 years working as a statistician for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Starting in 1988, when the American drug war was taking its current shape, he led the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), one of the federal governmen…

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Childhood malnutrition and pneumonia in Timor-Leste 31:52

2M ago31:52

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Dr Nick Fancourt is a Horizon Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the Sydney Medical School. He also works as a paediatrician at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead. Nick researches childhood pneumonia, particularly in low and middle income countries. He lived in Timor-Leste from 2018-2020, working with local partners on intitiatives to strengthen commun…

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Rene Almeling, Lisa Campo-Engelstein, Brian T. Nguyen eds., "Seminal: On Sperm, Health, and Politics" (NYU Press, 2025) 40:01

2M ago40:01

40:01

In Seminal: On Sperm, Health, and Politics, Rene Almeling, Lisa Campo-Engelstein, and Brian T. Nguyen come together across disciplines to offer a kaleidoscopic view of the relationship between sperm, health, and the intersecting politics of gender, race, and reproduction. Always insightful and often provocative, the essays in this unprecedented col…

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Ela Przybylo, "Ungendering Menstruation" (U Minnesota Press, 2025) 40:35

2M ago40:35

40:35

Ungendering Menstruation by Ela Przybyło discusses why and how menstrual pain needs to be incorporated into discussions of gender, embodiment, and disability. Honing a "cranky" approach to being a menstruating body expected to accept and embrace trauma, Ungendering Menstruation examines menstrual suppression, toxicity, and the cooptation of menstru…

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Ben Westhoff, "Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic" (Grove Press, 2019) 45:03

2M ago45:03

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Ben Westhoff is an award-winning investigative journalist whose best-selling 2019 book Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic (Grove Press, 2019), was one of the first to take fentanyl seriously as both a social phenomenon and a national threat. Since its release, Westhoff has become a policy exper…

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Richard Scheib, "A Viewing Guide to the Pandemic: Depictions of Plague and Pandemic on Film and TV" (Headpress, 2025) 35:23

2M ago35:23

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Richard Scheib's A Viewing Guide to the Pandemic (Headpress, 2025) is a film book like no other. It opens with the author's first-hand account of the Covid-19 pandemic and life in lockdown. His sense of dread, and anxiety about his state of health, were experiences shared with millions of others across the world. For author Richard Scheib, already …

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Dayna Bowen Matthew, "Just Health: Treating Structural Racism to Heal America" (NYU Press, 2022) 46:53

2M ago46:53

46:53

In the United States, systemic racism is embedded in policies and practices, thereby structuring American society to perpetuate inequality and all of the symptoms and results of that inequality. Racial, social, and class inequities and the public health crises in the United States are deeply intertwined, their roots and manifestations continually p…

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Andréa Becker, "Get It Out: On the Politics of Hysterectomy" (NYU Press, 2025) 28:59

3M ago28:59

28:59

At least one hysterectomy is performed every minute of the year, making it the most common gynecological surgery worldwide. By the age of sixty-five, one out of five people born with a uterus will have it removed. So, why do we seldom talk about this surgery? Highly performed yet overlooked, examining the paradox of hysterectomy begins to unravel t…

Joseph Forster Podcasts

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Three is Company

Joseph Forster, Ryan Kelly, Liam Wood

1
New Books in Medicine

Marshall Poe

1
Jack Hartnell, "Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image" (Princeton UP, 2025) 1:04:56

1
Breanne Pleggenkuhle and Joseph A. Schafer, "Crime, Corrections, and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Responses and Adaptations in the US Criminal Justice System" (Southern Illinois UP, 2025) 24:20

1
Dan Roche, "Eyes by Hand: Prosthetics of Art and Healing" (MIT Press, 2025) 1:05:02

1
Helen C. Epstein, "Why Live: An Anatomy of Suicide Epidemics" (Columbia Global Reports, 2025) 31:34

1
Agnes Arnold-Forster, "The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteenth-Century Britain" (Oxford UP, 2021) 1:01:30

1
Christopher Kemp, "Dark and Magical Places: The Neuroscience of Navigation" (Norton, 2022) 50:51

1
Susan C. Boyd, "Heroin: An Illustrated History" (Fernwood, 2022) 45:23

1
Stacia Kalinoski, "Racing Uphill: Confronting a Life with Epilepsy" (U Minnesota Press, 2025) 31:01

1
Lewis A. Grossman, "Choose Your Medicine: Freedom of Therapeutic Choice in America" (Oxford UP, 2021) 42:39

1
Manuel Barcia, "The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade" (Yale UP, 2020) 48:40

1
Ayo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China" (U California Press, 2018) 1:12:16

1
Athena Aktipis, "The Cheating Cell: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer" (Princeton UP, 2020) 57:38

1
Melody Glenn, "Mother of Methadone: A Doctor's Quest, a Forgotten History, and a Modern-Day Crisis" (Beacon Press, 2025) 43:35

1
Judith Grisel, "Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction" (Doubleday, 2019) 1:00:13

1
Rehearsals for Dying 1:00:11

1
Joseph Gfroerer, "War Stories from the Drug Survey: How Culture, Politics, and Statistics Shaped the National Survey on Drug Use and Health" (Cambridge UP, 2018) 57:27

1
Childhood malnutrition and pneumonia in Timor-Leste 31:52

1
Rene Almeling, Lisa Campo-Engelstein, Brian T. Nguyen eds., "Seminal: On Sperm, Health, and Politics" (NYU Press, 2025) 40:01

1
Ela Przybylo, "Ungendering Menstruation" (U Minnesota Press, 2025) 40:35

1
Ben Westhoff, "Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic" (Grove Press, 2019) 45:03

1
Richard Scheib, "A Viewing Guide to the Pandemic: Depictions of Plague and Pandemic on Film and TV" (Headpress, 2025) 35:23

1
Dayna Bowen Matthew, "Just Health: Treating Structural Racism to Heal America" (NYU Press, 2022) 46:53

1
Andréa Becker, "Get It Out: On the Politics of Hysterectomy" (NYU Press, 2025) 28:59