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“Delightful.”—Times Literary Supplement • “Intriguing.”—The Sydney Morning Herald • “Fascinating, well-illustrated.”—Nature • “Altogether surprising and hard to categorise.”—London Review of Books • “There are many stories to be told here, and Bashford tells them well.”—Literary Review

The astonishing history of palmistry and biometrics—from occult physicians to the very foundations of modern science and medicine. 

Why did Isaac Newton read books on chiromancy, the occult science of hand reading that revealed the secrets of the soul? Why did Charles Darwin claim that the hand gave humans dominion over all other species? Why did psychoanalyst Charlotte Wolff climb into the primate cages of the London Zoo, taking hundreds of delicate palm prints? Why did Francis Galton, the father of fingerprinting, take palm prints too? And why did world-leading geneticists study the geometry of palm lines in their search for the secrets of chromosomal syndromes?

Decoding the Hand is an astounding history of magic, medicine, and science, of an enduring search for how our bodily surfaces might reveal an inner self—a soul, a character, an identity. From sixteenth-century occult physicians influenced by the Kabbalah to twentieth-century geneticists, and from criminologists to eugenicists, award-winning historian Alison Bashford takes us on a remarkable journey into the strange world of hand readers, revealing how signs on the hand—its shape, lines, marks, and patterns—have been elaborately decoded over the centuries. Sometimes learned, sometimes outrageously deceptive, sometimes earnest, and, more often than we ever expected, medically and scientifically trained, these palm readers of the past prove to be essential links in the human quest to peer into bodies, souls, minds, and selves. Not only for fortune-telling palmists were the future and the past, health, and character laid bare in the hand, but for other experts in bodies and minds as well: anatomists, psychiatrists, embryologists, primatologists, evolutionary biologists, geneticists, and more.

Drawing telling parallels between the divination promised by palmistry and the appeal to self-knowledge offered by modern genetic testing, Decoding the Hand also makes clear that palm-reading is far from a relic or simple charlatanism. Bashford’s sagacious history of human hands touching and connecting opens wide the essential human pursuit of what lies within and beyond.

Highlighting the ingenuity and resourcefulness of caregivers, the book brims with inspirational stories, practical advice, and creative approaches to problem-solving. Among the issues addressed are:

Becoming a caregiver, whether for a spouse or parent
Dealing with the personality changes caused by dementia, from anxiety and paranoia to hallucinations and impulsive behavior
Keeping dementia sufferers meaningfully involved in life
Handling the emotions and stresses of caregiving
Seeking help through support groups and other sources, including medical professionals, clergy, and other family members The authors, who have both been caregivers themselves, augment their interviewees' stories with connective commentary and their own personal stories. A useful resource section is included to refer readers to associations and help-lines.

Developmental Programming for Infants and Young Children: Volume 1 provides detailed instructions for the use of Volume 2: Early Intervention Developmental Profile, including administration and evaluation techniques, scoring and interpretation of results, validity and reliability of findings, and complete item descriptions. To be used with children functioning in the 0-to-36-month developmental age range. Volume 1 includes the scoring sheet (Volume 2).

Developmental Programming for Infants and Young Children has proven to be an invaluable tool for teachers, therapists, and other professionals who assess and facilitate the development of children functioning primarily in the 0-to-60 month range. The authors address six areas of development: perceptual/fine motor, cognition, language, social/emotional, self-care, and gross motor. Volumes 1, 2, and 3 are designed for use with children functioning in the 0-to-36-month developmental age range, while Volumes 4 and 5 extend assessment and programming guidelines to 5-year (preschool) levels.

Carefully designed and tested by the University of Michigan's Institute for the Study of Mental Retardation and Related Disabilities, all volumes bridge the gap between assessment and program implementation.

Developmental Programming for Infants and Young Children: Volume 3 provides a reservoir of ideas for carrying out planned program objectives. Each developmental area contains sequenced develop mental behaviors that would be expected in a normal child, with adaptations for specific handicapping conditions noted. This volume describes ways to handle, stimulate, and interact with a young child functioning in the developmental age range 0-to-36 months. It can be used by parents for at-home activities.

This volume is available as a set in combination with Volumes 1 and 2.

Developmental Programming for Infants and Young Children has proven to be an invaluable tool for teachers, therapists, and other professionals who assess and facilitate the development of children functioning primarily in the 0-to-60 month range. The authors address six areas of development: perceptual/fine motor, cognition, language, social/emotional, self-care, and gross motor. Volumes 1, 2, and 3 are designed for use with children functioning in the 0-to-36-month developmental age range, while Volumes 4 and 5 extend assessment and programming guidelines to 5-year (preschool) levels.

Carefully designed and tested by the University of Michigan's Institute for the Study of Mental Retardation and Related Disabilities, all volumes bridge the gap between assessment and program implementation.

A groundbreaking examination of the entanglement between psychiatry, art, and art history.

Looking beyond the white walls of art galleries and museums, Kaira M. Cabañas explores art history through the psychiatric wards of the twentieth century, offering a reevaluation of the relationship between madness, making, and the art world and considering the deeply intertwined fields of psychiatry and art. 

Putting aside romanticized myths about “outsider art,” Cabañas argues for a radical revisioning that centers artists in psychiatric settings not as deviants and curiosities but rather as skilled, sophisticated innovators and active participants in shared culture. Beginning with the story of legendary art historian Aby Warburg, whose own psychiatric internment and subsequent recovery serve as a point of departure, the narrative then covers the globe, following visionary reformers such as Nise da Silveira in Brazil and Franco and Franca Basaglia in Italy. The book tracks how psychiatrists collaborated with professional artists and patients to turn clinical spaces into laboratories of liberation. By documenting how patient-artists moved from being subjects of clinical study to recognized cultural producers, Deviant Art Histories demonstrates how art was a primary vehicle for reclaiming their agency. Featuring a diverse cast of figures—including Lygia Clark, Ornette Coleman, and Antonin Artaud—the book offers a powerful testament to art’s ability to break the clinical frame and transform the definition of what it means to be a creative citizen in the modern world. 

For 1,600 years Dioscorides (ca. AD 40–80) was regarded as the foremost authority on drugs. He knew mild laxatives and strong purgatives, analgesics for headaches, antiseptics for wounds, emetics to rid one of ingested poisons, chemotherapy agents for cancer treatments, and even oral contraceptives. Why, then, have his works remained obscure in recent centuries? Because of one small oversight (Dioscorides himself thought it was self-evident): he failed to describe his method for organizing drugs by their affinities. This omission led medical authorities to use his materials as a guide to pharmacy while overlooking Dioscorides' most valuable contribution—his empirically derived method for observing and classifying drugs by clinical testing.

Dioscorides' De materia medica, a five-volume work, was written in the first century. Here revealed for the first time is the thesis that Dioscorides wrote more than a lengthy guide book. He wrote a great work of science. He had said that he discovered the natural order and would demonstrate it by his arrangement of drugs from plants, minerals, and animals. Until John M. Riddle's pathfinding study, no one saw the genius of his system. Botanists from the eighteenth century often attempted to find his unexplained method by identifying the sequences of his plants according to the Linnean system but, while there are certain patterns, there remained inexplicable incoherencies. However, Dioscorides' natural order as set down in De materia medica was determined by drug affinities as detected by his acute, clinical ability to observe drug reactions in and on the body. So remarkable was his ability to see relationships that, in some cases, he saw what we know to be common chemicals shared by plants of the same and related species and other natural product drugs from animal and mineral sources.

Western European and Islamic medicine considered Dioscorides the foremost authority on drugs, just as Hippocrates is regarded as the Father of Medicine. They saw him point the way but only described the end of his finger, despite the fact that in the sixteenth century alone there were over one hundred books published on him. If he had explained what he thought to be self-evident, then science, especially chemistry and medicine, would almost certainly have developed differently. In this culmination of over twenty years of research, Riddle employs modern science and anthropological studies innovatively and cautiously to demonstrate the substance to Dioscorides' authority in medicine.

Discovering Addiction brings the history of human and animal experimentation in addiction science into the present with a wealth of archival research and dozens of oral-history interviews with addiction researchers. Professor Campbell examines the birth of addiction science---the National Academy of Sciences's project to find a pharmacological fix for narcotics addiction in the late 1930s---and then explores the human and primate experimentation involved in the succeeding studies of the "opium problem," revealing how addiction science became "brain science" by the 1990s.

Psychoactive drugs have always had multiple personalities---some cause social problems; others solve them---and the study of these drugs involves similar contradictions. Discovering Addiction enriches discussions of bioethics by exploring controversial topics, including the federal prison research that took place in the 1970s---a still unresolved debate that continues to divide the research community---and the effect of new rules regarding informed consent and the calculus of risk and benefit. This fascinating volume is both an informative history and a thought-provoking guide that asks whether it is possible to differentiate between ethical and unethical research by looking closely at how science is made.

In the seventeenth century, a map of the plague suggested a radical idea—that the disease was carried and spread by humans. In the nineteenth century, maps of cholera cases were used to prove its waterborne nature. More recently, maps charting the swine flu pandemic caused worldwide panic and sent shockwaves through the medical community. In Disease Maps, Tom Koch contends that to understand epidemics and their history we need to think about maps of varying scale, from the individual body to shared symptoms evidenced across cities, nations, and the world.  

Disease Maps begins with a brief review of epidemic mapping today and a detailed example of its power. Koch then traces the early history of medical cartography, including pandemics such as European plague and yellow fever, and the advancements in anatomy, printing, and world atlases that paved the way for their mapping. Moving on to the scourge of the nineteenth century—cholera—Koch considers the many choleras argued into existence by the maps of the day, including a new perspective on John Snow’s science and legacy. Finally, Koch addresses contemporary outbreaks such as AIDS, cancer, and H1N1, and reaches into the future, toward the coming epidemics. Ultimately, Disease Maps redefines conventional medical history with new surgical precision, revealing that only in maps do patterns emerge that allow disease theories to be proposed, hypotheses tested, and treatments advanced.

Diseases Have No Eyes investigates how communities in Central Valley, California deal with Valley Fever, a painful illness caused by a soil fungus. The airborne disease’s symptoms can last from two months to a patient’s lifetime and may be fatal. Nearly a third of the national cases are reported in California, where those infected are disproportionately farmworkers and people incarcerated in the region. Poverty, pollution, and prison expose these groups to cumulative environmental and health risks that deny Valley Fever patients adequate medical treatment.

Sarah M. Rios examines how these populations face racial health disparities and develop strategies of care. She connects environmental justice activists as well as prison advocates and abolitionists who mobilize protests and issue calls to action to the past and ongoing efforts for medical autonomy and healthy communities. Diseases Have No Eyes emphasizes that vulnerable groups have developed an expertise and understanding of Valley Fever out of necessity. In the process, these community members offer an alternative public health response that extends beyond the individual body.

In the series Insubordinate Spaces

Gold Medal Winner, Living Now Book Awards, Inspirational Memoir (Female) 

“An arresting new memoir….”
– Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

Beverly Donofrio, author of Riding in Cars with Boys, says “Dizzy is a testament to the power of hope. Weaver’s courage and strength are so inspiring they encourage the same in the reader.  If all of that isn’t enough, the beauty and agility of the prose may make you regret reaching the last page.” 

In her early thirties, Rachel Weaver woke up dizzy and unable to function. She spent the next ten years seeing more than thirty medical practitioners before receiving a diagnosis, and then another eight years before finding relief from her condition. Dizzy is amedical mystery and a cautionary tale about our broken healthcare system. It is a story about learning to live with life's uncertainty, persevering in the pursuit of answers, and striving to find joy in an imperfect yet beautiful world.

In the late nineteenth century, women physicians began migrating to the American West in remarkable numbers. Drawn by early suffrage laws and a booming population of health seekers, they settled across states such as California, Colorado, and Oregon—places where they might finally practice medicine and participate in politics as full and equal citizens. Over the next several decades, these women became central figures in shaping the region's health landscape. They built hospitals and clinics, championed public health reform, and positioned themselves at the center of the era's defining debates over birth control, abortion, and eugenics. Their legacy is as complex as it is consequential. Doctoring the West tells the stories of these women: the power they wielded, the choices they made, the people they cared for—and those they harmed. Their work transformed the health of the American West and defined the medical politics of the nation.