Böcker av Paul de Kruif

A MAN AGAINST INSANITY describes the remarkable life and career of Dr. John (Jack) Ferguson, a man who began his medical career late in life with the simple goal of becoming a simple country doctor.But Dr. Ferguson was anything but a simple man, and this book provides an insightful description of a tumultuous early life that led to a relentless pursuit of goals motivated by an insatiable need for approval. Despite repeated financial set- backs, a divorce, a heart attack, a barbiturate addiction and several psychiatric hospitalizations, Ferguson persevered and eventually graduated medical school 20 years after he first enrolled. He then realized his dream when he was hired as the town doctor in a small, rural community. The dream didn't last: after only one year, he abruptly abandoned his position and collapsed into a fog of psychosis with grandiose delusions, delusions that led to an attempt to poison his wife and kill himself. Over the next 13 months, Ferguson would be hospitalized three times as a barbiturate psychotic, finally emerging as a "new man." Humbled and compassionate, Fer- guson credited supportive psychotherapy and the warmth of the hospital attendants with helping him find a new direction for life-to serve psychiatric patients.

Paul de Kruif, an American microbiologist and author, was most well-known for writing this classic bestseller, Microbe Hunters. His accounts of fourteen microbe hunting scientists are enlightening, engrossing, and paradoxically humorous and entertaining at the same time. All of which indicate why Microbe Hunters has been on recommended reading lists, influencing many aspiring physicians and scientists, since 1926.These microbe hunters were pioneers searching for knowledge and truth, fighting against death to advance medicine. A few succumbed to the invisible assassins they studied. Their failures, disappointments and triumphs, as they persisted, are deftly presented by the author.

"It manages to delight, and frequently to entrance, old and new readers [and] continues to engage our hearts and minds today with an indescribably brand of affectionate sympathy."-F. Gonzalez-Crussi, from the Introduction An international bestseller, translated into eighteen languages, Paul de Kruif's classic account of the first scientists to see and learn about the microscopic world continues to fascinate new readers. This is a timeless dramatization of the scientists, bacteriologists, doctors, and medical technicians who discovered the microbes and invented the vaccines to counter them. De Kruif writes about how seemingly simple but really fundamental discovers of science-for instance, how a microbe was first viewed in a clear drop of rain water, and when, for the first time, Louis Pasteur discovered that a simple vaccine could save a man from the ravages of rabies by attacking the microbes that cause it.

"First University of Minnesota Press edition, 2007."