Nearly all of the advances introduced against the odds by the people in this book still contribute to healing. Julie M. Fenster's riveting tales of the visionaries who pushed forward the boundaries of modern medicine, often at tremendous peril to themselves, is a rich tapestry of the personal stories which support great science, as well as of the groundbreaking science behind those stories. Whether read as a work which complements and adds to The History Channel series, or on its own merits, Mavericks, Miracles and Medicine is a startling reminder of the randomness of human progress -- and of the obsessed geniuses and eccentrics without whom our lives would be vastly different. - Jacket.

"Mavericks, Miracles, and Medicine, the companion volume to The History Channel series of the same name, brings to life the stories behind twenty groundbreaking achievements in the field of medical science." "From Typhoid Mary to Dolly, from Andreas Vesalius's sixteenth century studies in anatomy to John Gibbon Jr.'s development of the heart-lung machine over two decades in the twentieth, here are the healers and dreamers who marched resolutely ahead of their time - and altered the face of medicine for all time."--BOOK JACKET.