When Achilles dons his armor, gods and readers alike know the outcome, as does the hero himself. But when the commoner becomes the hero, when, as Dr. Johnson remarked in 1750, the heroes of modern fic
The award-winning author of Seeds of Mortality: The Public and Private Worlds of Cancer examines the complexities of medical decision-making over approving a pill for preventing prostate cancer. In th
Award-winning essayist Stewart Justman traces the inspiration of the pop psychology movement to the utopianism of the 1960s and argues that it consistently misuses the rhetoric that grew out of the ci
The Nocebo Effect documents the transformation of normal conditions into medical problems and brings out the risks that flow from this inflationary practice. One notable risk is that people labeled as
