The Health & Wellness category has 10,602 audiobooks on Listento.it, with an average listener rating of 4.3★ across 58,899 ratings. The most-rated is Take Control of Your Life.
The Anatomy of Melancholy
Summary
The Anatomy of Melancholy is one of the most remarkable books ever written. First published in 1621, and hardly ever out of print since, it is a huge, varied, idiosyncratic, entertaining and learned survey of the experience of melancholy, seen from just about every possible angle that could be imagined. Its subtitle explains much: The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With All the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of It. In Three Maine Partitions with their Several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up. But despite the subtitle’s length, it does not do justice to the immense scope of the study. Nor to its oddness. Robert Burton (1577-1640) was an Oxford scholar, a vicar and a mathematician with a stupendously wide reading habit which was supported by an exceptional memory: he remembered virtually everything he read. However, throughout his life he suffered from depression and was therefore able to bring personal experience to what could have been a dry, if gargantuan academic study. According to traditional medicine, accepted generally by Jacobeans, melancholy was caused by ‘black bile’. But for Burton psychology underpinned all. He divides his book into three Partitions. In 'The First Partition' he looks at causes of melancholy. He addresses diet (good and bad) and appetite; he considers witches and magicians; he surveys any number of physical maladies from ‘phrenzy’ to ‘lycanthropia’. The soul – sensible and rational – is investigated; the passions (envy, malice, anger, discontent, covetousness, love of gaming, pride, overmuch joy) are intricately examined. 'The Second Partition' is dedicated to ‘The Cure of Melancholy’, and Burton discusses physical issues and social positions, while dealing meticulously with such emotional states as envy, ambition, self-love and more. 'The Third Partition' is dedicated to an examination of ‘Love-Melancholy’: beauty, lust, music, amorous tales, bawds – and also religious melancholy. All this hardly reflects the experience of listening to The Anatomy of Melancholy. Burton’s fertile and curious mind dips here, there and everywhere. Classical references abound; the text teems with obscure references to scientists, doctors, philosophers, writers, musicians and politicians from all ages. They are invariably fascinating and in some cases astounding. He is equally fluent in investigating the diaphragm, the pleura, the vena cava, the bladder, the gall and the spleen as he is in acknowledging the role of hypochondria and psychosomatic ailments. In one sentence he refers to the excess habits of Alcibiades, in the next he is evoking Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. In fact quotations from Chaucer and Shakespeare, Juvenal, Lucretius, the Bible, Ariosto and Virgil tumble over one another in a glorious cornucopia. This great text, a monument to English knowledge and invention, once approached is never forgotten. It has informed, delighted and infuriated generations of great men of all disciplines (including Samuel Johnson) down the centuries. It must also be acknowledged that it is as challenging a task to record as exists in English literature. Peter Wickham, no stranger to tough texts, proves undaunted by it: he brings Robert Burton magnificently to the 21st century ear, rendering the Jacobean language, the abstruse references and the unbelievable detail, with a remarkable ease and familiarity. The Anatomy of Melancholy, presented here with all the original quotations in English, is, at last, available on audiobook in its entirety. An accompanying PDF is available with this recording, presenting the famous frontispiece which opens the work and Burton’s verse explanation of it: 'The Argument of the Frontispiece'. Also included are the 'Contents' in full form, giving a helpful overview of this unique and detailed book. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio on our Desktop Site.
Public Domain (P)2020 Ukemi Productions Ltd
Cheating Death
Summary
An unborn baby with a fatal heart defect . . . a skier submerged for an hour in a frozen Norwegian lake . . . a comatose brain surgery patient whom doctors have declared a "vegetable." Twenty years ago all of them would have been given up for dead, with no realistic hope for survival. But today, thanks to incredible new medical advances, each of these individuals is alive and well . . .Cheating Death. In this riveting book, Dr. Sanjay Gupta - neurosurgeon, chief medical correspondent for CNN, and best-selling author- chronicles the almost unbelievable science that has made these seemingly miraculous recoveries possible. A bold new breed of doctors has achieved amazing rescues by refusing to accept that any life is irretrievably lost. Extended cardiac arrest, "brain death," not breathing for over an hour-all these conditions used to be considered inevitably fatal, but they no longer are. Today, revolutionary advances are blurring the traditional line between life and death in fascinating ways. Drawing on real-life stories and using his unprecedented access to the latest medical research, Dr. Gupta dramatically presents exciting accounts of how pioneering physicians and researchers are altering our understanding of how the human body functions when it comes to survival-and why more and more patients who once would have died are now alive. From experiments with therapeutic hypothermia to save comatose stroke or heart attack victims to lifesaving operations in utero to the study of animal hibernation to help wounded soldiers on far-off battlefields, these remarkable case histories transform and enrich all our assumptions about the true nature of death and life.
©2009 Sanjay Gupta (P)2009 Hachette