After being forced to take a sabbatical from work because of her chronic breathing troubles, Jhelum Biswas Bose turned to flowers for solace and healing. Her blossoming connection with flowers deepened her understanding of herself and the world around her. Over the years, she has learnt to recognize and respect the soft energies of blooms with the help of healing therapies such as Bach flower remedies and aromatherapy.

Phoolproof is a complimentary bouquet to flowers, especially Indian flowers, and brings to our plain sight their subtle power and meaning. From the book’s various whorls, Jhelum teaches us how to gainfully use flowers in living spaces, foods, and beauty and healing treatments.

Here are some ways you can incorporate flowers into your daily lifestyle:

Flower essences are flower infusions/concoctions/tinctures that are consumed for healing the mind, body and soul. It is believed that flowers hold the essence or the life force of the plant, and when water is infused with flowers, the imprint of that particular floral energy is taken up by the water crystals and then preserved when diluted with highgrade alcohol.

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If you had to pick just one essential oil for your life, then lavender would surely qualify for the spot. The most versatile of all essential oils, lavender has clean, fresh, floral top notes and subtle, herbaceous undertones. It is antiseptic, analgesic, anti-allergic and an excellent healer. Plus, it has a warm soothing aroma that makes it an ideal single-note perfume for daily wear.

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While eating flowers may seem somewhat exotic, in reality we have been eating quite a few flowers in our meals. The humble cauliflower and broccoli, and the pineapple (a combination of several flowerets), and some spices like clove/ laung, saffron/kesar, star anise and mace/javitri are all flowers used extensively in flavouring dishes.

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Rose essential oil has also been used widely in skin and beauty care. The best way to reap its antiseptic benefits is to add a few drops of the oil into any DIY creams or oil blend. 

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A gentle massage of rose oil works wonders to reduce menopausal symptoms. Very effective for the immune system, the oil protects our body from various viruses and reduces chances of catching viral infections. Try a blend of 30 ml olive oil with two drops of desi gulab oil and four drops of khus oil.

 Get your copy of Phoolproof today!

The Rule of One speaks about the power of social intrapreneurship in the developing world. Colleagues at Intel, Kazi I. Huque and Narayan Sundararajan founded an intrapreneurial venture between Intel and Grameen, called Grameen Intel Social Business, working with Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus. Along with Jacen Greene, they have collected and presented their original and transformational ideas in this book that explores crippling challenges like poverty, healthcare and education which plague the developing world and how problems related to these challenges can be solved in a sustainable and comprehensive manner.

This book tells us that nearly half of the people living in developing countries are yet to benefit from information technology. Peppered with illustrative and useful examples and case studies, The Rule of One provides a comprehensive roadmap for any foundation, development agency and company to engineer solutions to deal with social and economic issues.

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction!

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Take out a world map and a pencil. Draw a circle with the centre in Bangladesh and a radius of 1500 miles.

The circle covers much of India, Pakistan, China and Indonesia, some of the most densely populated countries
in the world. There are more people living inside this circle than outside it, and many of them live in poverty(Quah, 2016).

When people think of economic development in developing countries, they often think of handouts: direct charity, development aid and low-cost loans provided to local governments. However, at the end of the day, the real solution to poverty is economic opportunity through education and jobs. We have seen information technology become a key economic driver in the West. We have seen outsourcing add millions of jobs in India. We have seen banks and microcredit institutions evolve to provide access to credit for the poor. Can we do more to create viable economic solutions using information technology for the impoverished parts of the world?

The Efforts in this area thus far have centred on cheap devices, such as a $100 computer and greater broadband internet access, sometimes coupled with additional services. A typical approach is to donate computers to schools and hospitals, or to set up an Internet-enabled service centre in a remote village. The service centre comes with a promise to serve the low-income community by providing, for example, harvest information, or by processing online forms for land registries that help establish ownership claims. These efforts have only generated limited success in alleviating poverty, because more is needed than just setting up a computer with an internet connection. Entire government bureaucracies and organizations have to be created or redesigned to process this information to produce the required output. But more importantly, there has to be clear cash flow for
the beneficiary—better agricultural information leads to more income, or the ability to process a land registry leads to lower costs. Our approach to information technology adoption is ineffectual without those clear economic benefits.

In 2007, Craig Barrett was the chairman of Intel Corporation. He had previously served as CEO, and in his new role he acted as a technology ambassador travelling the world. In each country he visited, he met with the leaders of the government and major corporations. He talked about the impact of technology on education and healthcare, and he talked about how countries can catalyse their economic growth through the increased
adoption of technology. On one of these trips, he met Muhammad Yunus, who had recently received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on microcredit. Yunus shared the prize with Grameen Bank, which he had established to loan small amounts of money to those in poverty for income-generating purposes, enabling millions of people to alleviate their poverty by establishing access to financial credit.

One of the ideas that came up during their discussion was to create a company to focus on how technology solutions might be designed for low-income populations. Could we create solutions and services that had real tangible benefits? Not for the rich, but for the poor— those who were yet to benefit from the incredible growth of information technology. The company would be set up as a social business, a non-loss and non-dividend
company. In other words, the company would try to recover its operational costs, but if it generated any surplus cash, that would be reinvested into the company to support its mission.

Intel found two employees, Kazi I. Huque and Narayan Sundararajan, who were passionate about and committed to the use of technology for social impact. We, at different points in our Intel tenure, had pitched other business ideas for how to do that, and this was a perfect opportunity. Setting up a business with a goal for social impact is why we are called social entrepreneurs. When that happens within an existing organization, we refer
to ourselves as ‘social intrapreneurs’.

Get your copy of The Rule of One

Manish Sisodia, Delhi’s deputy chief minister and education minister, is the visionary instrumental in ushering in evolutionary change in the public school education system. Recounting his experiences and experiments as an education minister, Shiksha offers blow-by-blow account of this amazing success story.

Read to find out what experiments he did that revolutionized Delhi government schools forever:

Budget: A Game Changer

The Delhi government’s biggest achievement with regard to the education sector has been that in our very first budget the allocation for the education department was doubled.

Infrastructure: Beginning with Basics 

We calculated that to accommodate the present number of students and teachers, and to manage them well, we needed another 30,000 rooms. The solution was to either build new schools or add rooms to the existing ones. We adopted both approaches.

Principals: Empowering Leadership

In Delhi, we have taken crucial steps to strengthen the position of the principals and establish them as responsible leaders.

Teachers: Re-establishing Trust 

I realized that there was a segment of very capable and enthusiastic teachers but because of a few politically inclined or lazy ones the whole system had got a bad name. I kept talking to these teachers and decided to make their ideas an integral part of my vision for our education system.

Mentor-Teacher: A New Tradition 

My advisers, Atishi and Shailendra along with the officers in the Directorate of Education, designed a
framework to initiate the mentorship programme for teachers. 

Parents: Participation with Dignity

Students usually come from localities far removed from the places the teachers inhabit…This is the reason for the limited social interaction between the teachers and the parents of the students after school. This could also be the reason for the lack of communication between them. I felt that it was critically important to break this wall.

Shiksha is available now!

Pico Iyer calls his new book , A Beginner’s Guide to Japan , a “beginner’s guide” not only because it’s aimed at beginners, but mostly because it’s written by one. Being in Japan has taught him to say, “I wonder,” more often than “I think.” The first rule for any foreigner in Japan is not to talk of this- or- that; the second is never to take anything too seriously.

Here we try to understand some reasons why this land of streamlined surfaces and the home of collected inwardness has made the author live in the country for thirty-two years; inspite living all of it on a tourist-visa.

Strangers routinely sleep with their heads on strangers’ shoulders on Japanese trains, and the leaned- upon agree not to flinch. A sign of trust—of community, perhaps……

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Japan is the land of the bento box. Portions are small, and divisions absolute. Everything is in its place— right down to the condiments— and no sauce slops over the side, as it might in a tiffin box in India.

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You can imagine yourself to be anyone— anywhere— for a moment, so long as you accept that you can’t be what or where you choose most of the time.

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Identities are fluid, flexible in Japan, perhaps because reality is not. And in a culture based upon impermanence, you can give yourself up to any disguise, because it doesn’t last.

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The smiles we see in Japan are, less an attempt to get something from us than an attempt to give something.

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The Japanese aesthetic is less about accumulation than subtraction, so that whatever remains is everything.

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In Japan, a great conversationalist is one who listens.

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It is the crowds that make a festival, much more than the spectacle itself. It’s their unembarrassed gasps, the high- pitched cries of delight, the collective roar— the whole sense of being part of a large and happy unit— that gives a public celebration its warmth.

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Japan’s streets are less threatening to women than those of almost any other country…..

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Japan is a society based more on trust than on faith and lack of transparency can be less the enemy of trust than its perfect safeguard.

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Japan’s toilets are famous for their ability to measure your urine sugar, to offer air-conditioning, to produce music to cover up a tinkle, even to self- deodorize.

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The holiest shrine in the land, at Ise, is completely rebuilt every twenty years, and all the twenty- five hundred ceremonial objects and instruments within the shrine are carefully re- created.

A Beginner’s Guide to Japan is a playful and profound guidebook full of surprising, brief and incisive glimpses into Japanese culture.

On 26 July 1999, the Kargil conflict officially ended. The Indian Army announced complete eviction of Pakistani intruders; but a price was paid for it in blood and tears.

Kargil- Untold Stories from the War pays tribute to the do-or-die spirit of the Indian armed forces. The book takes you into the treacherous mountains where some of Indian Army’s bloodiest battles were fought. Interviewing war survivors and martyrs’ families, Rachna Bisht Rawat tells stories of extraordinary human courage, of not just men in uniform but also those who loved them the most.

This blog takes you through a few of those unforgettable moments from the war.

When Kargil martyr Lance Naik Bachan Singh’s son, Lt Hitesh was asked to share some memories of his father, he said he hardly had any.

“We were too young then to understand the enormity of the event. Our father had been shot in the head and my uncle, who was also posted in 2 Raj. Rif., had called up to inform my mother,”says Hitesh, talking clinically about the life-shattering event that left him fatherless at four years of age.

The Army Aviation Corps was awarded two Vir Chakras, one Yudha Seva Medal, three Sena Medals (Gallantry) and one Sena Medal (Distinguished) for its exception role in the

Not only did the daredevil pilots of the Army Aviation Corps initially lift troops and carry material to points close to where the bloodiest battles were fought, they dropped essential supplies to the fighting troops and evacuated over 900 casualties during the war, carrying injured soldiers to field hospitals and martyrs closer to their grieving families. They did this with fearless disregard to enemy small-arms and artillery fire, landing and taking off from makeshift helipads.

The Doctor with a Maroon Beret

The Army Medical Corps remain amongst the unsung heroes of the war. Dr Capt. Vikram Singh Grewal and his team attended to seventy-five casualties during the operations conducted around Muntho Dhalo in the Batalik sector. These came from the attacking units in that area—5 Para, 10 Para, 1/11 GR, 2 Vikas and the Engineers. They also treated two Pakistani POWs.

Devender Pal Singh (retd), of 7 Dogra, proves his mettle off the battlefield.

When the soldiers come running to his tent, they find that Major Devender Pal Singh’s stomach has been ripped open, exposing his intestines, and all the flesh has been blown off his right leg,knee downwards. They quickly drape a blanket around him and carry him across to where an ambulance is waiting. He is driven two and a half hours on a mud track to the closest hospital in Akhnoor. It is a 60-km ride that he endures in excruciating pain.

Carie and his men, who sit crouched on the mountain have experienced enemy rounds falling around them earlier in Siachen. Mentally prepared to die, they know that nothing worse can happen to them now.

Carie has been hit in the head by metal shrapnel. He is lucky to be alive. The men quickly pull him back, remove the pieces and bandage him as best as they can. Col. Shrivastava is shocked to learn of Carie’s injuries and asks him to de-induct while it is still daytime. A bleeding Carie refuses outright, tell him that vacating the position would make the sacrifices of the two men they have already lost worthless since the enemy would move back in.

Endorsing the enemy’s bravery

One of the most heart-warming observations the author made while writing war stories is that soldiers recognize and respect bravery, even if it is the enemy. A perfect example of this is the case of the late Capt. Karnal Sher Khan of the Pakistan Army, who was martyred at Tiger Hill during the Kargil War. Very few people know that the Indian Army was instrumental in the officer being awarded the , Pakistan’s highest gallantry award, which is equivalent to India’s Param Vir Chakra.

A young officer takes off his engagement ring and leaves it behind before heading out for a battle.

The action led by Capt. Anuj Nayyar resulted in the death of nine enemy soldiers and destruction of three MMGs positions of the enemy. For displaying indomitable grit and determination, motivating his men by personal example and making the supreme sacrifice in the true traditions of the Indian Army, Capt. Anuj Nayyar was awarded the Maha Vir Chakra posthumously.

It was a glorious victory but achieved at a very high price. The battalion had lost five of its brave men, including Capt. Batra who had been promoted on the battlefield at Tololing after an earlier victory.

In the fifty-four days of deployment in the war, the 13 J&K Rifles recaptured five heights and won thirty-seven gallantry awards, including two PVCs.

Kargil-Untold Stories of the War is available now.

In his new book, Savarkar – Echoes from a Forgotten Past, historian Vikram Sampath paints a powerful portrait of one of the most contentious political thinkers and leaders of the twentieth century- Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.

A man who simultaneously meant many things to many people – An alleged atheist and a staunch rationalist who strongly opposed orthodox Hindu beliefs and the caste system and dismissed cow worship as mere superstition, Savarkar was also the most vocal political voice for the Hindu community through the entire course of India’s freedom struggle.

Read on to know some facts provided by the book on his ideology and political movement:

“Right from his childhood, Vinayak found the caste system that plagued Hindu society reprehensible.”

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“It was in these very narrow lanes of Tilbhandeshwar that the first modern, organized secret society of young revolutionaries in India took shape. Under sixteen-year-old Vinayak’s stewardship, and Mhaskar and Paage as members, the Rashtrabhakta Samuha, or The Society of Patriots, was formed towards the end of November 1899.”

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“The Congress, Vinayak said, kept harping on about cutting leaves and pouring milk (prayers and petitions) to the poisonous tree. According to him, following the path of the Congress and Gokhale—of peaceful petitions and prayers—might get a few Indians jobs and fanciful titles, but not total independence for the nation.”

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“Vinayak’s Abhinav Bharat was far from a bunch of misguided youth hurling bombs and assassinating random officers. It had a clear road map of how to instigate that ultimate pan-India revolution, taking inspiration from the seeds of 1857, and extinguish the Empire in its massive blaze.”

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“It was into this mysterious and enigmatic world of pain and torture that Vinayak was ushered in the wee hours of the morning. His arrival in the settlement has been recorded as on 30 June 1911.”

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“The radial, seven-winged monstrous jail with a high watchtower at the intersection sent shivers down the spine of many brave hearts. The seven wings, with three storeys each and having a series of cells totalling up to 698, radiated outwards like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. A large bell hung on the tower to raise alarm. Each cell measured 13’6″ by 7’6″. There was a small ventilator at a height of 9’8″ from the ground. The solitary cells were so arranged as to prevent any communication among prisoners. It was named ‘Cellular Jail’ because there were only cells and no barracks.”

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“Many prisoners were let out of the jail for outside work after they had completed six months of stay. In Vinayak’s case, while his solitary confinement of six months ended on 15 January 1912, he was not let out of prison even after he had adhered to all prison norms….On one such hot afternoon, while pulling the grinding mill, Vinayak began panting for breath and felt faint. His stomach was cramped and excruciating pain wracked his body. He fell to the ground and his eyes closed. For a couple of minutes, a sense of nothingness engulfed him. This near-death experience opened his mind to the idea that leaving the body was a far better proposition than making it endure so much pain and suffering.”

Read this well-researched biography to know more about Savarkar’s philosophy and its place in the rise of Hindutva, an idea dominant in Indian politics today.

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Story Time!

Manish Sisodia, Delhi’s deputy chief minister and education minister, is the visionary instrumental in ushering in evolutionary change in the public school education system. Recounting his experiences and experiments as an education minister, this book offers blow-by-blow account of this amazing success story. Shiksha, a book of hope and possibilities, will inspire everyone who is poised to make a difference in society through education.

Read an excerpt from the book below:

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In Delhi, government schools have brought new hope in the education system by scoring a pass percentage of over 96 per cent this year. This is a great class 12 result. The fact that these are the best results in the last twenty-one years makes this an important landmark. What fills me with pride is that in today’s date, there are many Delhi government schools that are preferred over private schools by parents for their wards. Another feather in our cap is that the admission fee of many big private schools has not increased in the last four years. This is because the government got the accounts of these schools checked and found that they had crores of funds lying in surplus. Education departments from all over the country are now keen to visit Delhi government schools to understand what exactly is happening in this city that has drawn such attention! Not just national but many international delegations are paying Delhi a visit just to understand its education model.

During the days of agitation, in 2010–11, Arvind Kejriwal and I would often wonder why education was not at the centre of politics. Why was it that governments never allotted the requisite amount of money in budgets? Why was education not on anyone’s election agenda? In 2015, when Kejriwal was voted in as the chief minister by Delhi, with AAP getting sixty-seven out of seventy seats, it was our turn to answer these questions. We were now answerable to ourselves and the country’s politics. As soon as he became the chief minister, Kejriwal made it clear to all ministers and officers that education was the topmost agenda of his government. After four and a half years since then, as I write the introduction to this book, I can say with a great deal of happiness that our government has changed the people’s perception.

It is a fact that education has not been in focus in political discourse. The reason for this is that it isn’t easy to focus on education while doing political work.

There are two main reasons for this: One, we lack an organizational system in a big way. Usually, all education related decisions are taken by the education minister or the people in the education ministry or the education directorate. If we go by the prevailing norms, there is no need for them to have an experience in or understanding of education. Any person, whose party is in majority and who has been voted in, can become the education minister; any senior IAS officer can become a director or secretary of education. These three are the principal stewards of education, but neither at the Centre nor at the state level is it important for them to have some experience in or understanding of the sector. In my view, those who understand education do not necessarily have the authority to bring about a positive change, and the ones who take decisions mostly lack the understanding. This is one reason for the current dismal situation in India. The other reason, in my opinion, is that there is no instant gratification when it comes to improving education systems as the hard work yields results later. Today’s politics wants instant results. The public expects quick solutions to issues from its government. In such a situation, it becomes easier to pacify them by constructing roads or flyovers, or to float policies such as pension schemes that make a bit of a difference to the lives of people. There has been a tradition to use popular schemes to woo voters but working on education doesn’t just mean building a school. Improving education also means constantly supervising hundreds and thousands of teachers—to ensure that they spend more time in schools, that they attend training programmes, and to make them more accountable. These are enough to make anyone unpopular among teachers but without these, without their support, without putting them in ‘mission mode’, it is impossible to make any improvements in the education sector. This is probably the reason why previous ministers have not made education the focus of their agenda.

In the last four years, many of my well-wishers have commented that we have been doing great work in the sector of education and the country needs development in this arena the most, but we should also float schemes that will make our politics successful. By this they mean winning elections. The success or failure of politics is in future’s womb but, for now, Delhi is proof that if there is political willingness, the country’s growth vis-à-vis education is possible. The Delhi education model is testament to the fact that with extreme diligence and political willpower government schools can be made like private schools even at a time when their performance across the country is underwhelming. Delhi is also an example of how with political interest and honest governance, the steeply rising fees in private schools can be regulated, which is a major source of concern for a lot of parents.

I am writing this book to document this story of transformation, so that people can appreciate these finer points which have been effective in helping the Delhi government change the face of government schools. It is also to familiarize them with the reason behind these efforts because just getting good results and building great structures do not translate to good education. Education is not merely about creating a society equipped with school and college certificates. Education is more than that, much more.

Shiksha is available now!

The Indian Penal Code (IPC) of 1860 was the first ever codification of offences and penalties in India. Chapter VI of the Indian Penal Code provides for ‘Of Offences against the State’, within which falls Section 124A which lays down the offence of ‘sedition’.

Section 124A was amended for the first time in 1898, and thereafter underwent multiple changes in the years 1937, 1948, 1950, 1951 and 1955. After the amendment of 1955, Section 124A has been left untouched by Parliament, and in its present form reads as under:

Sedition.— Whoever, by words, either spoken or written, or by signs, or by visible representation, or otherwise, brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards, the Government established by law in India, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, to which fine may be added, or with imprisonment which may extend to three years, to which fine may be added, or with fine.

The Great Repression will attempt to tell the story of sedition, and the reasons and desirability of its continued existence. Read to know some facts about the Law of Sedition and its origin in India:

The provision on sedition was based on the Libel Act of 1792 enacted in England, and the law settled after that.

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Sedition was categorized as a class of offences against internal public peace not accompanied by or leading to open violence. In fact, there was no such offence of ‘sedition’ known to English law. Rather than have a single offence called sedition, seditious offences were categorized as seditious words, seditious libels and seditious conspiracies.

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On 25 November 1870, the Legislative Council of the governor general led by Stephen amended the IPC by Act XXVII of 1870 and introduced section 124A, which was a revised version of Clause 113 of the draft penal code.

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The position of the law regarding sedition was consistent until 1942 during the Second World War.

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Even if seditious activity was not directed against the government in explicit language but the inference was necessary by implication, it amounted to sedition under Section 124A.

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Sedition under Section 124A of the IPC continued to be a statutory offence as Article 372 of the Constitution provides that any existing law in force in India as on 26 January 1950 would continue to be in force unless explicitly modified or repealed by the legislature.

The Great Repression by Chitranshul Sinha is a trenchant exposition of the history of the sedition law in India. It makes an exceptionally well-researched and strongly argued case against this antiquated and undemocratic tool of repression.

Did you know that the world’s first eye surgeon, who lived 2500 years ago, came from India?
Or that the standard textbook on medicine-for 600 years!-was written by a self-taught
physician from Persia?
Or that it was a seventeenth-century cloth merchant from Europe who discovered microorganisms?

Discover dozens of ‘No way!’ nuggets like these in this fun, info-packed romp through 2500 years of human health and healing by Roopa Pai. And prepare to be gobsmacked, entertained and inspired by the stories behind some of the most significant medical breakthroughs in history, and the extraordinary men and women behind them.

You don’t need to be a doctor to enjoy this book. Here’s why:

I DON’T WANT TO BE A DOCTOR, WHY SHOULD I READ THIS BOOK?

It isn’t the funnest thing in the world to be ill, of course, but there are always compensations. The biggest, fattest silver lining for us who fall ill in the twenty-first century is, well, exactly that—we’ve fallen ill in the twenty-first century!

No, seriously. If you had lived even as recently as 200 years ago, you might have received some pretty bizarre, and/or very painful, treatments for your condition.

A physician/barber/surgeon (more details given in the box on page xii) may have:

• unleashed a whole army of leeches on you, so that they could suck out your ‘bad blood’ (be warned, this treatment hasn’t fallen entirely out of favour, is reputed to have many benefits and may yet make a big comeback);

• drilled a hole into your skull, via a procedure called trepanning, to ‘let the evil spirits out’ (not even kidding; also, just FYI, to spare you some really scary nightmares, this procedure isn’t life-threatening);

• amputated a limb because it was infected—without using anaesthesia (because an effective mixture for numbing pain that didn’t send the patient into fatal shock hadn’t yet been tested—ouch!) and while using surgical instruments that looked more like medieval torture devices than anything else (maybe that was part of the strategy— patients probably passed out from sheer terror the moment they caught sight of the instrument, thus precluding the need for any other kind of knockout drug);

• wrapped you up like a mummy, plunged you into an ice-cold bath and kept you there for hours at a time to treat your ‘manic episodes’, chained you up and restrained you in a straitjacket for days on end to ‘prevent you from hurting yourself’, or conducted a lobotomy on you (taken out bits of your brain that they believed to be responsible for madness)—all in an effort to cure you of your ‘insanity’, which was believed to be a result of ‘demonic possession’.

Say whaaaa . . .?

Barber surgeon? Yes! In Europe, for a big part of the last given that honour.

But spare those poor physicians a thought. None of them did what did because they were particularly mean or sadistic—all their treatments were done in good faith, and came out of long-held (and as we know now, erroneous) beliefs about what made us ill. Hardly anyone back then understood any aspect of mental illness, and although the treatments have become far more humane now, and great progress has been made, we are still quite some way from truly understanding how—or how much!—the brain is related to the ‘mind’. Physical illness, and how the body worked, was better understood, but treatments were often misguided simply because—get this!—until the 1880s, very few people in the world believed, or even suspected, that it was germs that caused disease!

Astounding as it sounds, so many things that we take for granted today about disease and treatment are very, very new developments in the history of humankind. Medicine is arguably the world’s youngest science, and seen from that perspective, the massive strides it has made towards understanding and healing the human body (and mind) are nothing short of, um, mind-blowing. We are better-nourished, die far less often from infectious diseases and live way longer as a species today, almost entirely because of advances in modern medicine.

Featuring groundbreaking ideas, trivia, factoids, and more, From Leeches to Slug Glue will make you question your notions of what makes a person ‘whole’. And it will fill you with wonder at the innovations, inventions and discoveries that have made-and are continuing to make-the young science of modern medicine.