“Stereo Sue” sounds like the handle of a fast-talking disc jockey, but Susan Barry, author of Fixing My Gaze: A Scientist’s Journey Into Seeing in Three Dimensions, is actually a neuroscience professor. On top of that, she is probably her own most famous experiment. Oliver Sacks, author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, wrote an article called “Stereo Sue” for the New Yorker, and also introduces this book.

Barry was born with crossed eyes, and the vision centers in her brain compensated by allowing her to see without double vision. Her condition—seeing, essentially, in two dimensions—is called stereoblindness. It was not until Barry was in her late 40s that she undertook the developmental optometry that taught her, through perseverance, to see in three dimensions. In Fixing My Gaze, she chronicles this process with plenty of illustrations and scientific terms, explaining each phrase for her lay readers. A complete glossary also helps readers understand some of the necessary language.

Filled with clear diagrams that illustrate the difference between how the stereoblind and normally sighted people see, Fixing My Gaze introduces readers to a rare but interesting disability. It is also a testament both to human physiology and spirit that permits someone to live with—and then change—a uniquely altered view of the world. As Barry writes, “What a magnificent feeling it is to take control of your own vision and solve your own problems.”

My own seven-year-old son is currently working with a developmental optometrist to help him with his “tracking.” He does not naturally see from left to right, or top to bottom. Instead, his eyes jump all over the page. His reading tutor recommended vision therapy, and we hope it will help him as it helped Barry. This book opens up the possibility that people can change their physical limitations, and that it is never to late to try.

Eliza McGraw writes from Washington, D.C.

In journalist Julie Salamon’s Hospital: Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God, and Diversity on Steroids, you won’t find interns and residents incessantly worrying over their love lives while treating patients suffering from horrific accidents and outrageously unbelievable situations. Instead, you’ll find real-life, day-to-day drama, big and small, with a huge staff (6,210) of doctors, nurses, administrators and others playing their parts.

The hospital in question is Maimonides Medical Center in Borough Park, Brooklyn, a major hospital that for many years served a neighborhood of Orthodox and Hasidic Jews. More recently, however, the area has become increasingly multicultural, with no less than 67 languages spoken by the hospital’s staff and patients. This proved irresistible to Salamon (The Devil’s Candy, The Christmas Tree), who spent a year at Maimonides, talking to everyone, seemingly, who passed through. Her thorough and thoughtful research pays off in the broad, yet detailed strokes she paints of the complex relationships, financial constraints, and medical mysteries and miracles inside.

Salamon guides us through a broad cast of characters in an organized way, beginning with a helpful list of them all. She paints well-rounded portraits of everyone, including, for example, Mr. Zen, an illegal immigrant with cancer who doesn’t want to leave the hospital because he has nowhere else to go. We meet a first-year, surf-loving resident named David, a Nebraskan full of wonder, and, of course, exhaustion. And there is hospital president and CEO Pam Brier, who just before taking over the reins was in a car accident that almost killed her and her husband. Her recovery and drive alone would be enough material for a book.

Hospital starts with the top executives and extends out into Borough Park, showing how the Maimonides staff strives to reach out to the community. Salamon knows how to weave a story well, and here she weaves many stories with drama and grace.

Alice Cary writes from Groton, Massachusetts.

One sad lesson to be learned from Side Effects: when you’re considering whether to take a new medication, don’t assume anything. Don’t assume the medical researchers didn’t manipulate their findings. Or that the pharmaceutical company released all its data. Or that the Food and Drug Administration made sure the medicine is safe. Alison Bass, a former Boston Globe reporter who specializes in medical issues, delivers that tough truth through the tale of Paxil, a popular antidepressant widely prescribed for children and adolescents – before it became clear that Paxil and similar drugs increase suicidal thoughts among some pediatric patients. The FDA now requires warning labels on those medications, but that step came only after a struggle between “Big Pharma” and patient advocates.

Bass focuses on a precedent-setting legal case brought by the New York State Attorney General’s Office against GlaxoSmithKline, accusing the company of hiding negative findings about Paxil. She humanizes the somewhat complex story through the experiences of a handful of dogged whistleblowers: a legally blind prosecutor who noticed the data in a key Paxil study didn’t match its positive conclusion; a health care administrator who stumbled over what Bass says were research misdeeds at Brown University; and a psychiatrist who first reported in 1990 that some patients became suicidal after they were prescribed Prozac.

The whistleblowers’ persistence has paid off to some extent. The FDA has become somewhat more vigilant, and medical journals are more careful about the research they publish. But Bass shows that ethically dubious financial ties between pharmaceutical companies and the medical research community continue unabated. Her prime example is a senior psychiatrist at Brown implicated in questionable practices in the Paxil case and others. He refused to speak to Bass, and remains in good standing at Brown.

Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

If you ask someone born after World War II about sulfa drugs, you’ll likely get a blank stare. Ask the same question of someone born before the war, however, and it’s a different story. That’s because while the reign of sulfanilamide and its numerous variants was brief a mere decade before other, more effective drugs emerged it changed the world in a way no one then alive will ever forget. As recounted in Thomas Hager’s first book, The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor’s Heroic Search for the World’s First Miracle Drug, the introduction of sulfa drugs meant that for the first time in history a person with a bacterial infection could expect not just hope, but reasonably expect to live. Who was responsible for this miracle cure? As with most great scientific and technological advances, it is difficult to credit a single person. So many doctors, chemists and industrialists contributed to the discovery that even a comprehensive history like Hager’s can’t give every one his or her due. But one name does stand out Gerhard Domagk, a German doctor and medical researcher who watched too many soldiers die of gangrenous infection in World War I. His dedication to finding a cure, coupled with the work of talented chemists and the financing of one the world’s largest chemical companies (Bayer), resulted in the earth-shaking breakthrough at Christmas 1932. For this great humanitarian work, Domagk was awarded the 1939 Nobel Prize in medicine, which the Nazis prevented him from accepting. Soon, the second great war in a generation swept Europe but this time, wounded soldiers and civilians knew they had a fighting chance.

The tale of sulfa drugs, credited with saving hundreds of thousands of lives, is told by Hager in a thorough, yet highly readable style that grips the reader from the first paragraph. It is a story of dedication, luck, tragedy and triumph that’s still relevant today. Chris Scott writes from Nashville.

Even today, there are conflicting estimates of how many deaths the great influenza pandemic of 1918 caused worldwide. In 1927, an American Medical Association study set the total at a conservative 21 million. Some say it was closer to 100 million. In the U.S. alone, where the disease is generally believed to have originated, approximately 675,000 citizens died.

This natural horror coincided with the last months of carnage of World War I, but as John M. Barry points out in The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History, the disease was even more devastating than the battles. “In the American military alone,” the author reports, “influenza-related deaths totaled just over the number of Americans killed in combat in Vietnam [47,420]. One in every sixty-seven soldiers in the army died of influenza and its complications, nearly all of them in a ten-week period beginning in mid-September [1918].” Unlike pneumonia, which tended to kill infants, the old and the weak, this virulent strain seemed to target those who were young, strong and in the prime of their lives.

Barry, whose other books include Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, tells three separate but intertwined stories here. The first traces the history of American medicine from its primitive beginning to the start of the war; the second chronicles the spreading tentacles of the pandemic; and the third follows the medical community’s efforts to analyze and treat the disease and search for a cure.

Throughout his account, Barry criticizes President Woodrow Wilson and his administration for creating an unquestioning, suppressive pro-war climate that kept the public from recognizing and reacting sensibly to the disease. Time and again, medical precautions were ignored and vital news withheld for fear of damaging the war effort. Barry’s heroes are such valiant and foresighted doctors as William Welch, Simon Flexner and William Gorgas, who were rigorous in their attempts to cap the outbreak.

Believed to have originated in Haskell County, Kansas, in early 1918, the influenza spread across the country in two waves. The first one, in spring, was relatively mild. The second one was a rolling slaughterhouse. That fall, in the Camp Devens army encampment near Boston, deaths from the flu rose to an average of nearly 100 a day. Doctors and nurses began dying too. In Philadelphia, one of the cities hardest hit, the daily death toll soared briefly to around 800. There were neither enough coffins nor enough gravediggers to handle the onslaught. Entire families became sick and often had to wait for days for their dead to be taken away. Still, a cowed and “patriotic” press ignored or played down the city’s plight.

While medical and public health advances were made as it raged on, the plague essentially burned itself out, subsiding in America almost as quickly as it arose. Barry’s book is afflicted with a textbookish excess of detail at least for the general reader but it serves as a clear warning that governments must be open with their people and generous in their application of resources if they are to contain such present menaces as AIDS and SARS and slow the progress of epidemics yet to come.

In 1980, the possibilities of artificial insemination inspired a strange experiment, mixed with elitism, an overdose of eugenics, a smattering of racism and the barest dollop of science. In The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank, David Plotz reveals an idea straight from a science fiction novel: to collect the sperm of the world’s leading scientific minds and create a generation of genius babies. The Genius Factory offers a fascinating glimpse into this very real, almost comically bizarre effort by a California millionaire to improve the American gene pool. Beyond simply examining the shaky science and equally shaky philosophy behind it all, Plotz explores the human impact, highlighted by interactions with a few of the donor fathers (none of whom were Nobel winners) and their offspring. Their stories range from the worst cases, where the impact on the child and adults was virtually unconsidered, to the best, where child, parents and donor found an unexpected bonus: not genius, but love. Howard Shirley is a son and a father.

The swift, worldwide spread of SARS in recent months provides a small reminder of what life was like before modern medicine largely conquered the most lethal epidemic diseases. Small is the operative word here. Bad as the outbreak is, it pales in comparison to the experiences of our ancestors. Smithsonian writer Jennifer Lee Carrell brings us an engaging account of an early struggle against a deadly epidemic in The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox.

Focusing on two people who fought smallpox on two different continents during a 1721 outbreak, Carrell tells the stories of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, an aristocrat in England, and Zabdiel Boylston, a Boston doctor. Both were early advocates of inoculation, a practice then ill-understood and feared.

The Speckled Monster, is not history for purists. As Carrell explains clearly in her introduction, she wants to tell us a “tale,” so she turns history into drama, with invented dialogue and scenes. The book is best considered a highly informed historical fiction.

Lady Montagu is a fascinating character, a strong-minded female intellectual and smallpox survivor, whose once-spectacular looks had been ruined by pockmarks. She learned about inoculation from the Turks, when her husband was ambassador to the Ottoman court. Boylston, who learned of inoculation in part from African slaves, was a more prosaic figure. But he faced the greater risk: Boston civic leaders threatened him with prosecution for attempted murder when he started his inoculations. Both Boylston and Montagu advocated introducing a mild form of smallpox virus into the skin. Their work was a crucial step in the advances that protect us today.

Although she combines fictionalized elements with the actual events that occurred, Carrell presents an intriguing story of a timely topic. The Speckled Monster is a narrative that reminds us of how far we’ve come thanks to the diligence and courage of pioneering doctors and ordinary citizens. Anne Bartlett is a journalist who lives in South Florida.

<B>Young patients’ heart-rending lessons</B> Don’t even think of starting this brief but beautiful book without a box of tissues at your elbow. You’ve got a lot of crying ahead. <B>If I Get To Five</B> takes its title from the sayings of a four-year-old girl, Naomi, whom author Fred Epstein was treating for a brain cancer. "If I get to five," the little girl would tell him, "I’m going to learn to ride a two-wheeler!" Or "If I get to five, I’m going to learn to tie my shoes with a double-knot!" Epstein, who established the Institute for Neurology and Neurosurgery (INN) at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, tells story after story of children he came to know as he was trying to save their lives. But this is more than a maudlin exercise in recollection. It is at bottom a recitation of what he has learned from dealing with these incredibly resilient children and how surroundings and attitudes can contribute to the healing process. Initially, Epstein confesses, he placed virtually all his faith in medical technology and his ability to refine and manipulate it. However, a poem from one of his young patients one who didn’t survive made him realize that imparting a feeling of love, understanding and acceptance was as vital as having and mastering all the best surgical tools. Armed with this new-found wisdom, Epstein says he designed a hospital the INN that would take the children’s feelings and wishes into account, a hospital with a resident clown, around-the-clock visiting hours, parties in the patients’ rooms and impromptu ball games in the halls. Running parallel to Epstein’s tales about his patients is an account of his own bumpy life and what it has taught him about healing. An academic underachiever, afflicted with dyslexia, depression and self-doubt, Epstein at first seemed an unlikely candidate to become a medical doctor, much less a distinguished one. But in witnessing the power of his own determination to change predicted outcomes, he became aware of that same potential power in others. It is no slight to call <B>If I Get To Five</B> a "feel-good" book. It is. But, after all, isn’t feeling good what medicine is supposed to be about?

Has it really been half a century since James D. Watson and Francis Crick announced to the world their discovery of the structure of DNA? Their breakthrough in the spring of 1953 was unquestionably one of the great milestones in the history of science. Crick famously (and forgivably) bragged in a local pub that he and Watson had discovered the “secret of life,” but even he would never have dared to predict how far this discovery would lead scientists in only 50 years. Naturally, the event is being commemorated in a variety of ways during 2003.

Watson’s new book, DNA: The Secret of Life, written in the first person although co-authored with Andrew Berry, is part of a group of interrelated celebrations of this golden anniversary. There will be a separate five-part PBS series starring Watson, as well as a multimedia companion program. The book provides details on these projects and also includes a strong Further Reading list. Watson’s new book is more than just another account of the great discovery. It is a history of the development of genetics and (inevitably) genetic engineering, told by one of the founders of the discipline. It covers the whole topic the Human Genome Project, genetic fingerprinting, genetically modified foods, even evolutionary microbiology’s search for human ancestors.

The book begins with a brief but impressively lucid history of ideas about heredity, from Lamarck’s notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics to Mendel’s brilliant tinkering with peas in an Augustinian monastery. Like the rest of this spirited book, the section on early history is brought to life with telling anecdotes. We observe how Mendel’s weight gain curtailed his fieldwork. We learn about the “Hapsburg lip,” the distinctive physical trait that resulted from unwise inbreeding among European monarchs. The book is wonderfully unpredictable, and the whole discipline of genetics is presented in human terms, not in biochemical formulae.

Watson has never been accused of undue modesty, and in this book he doesn’t pretend to offer an objective account. He dismisses Jeremy Rifkin, one of the primary opponents of genetically modified foods, as a “professional alarmist.” He complains about the “knee-jerk, politically craven attitudes and even scientific incompetence” of government regulatory agencies that are opposed to genetically modified foods. Thrilled with the field, its history and its implications, Watson sums up his Dr. Frankenstein hubris by describing his response to the initial discovery of DNA’s structure: “We were no longer condemned to watch nature from the sidelines but could actually tinker with the DNA of living organisms, and we could actually read life’s basic script.” In case this topic seems daunting to you, note that DNA is designed for the nonspecialist. No technical terms are used without being fully explained, and their first mention is boldfaced in the index in case you want to refresh your memory later. You probably won’t even need to. The writing here does the work for you, as it ought to do in popular nonfiction. And this book will be popular. The authors sum up the importance of their volume and their topic in a single sentence: “DNA is no longer a matter of interest only to white-coated scientists in obscure university laboratories; it affects us all.” Michael Sims’ new book Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form will be published by Viking in August.