Written by Shakespeare's son-in-law John Hall, The Little Book of Cures is a fascinating look into the life of a doctor in seventeenth-century Stratford-upon-Avon.

What drives us to eat and accounts for different appetites? Why is breathing at high altitudes easy for birds and difficult for humans? Why do animals have two sets of sensory organs--eyes, ears, nostrils, etc...? In Why Geese Don't Get Obese, physiologist Eric Widmaier describes the astonishing ways humans and other creatures have adapted to their environmental challenges in order to survive. Surprising examples, a sense of humor, and some insightful science make this book a delightful and lively read.

Challenging histories of plastic surgery that posit a complete disappearance of Gaspare Tagliacozzi’s rhinoplasty operation after his death in 1599, Rhinoplasty and the nose in early modern British medicine and culture traces knowledge of the procedure within the early modern British medical community, through to its impact on the nineteenth-century revival of skin-flap facial surgeries. The book explores why such a procedure was controversial, and the cultural importance of the nose, offering critical readings of literary noses from Shakespeare to Laurence Sterne. Medical knowledge of the graft operation was accompanied by a spurious story that the nose would be constructed from flesh purchased from a social inferior, and would drop off when that person died. The volume therefore explores this narrative in detail for its role in the procedure’s stigmatisation, its engagement with the doctrine of medical sympathy, and its unique attempt to commoditise living human flesh.