In Stephen Massimilla's latest book, The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat, self-recognition is found in the loss, beauty, and suffering that define our common humanity. This collection of poems maps overseas and underworld routes by which personal exploration opens onto universal territory. From Capri to Venice, from New England to the tropics, from Ithaca to the prismatic sea, the poems enact a struggle to salvage psychological, social, cultural and ecological landscapes.

Masks hide more than just flesh... A sadistic killer stalks the city of Green Valley Falls and with limited resources the police are getting nowhere. Fear grips the heart of the city as the unusual nature of the attacks are kept from the media. Laurie Hood, a young man living a mundane life loses a friend to the killer and begins investigating the case himself. He quickly has to adapt to his new life, as the killer widens his list of targets and continues his reign of terror. Can one man make a difference?

A nightmarish pulsating space adventure. A man wakes up on the couch. His couch? Is it the morning or the middle of the night? Was he drinking again? Has his wife left for work yet? Why can't he move? Why doesn't he know how he got there? And most importantly... How did he lose his memory? Someone has the answers. Donald Trump: Plague Doctor is a feverish Rubik's Cube of pulp goodness that will wake you up from cryogenic sleep, put you into a spaceship, and leave you wondering what planet you were just on. Tremendous.

A narrative of one of the key turning points in medical history.

The Black Death of the late Middle Ages is often described as the greatest natural disaster in the history of humankind. More than fifty million people, half of Europe’s population, died during the first outbreak alone from 1347 to 1353. Plague then returned fifteen more times through to the end of the medieval period in 1500, posing the greatest challenge to physicians ever recorded in the history of the medical profession. This engrossing book provides the only comprehensive history of the medical response to the Black Death over time. Leading historian John Aberth has translated many unknown plague treatises from nine different languages that vividly illustrate the human dimensions of the horrific scourge. He includes doctors’ remarkable personal anecdotes, showing how their battles to combat the disease (which often afflicted them personally) and the scale and scope of the plague led many to question ancient authorities. Dispelling many myths and misconceptions about medicine during the Middle Ages, Aberth shows that plague doctors formulated a unique and far-reaching response as they began to treat plague as a poison, a conception that had far-reaching implications, both in terms of medical treatment and social and cultural responses to the disease in society as a whole.

In 1992, Dr. Ross A. Slotten signed more death certificates in Chicago—and, by inference, the state of Illinois—than anyone else. As a family physician, he was trained to care for patients from birth to death, but when he completed his residency in 1984, he had no idea that many of his future patients would be cut down in the prime of their lives. Among those patients were friends, colleagues, and lovers, shunned by most of the medical community because they were gay and HIV positive. Slotten wasn’t an infectious disease specialist, but because of his unique position as both a gay man and a young physician, he became an unlikely pioneer, swept up in one of the worst epidemics in modern history. Plague Years is an unprecedented first-person account of that epidemic, spanning not just the city of Chicago but four continents as well. Slotten provides an intimate yet comprehensive view of the disease’s spread alongside heartfelt portraits of his patients and his own conflicted feelings as a medical professional, drawn from more than thirty years of personal notebooks. In telling the story of someone who was as much a potential patient as a doctor, Plague Years sheds light on the darkest hours in the history of the LGBT community in ways that no previous medical memoir has.

After antiques dealer Zolena Gillette purchases a blind-box of antiques at an estate auction, she realizes she's acquired an authentic plague doctor's mask from 17th century Italy. While searching to find a buyer for the macabre artifact, she quickly discovers that the mask is haunted by the tormented spirit of a medieval plague doctor.