Ocean State Libraries

"At a moment of drastic political upheaval, a shocking investigation into the dangerous, expensive, and dysfunctional American healthcare system, as well as solutions to its myriad of problems. In these troubled times, perhaps no institution has unraveled more quickly and more completely than American medicine. In only a few decades, the medical system has been overrun by organizations seeking to exploit for profit the trust that vulnerable and sick...

Can you love someone you can never touch? Stella and Will both suffer from cystic fibrosis. Being together means they could pass an infection. Stella is waiting for a lung transplant; Will is on a clinical drug trial. The only way to stay alive is to stay apart. Staying six feet apart doesn't feel like safety, it feels like punishment. Would five feet apart really be so dangerous if it stops their hearts from breaking too? -- adapted from jacket

Bellevue Hospital, on New York City's East Side, occupies a colorful and horrifying place in the public imagination: a den of mangled crime victims, vicious psychopaths, assorted derelicts, lunatics, and exotic-disease sufferers. In its two and a half centuries of service, there was hardly an epidemic or social catastrophe--or groundbreaking scientific advance--that did not touch Bellevue. David Oshinsky, whose last book, Polio: An American Story,...

"For centuries, doctors have struggled to define mental illness--how do you diagnose it, how do you treat it, how do you even know what it is? In search of an answer, in the 1970s a Stanford psychologist named David Rosenhan and seven other people--sane, normal, well-adjusted members of society--went undercover into asylums around America to test the legitimacy of psychiatry's labels. Forced to remain inside until they'd "proven" themselves sane,...

Katie goes to the hospital to have an ear operation.

"Moonbeam, seventeen, survives a devastating confrontation between government forces and the cult she grew up in, but will need a lot of help to heal mentally, emotionally, and physically." -- Before, she lived inside the fence. She was never allowed to leave the property, never allowed to talk to Outsiders, never allowed to speak her mind. Because Father John controlled everything-- and Father John liked rules. Disobeying Father John came with terrible...

"The last person Zac expects in the room next door is a girl like Mia, angry and feisty with questionable taste in music. In the real world, he wouldn't--couldn't--be friends with her. In hospital different rules apply, and what begins as a knock on the wall leads to a note--then a friendship neither of them sees coming"--

"San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hotel-Dieu (God's Hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves--"anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times" and needed extended medical care-ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed for twenty years.Laguna Honda, lower tech but human paced, gave...

"What's it like inside a hospital? Hold the special pages to a light to go behind the scenes at a busy hospital in this volume of the bestselling Shine-a-Light series of nonfiction books." --