Alumni in Print

Cancers in the Urban Environment: How Malignant Diseases are Caused and Distributed among the Diverse People and Neighborhoods of a Major Global Metropolis (second edition) 

Thomas M. Mack’61

Academic Press, 2020 

Dr. Mack’s book is the only comprehensive, evidence-based description of the pattern of diverse common malignancies. The book reviews the ethnically, socially, and environmentally complex milieu of the 10 million people and 2,346 neighborhoods of California’s Los Angeles County. The rates of 104 malignancies are compared with those in London and other U.S. locations and categorized by gender, age, race/ethnicity, calendar time, social class, and (most notably) individual neighborhood. The 2004 first edition covered diagnoses occurring from 1972 to 1998, and the second edition derives from the experience of roughly 750,000 affected persons diagnosed from 1999 through 2016.

 

Postscripts for a Doctor from His Patients 

Jeffrey Fisher’69

Jones Media Publishing, 2020

Dr. Fisher looks back on his 45-year career in internal medicine by sharing some of the ways his patients taught him through their “courage, humor, faith, love, kindness, fortitude, and flexibility.” He wrote the book of “stories about 17 patients who taught me lessons while I was treating them” not as a memoir but as a way to encourage medical students to consider careers in primary care. Sales of the book are used to purchase copies for medical students. “It is my hope that these stories will encourage medical students to explore the unique relationships that can develop between doctor and patient. They then will find an abundance of stories and experiences of their own,” Dr. Fisher writes in the book’s introduction.

 

Meltdown and the Neuroscience of Stress 

Arnold Eggers’71

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019 

Dr. Eggers’ book investigates how stress causes a cluster of life-threatening diseases. One reviewer said: “He has formulated a robust eminently testable model which provides a deep pathophysiological understanding of the aetiology both of a range of neuropsychiatric disorders ranging from Alzheimer’s disease to schizophrenia and of other all-too-common disorders such as obesity and hypertension. The Eggers Model immediately suggests attractive therapeutic options for these disorders.” In particular, the book predicts that surgical denervation of the autonomic nervous supply to the adrenal glands and kidney can prevent Alzheimer’s disease and stroke. The book is accessible to the general reader; it has diagrams and summaries and walks the reader through basic concepts. It also includes some personal narrative and anecdotes about Columbia.

 

Main Street: How a City’s Heart Connects Us All 

Mindy Thompson Fullilove’79

New Village Press, 2020 

Dr. Fullilove’s 11-year voyage to 178 cities in 14 countries resulted in this book that asks the question: How do main streets contribute to our mental health? The visits enabled Dr. Fullilove to discern the larger architecture of main streets—the ways that main streets are shaped for a vast array of social gatherings and processes and how they are markers for the integrity of civilization. Dr. Fullilove’s book describes how a pattern of disinvestment in inner-city neighborhoods has left main streets across the United States in disrepair, weakened cities, and left residents vulnerable to catastrophe. Issues of racial injustice, climate change, and COVID-19 have highlighted the importance of main streets for empowering our communities.