Books like The birth of the pill by Jonathan Eig

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks follows the story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black tobacco farmer whose cancer cells were taken in 1951 without her consent and later became the first immortal human cell line, HeLa, driving major scientific breakthroughs while raising questions of ethics, race, and medical exploitation.

Walter Isaacson chronicles the minds that forged the digital age, from Ada Lovelace to Larry Page, showing how vision, collaboration, and engineering transformed abstract ideas into the computers, Internet, and technology we use today.

A sweeping, nonfiction biography of cancer that traces the disease’s discovery, the development of therapies, and the lives of patients and scientists who shaped its history, earning a Pulitzer Prize and New York Times bestseller status.

A biographer portrays the driven yet modest hero, Thomas Young, who solved mysteries in physics, medicine, and Egyptology, but was overlooked for recognition.

A true‑story portrait of the Shield family, twelve children—six with schizophrenia—whose lives spurred groundbreaking research into the disease.

A graphic biography of Margaret Sanger, birth‑control pioneer, mapping her fight for women's reproductive rights and the influence of her activism in 20th‑century America.

From Kay Redfield Jamison - an international authority on manic-depressive illness, and one of the few women who are full professors of medicine at American universities - a remarkable personal testimony: the revelation of her own struggle since adolescence with manic-depression, and how it has shaped her life. Vividly, directly, with candor, wit, and simplicity, she takes us into the fascinating and dangerous territory of this form of madness - a world in which one pole can be the alluring dark land ruled by what Byron called the "melancholy star of the imagination," and the other a desert of depression and, all too frequently, death. A moving and exhilarating memoir by a woman whose furious determination to learn the enemy, to use her gifts of intellect to make a difference, led her to become, by the time she was forty, a world authority on manic-depression, and whose work has helped save countless lives.

J. Craig Venter’s trail‑blazing journey—from Vietnam medic to pioneer of the human genome—reveals how his daring rereading of DNA reshaped science and sparked one of the era’s most fierce controversies.

There can be no doubting the importance of "the pill" in post-World War II America. The commercial availability of the birth control pill in the early 1960s permitted women far greater reproductive choice, created a new set of ethical and religious questions, encouraged feminism, changed the dynamics of women's health care, and forever altered gender relations. In this fresh look at the pill's cultural and medical history, Elizabeth Siegel Watkins reexamines the scientific and ideological forces that led to its development, the parts women played in debates over its application, and the role of the media, medical profession, and pharmaceutical industry in deciding issues of its safety and meaning.

John R. Brinkley, a 20th‑century medical quack, rose from selling worthless patent remedies to becoming a famous surgeon in Kansas, while battling physician authority and regulators, in a tale of ambition and controversy.