The scientists working to free those trapped between life and death.

A diagnosis in question.

Watching a brain surgeon at work.

On the experience of having a stroke.

The author gets a crash course in health care pricing after having his urethra fixed.

The neurologist explores the mystery of hallucinations.

How a once-lauded psychiatrist became a prolific prescriber of painkillers in one of Virginia’s poorest and most isolated counties.

How a substandard abortion provider stays in business.

The rise of an expensive, experimental stem-cell treatment in China and the medical tourism it attracts.

A physician reports on his own catastrophic injury.

One man’s quest to have a healthy leg amputated.

It comes from the soil of the desert Southwest. Inhaled, it can cause incurable, even fatal illness. And, thanks to global warming, valley fever is spreading fast.

How a self-taught doctor from Delhi cornered the black market in kidneys, building one of the world’s most lucrative organ-trading rings, until it all came crashing down.

For centuries, a little town in Belgium has been treating the mentally ill. Why are its medieval methods so successful?

“I’ve tried therapy, drugs, and booze. Here’s what helps.”

On the history, science, and rise of ACL tears.

On the criminalization of nondisclosure.

On recreational genetics, privacy and the new vulnerability of family secrets.

On Ambien and the search for the next blockbuster insomnia drug.

The fight to vaccinate children in the border regions between Pakistan and Afghanistan as part of an attempt to eradicate polio worldwide.

After 85 years, antibiotics are growing impotent. So what will medicine, agriculture and everyday life look like if we lose these drugs entirely?

A recent history of ‘bupe’ Suboxone film, which is described as a miracle cure for opiate addiction but flows freely from for-profit clinics to dealers and inmates, sometimes melted into the pages of smuggled Bibles.

An essay on those who don’t get caught by health care’s so-called safety net.

How the corpses of Hitler’s victims still haunt modern science—and American abortion politics.