You Bet Your Life From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation

From one of America’s top physicians, a “riveting,” “fascinating,” and “timely” (Nature) history of risk in medicine  
 
Every medical decision—whether to have chemotherapy, an X-ray, or surgery—is a risk, no matter which way you choose. In You Bet Your Life, physician Paul A. Offit argues that, from the first blood transfusions four hundred years ago to the hunt for a COVID-19 vaccine, risk has been essential to the discovery of new treatments. More importantly, understanding the risks is crucial to whether, as a society or as individuals, we accept them.  
   
Told in Offit’s vigorous and rigorous style, You Bet Your Life is an entertaining history of medicine. But it also lays bare the tortured relationships between intellectual breakthroughs, political realities, and human foibles. As we have learned from the COVID pandemic—the debates over lockdowns, masks, and vaccines—it’s all too easy to get everything wrong. Updated with a new introduction, You Bet Your Life is an essential read for getting the future a bit more right.  

Paul A. Offit, MD, is the director of the Vaccine Education Center, an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and a professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The author of ten works of narrative nonfiction, he lives near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.