Hannah Wunsch – författare

"A perfectly pitched medical mystery that will captivate you from page one."—Wes Ely, MD, MPH, author of Every Deep-Drawn Breath, winner of the 2022 Christopher Award for Literature.A suspenseful, authoritative account of how the battle against a mid-century polio epidemic sparked a revolution in medical care.Americans knew polio as the "summer plague." In countries further North, however, the virus arrived later in the year, slipping into the homes of healthy children as the summer waned and the equinox approached. It was described by one writer as "the autumn ghost."Intensive care units and mechanical ventilation are the crucial foundation of modern medical care: without them, the appalling death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic would be even higher. In The Autumn Ghost, Dr. Hannah Wunsch traces the origins of these two innovations back to a polio epidemic in the autumn of 1952. Drawing together compelling testimony from doctors, nurses, medical students, and patients, Wunsch relates a gripping tale of an epidemic that changed the world.In vivid, captivating chapters, Wunsch tells the dramatic true story of how insiders and iconoclasts came together in one overwhelmed hospital in Copenhagen to save the lives of many polio patients dying of respiratory failure. Their radical advances in care marked a turning point in the treatment of patients around the world—from the rise of life support and the creation of intensive care units to the evolution of rehabilitation medicine.Moving and informative, The Autumn Ghost will leave readers in awe of the courage of those who battled the polio epidemic, and grateful for the modern medical care they pioneered.

In this issue of Critical Care Clinics, guest editor Dr. Hannah Wunsch brings her considerable expertise to the topic of History of Critical Care Medicine. The term "Critical Care Medicine� was first introduced in the 1950s at the University of Southern California-making 2023 the 70th anniversary of this subspecialty.� This issue provides a fascinating look at important aspects of the history of the field, which originated with the concept that immediately life-endangered patients, the critically ill and injured, may have substantially better chances of survival if provided with professionally advanced minute-to-minute objective measurements.