Blood Poison: The Untold Story of Sepsis

A frontline doctor's sweeping, deeply researched, and intimately written chronicle of the centuries-long effort to understand and effectively treat sepsis--one of history's most lethal, misunderstood maladies and the leading cause of death for children worldwide.

When presented with a patient with a severe infection, there is one question that everyone must ask themselves: Could it be sepsis?

Since the earliest days of medicine, sepsis has been one of its most confounding and dangerous conditions--first emerging in its modern understanding from the trenches of pre-antibiotic battlefields as "blood poisoning" (aka septicemia) but evolving to be understood as an elusive syndrome in which the body's immune response spirals out of control with immediate and deadly consequences.

In the tradition of sweeping medical narratives like The Emperor of All Maladies and The Great Influenza, Blood Poison traces the history of sepsis from its origins in ancient civilization in the poetry of Homer and the theories of Hippocrates to its establishment in the modern age as the scourge of emergency rooms and hospital wards that is responsible for one in five deaths each year around the world.

With riveting patient stories, insights from top experts, and moving firsthand accounts of his work as a doctor, advocate, and a leader in the field, Parsa Shahinpoor brings readers inside the fight to raise awareness about new and effective ways to fight an insidious illness, which--due to the rise of drug-resistant superbugs, viral pandemics, and an ailing healthcare system--is only getting more dangerous.

Parsa Shahinpoor, MD, is a frontline hospitalist, teaching physician, and quality improvement leader at Kaiser Permanente Northwest, where he has spent nearly two decades advancing sepsis care--a role that has connected him with experts around the world. He completed his medical training at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, where he served as an assistant professor of medicine and director of the internal medicine medical student clerkship. Blending science, history, and narrative, he writes to make one of medicine's most urgent challenges vivid and accessible.