From beneficial yeasts that aid digestion to toxic molds that cause disease, we are constantly navigating a world filled with fungi. Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines explores the amazing ways fungi interact with our bodies, showing how our health and well-being depend on an immense ecosystem of yeasts and molds inside and all around us.

Nicholas Money takes readers on a guided tour of a marvelous unseen realm, describing how our immune systems are engaged in continuous conversation with the teeming mycobiome inside the body, and how we can fall prey to serious and even life-threatening infections when this peaceful coexistence is disturbed. He also sheds light on our complicated relationship with fungi outside the body, from wild mushrooms and cultivated molds that have been staples of the human diet for millennia to the controversial experimentation with magic mushrooms in the treatment of depression.

Drawing on the latest advances in mycology, Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines reveals what scientists are learning about the importance of fungi to our lives, from their vital role in supporting the ecosystems on which we depend to their emerging uses in lifesaving medicine.
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Nicholas P. Money is professor of biology at Miami University in Ohio and the author of many books, including The Rise of Yeast: How the Sugar Fungus Shaped Civilization, Mushrooms: A Natural and Cultural History, and Microbiology: A Very Short Introduction.

Donald H. Pfister is the Asa Gray Research Professor and Curator at the Farlow Herbarium of Cryptogamic Botany. He taught various courses over his career including about fungi and tree and forests. His research is on fungal taxonomy and phylogeny. He has published on the history of mycology and the documentation of biological specimens. He completed his undergraduate degree at Miami University in Ohio and Ph.D. at Cornell University. Fieldwork has taken him to the island of the Caribbean, South America, Iceland, Asia and various parts of North America.

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