[4] His UT course is entitled "Politics, Power and Poetry" and the textbooks are Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Readings to Accompany Walks Across Washington (2010).

[3] He was a National Magazine Awards finalist for his December 1994 story, "America's Poet: Walt Whitman,"[2] and he was cited again in 2000, for general excellence.

[16] His residency included the delivery of the public lecture, "The Rest are Left to Die: Health Care Rationing and the News Media.

[3] He has served as Guest Scholar at Smithsonian's Woodrow Wilson Center,[3] where he studied how the news coverage of three instances in which the U.S. had to openly ration action to life-saving technologies: iron lungs from the 1920s-1940s; penicillin for civilians during World War II; and kidney dialysis in the 1960s and early 1970s.

[3] Swerdlow's medical and science writing began as a writer for U.S. News & World Report books, He contributed, for example, to Blood: The River of Life,[19] which was part of The Human Body series.

He is coauthor of The Bug Stops Here: Force Protection and Emerging Infectious Diseases,[20] published by the Center for Technology and National Security Policy of National Defense University in Washington, D.C. For the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation he wrote "Special Reports" on rural infant care, at-risk adolescents, and other topics related to the provision of health care, such as the 1986 report, "Four-year effort cuts infant deaths in isolated rural counties by medical school-public health linkages.

[25] Topics have included: "1 Billion Cokes a Day: World Culture at the Millennium," "Everyone On Earth Could Fit Easily into Texas," Finding Geography in Surprising Places,""Why Do Some Plants Cure Cancer?," "Moving from Absurd to Obvious," and "The Rest are Left to Die: Health Care Rationing and the News Media."

Swerdlow decided to become a writer in part because he believed that power in American society, specifically, the ability to have a positive impact, was increasingly moving from political and governmental institutions to the mass media.

[26][failed verification] In an August 1999 article entitled, "The Power of Writing," in National Geographic magazine, he wrote that "No other invention-perhaps only the wheel comes close-has had a longer and greater impact.

Writing has an almost magical power: Words on paper, created by ordinary citizens, have overthrown governments and changed the course of history.

"[31] "To Heal a Nation" is frequently recommended in other works, such as Edward Linenthal's Sacred Ground: Americans and their Battlefields, which notes: "The sensitivity regarding martial monuments is perhaps best revealed in the celebrated controversies over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

"[38] He believes Western medicine must consider drugs that have multiple active ingredients akin to the complex healing powers we find in the world of plants.

"[38] In a National Geographic News online release, Swerdlow described some ways that medicine is beginning to appreciate a new multi-faceted approach, along with an appreciation for the "billion years of evolution" that have produced today's plants and their healing properties: In more than one billion years of evolution, plants have developed countless chemicals that help them ward off microbes such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi.

It has been scientifically proven to lower risks of heart disease, reduce chances of developing cancer, and prevent strokes (the three leading causes of death in the United States) all without side effects.

Vietnam, on the other hand, is still an inflamed wound it hurts to touch, and partisans are still ready to tear at one another over the subject when it is resurrected from a dark place in our past.

[39]As one newspaper review put it, "Using beautiful photographs and poignant letters from donors ... [this book] traces the story of ... [Jan Scruggs'] dream.

"[40] A New York Times Sunday lead editorial cited the book's description of how opposition to the design of the memorial—called a "black gash of shame" and "Orwellian glop"—had dissipated with surprising speed.