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93 books about Diseases
The African Exchange
Toward a Biological History of Black People
Kenneth F. Kiple
Duke University Press, 1988
David Eltis has observed that "in terms of immigration, America was an extension of Africa rather than Europe until late in the 19th century." The unwilling African immigrants were not spread evenly across the Americas; the overwhelming majority arrived in tropical and subtropical "plantation America" with the result that the disease and nutritional environments of this region also became extensions of Africa. While the implications of disease ecology for world history have been examined, and the details of the "Colombian exchange" of plants and pathogens between Europe and the Americas studied, we have no comparable study of the "African exchange."
The essays in this volume form the cutting edge of biohistorical research that promises to rewrite the story of humankind's past in significant ways.
The essays in this volume form the cutting edge of biohistorical research that promises to rewrite the story of humankind's past in significant ways.
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Agent Orange
History, Science, and the Politics of Uncertainty
Edwin A. Martini
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012
Taking on what one former U.S. ambassador called "the last ghost of the Vietnam War," this book examines the far-reaching impact of Agent Orange, the most infamous of the dioxin-contaminated herbicides used by American forces in Southeast Asia. Edwin A. Martini's aim is not simply to reconstruct the history of the "chemical war" but to investigate the ongoing controversy over the short- and long-term effects of weaponized defoliants on the environment of Vietnam, on the civilian population, and on the troops who fought on both sides.
Beginning in the early 1960s, when Agent Orange was first deployed in Vietnam, Martini follows the story across geographical and disciplinary boundaries, looking for answers to a host of still unresolved questions. What did chemical manufacturers and American policymakers know about the effects of dioxin on human beings, and when did they know it? How much do scientists and doctors know even today? Should the use of Agent Orange be considered a form of chemical warfare? What can, and should, be done for U.S. veterans, Vietnamese victims, and others around the world who believe they have medical problems caused by Agent Orange?
Martini draws on military records, government reports, scientific research, visits to contaminated sites, and interviews to disentangle conflicting claims and evaluate often ambiguous evidence. He shows that the impact of Agent Orange has been global in its reach affecting individuals and communities in New Zealand, Australia, Korea, and Canada as well as Vietnam and the United States. Yet for all the answers it provides, this book also reveals how much uncertainty—scientific, medical, legal, and political—continues to surround the legacy of Agent Orange.
Beginning in the early 1960s, when Agent Orange was first deployed in Vietnam, Martini follows the story across geographical and disciplinary boundaries, looking for answers to a host of still unresolved questions. What did chemical manufacturers and American policymakers know about the effects of dioxin on human beings, and when did they know it? How much do scientists and doctors know even today? Should the use of Agent Orange be considered a form of chemical warfare? What can, and should, be done for U.S. veterans, Vietnamese victims, and others around the world who believe they have medical problems caused by Agent Orange?
Martini draws on military records, government reports, scientific research, visits to contaminated sites, and interviews to disentangle conflicting claims and evaluate often ambiguous evidence. He shows that the impact of Agent Orange has been global in its reach affecting individuals and communities in New Zealand, Australia, Korea, and Canada as well as Vietnam and the United States. Yet for all the answers it provides, this book also reveals how much uncertainty—scientific, medical, legal, and political—continues to surround the legacy of Agent Orange.
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All about Your Eyes
Sharon Fekrat, M.D., FACS and Jennifer S. Weizer, M.D., eds.
Duke University Press, 2005
A concise, easy-to-understand reference book, All about Your Eyes tells you what you need to know to care for your eyes and what to expect from your eye doctor.
In this reliable guide, leading eye care experts:
—explain how healthy eyes work
—describe various eye diseases, including pink eye, cataract, glaucoma, age-related macular degeneration, and diabetic retinopathy
—provide up-to-date information on eye surgery, including refractive, laser, and cosmetic
For each eye problem, the authors describe in simple, straightforward language
—what it is
—the symptoms
—what, if anything, you can do to prevent it
—when to call the doctor
—the treatment
—the likelihood of recovery
All about Your Eyes includes a glossary of technical terms and, following each entry, links to web sites where further information may be found.
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All about Your Eyes, Second Edition, revised and updated
Sharon Fekrat, Tanya S. Glaser, and Henry L. Feng, editors
Duke University Press, 2021
A concise, easy-to-understand reference book, the revised and updated second edition of All about Your Eyes tells you what you need to know to care for your eyes and what to expect from your eye doctor. In this reliable guide, leading eye care experts:
* explain eye anatomy and how healthy eyes work
* describe various eye diseases, including pink eye, cataract, glaucoma, age-related macular degeneration, and diabetic retinopathy
* provide up-to-date information on surgery
For each eye problem, the authors describe in simple, straightforward language:
* what it is
* the symptoms
* what, if anything, you can do to prevent it
* when to call the doctor
* diagnostic tests and treatment
* the likelihood of recovery
All about Your Eyes includes a glossary of technical terms and, following each entry, links to websites where further information may be found.
Contributors. Natalie A. Afshari, MD, Rosanna P. Bahadur, MD, Paramjit K. Bhullar, MD, Faith A. Birnbaum, MD, Cassandra C. Brooks, MD, Pratap Challa, MD, Melissa Mei-Hsia Chan, MBBS, Ravi Chandrashekhar, MD, MSEE, Nathan Cheung, OD, FAAO Claudia S. Cohen, MD, Vincent A. Deramo, MD, Cathy DiBernardo, RN, Laura B. Enyedi, MD, Sharon Fekrat, MD, Henry L. Feng, MD, Brenton D. Finklea, MD, Anna Ginter, MD, Tanya S. Glaser, MD, Michelle Sy Go, MD, MS, Mark Goerlitz-Jessen, MD, Herb Greenman, MD, Abhilash Guduru, MD, Preeya Gupta, MD, Renee Halberg, MSW, LCSW, S. Tammy Hsu, MD, Alessandro Iannaccone, MD, MS, FARVO, Charlene L. James, OD, Kim Jiramongkolchai, MD, Michael P. Kelly, FOPS, Muge R. Kesen, MD, Kirin Khan, MD, Wajiha Jurdi Kheir, MD, Jane S. Kim, MD, Jennifer Lira, MD, Katy C. Liu, MD, PhD, Ramiro S. Maldonado, MD, Ankur Mehra, MD, Priyatham S. Mettu, MD, Prithvi Mruthyunjaya, MD, MHS, Nisha Mukherjee, MD, Kenneth Neufeld, MD, Kristen Peterson, MD, James H. Powers, MD, S. Grace Prakalapakorn, MD, MPH, Michael Quist, MD, Leon Rafailov, MD, Roshni Ranjit-Reeves, MD, Nikolas Raufi, MD, William Raynor, BS, Cason Robbins, BS, Ananth Sastry, MD, Dianna L. Seldomridge, MD, MBA, Terry Semchyshyn, MD, Ann Shue, MD, Julia Song, MD, Brian Stagg, MD, Christopher Sun, MBBS, Anthony Therattil, BS, Daniel S.W. Ting, MBBS, Fay Jobe Tripp, MS, OTR/L, CLVT, CDRS, Obinna Umunakwe, MD, PhD, Lejla Vajzovic, MD, Susan M. Wakil, MD, C. Ellis Wisely, MD, MBA, Julie A. Woodward, MD
* explain eye anatomy and how healthy eyes work
* describe various eye diseases, including pink eye, cataract, glaucoma, age-related macular degeneration, and diabetic retinopathy
* provide up-to-date information on surgery
For each eye problem, the authors describe in simple, straightforward language:
* what it is
* the symptoms
* what, if anything, you can do to prevent it
* when to call the doctor
* diagnostic tests and treatment
* the likelihood of recovery
All about Your Eyes includes a glossary of technical terms and, following each entry, links to websites where further information may be found.
Contributors. Natalie A. Afshari, MD, Rosanna P. Bahadur, MD, Paramjit K. Bhullar, MD, Faith A. Birnbaum, MD, Cassandra C. Brooks, MD, Pratap Challa, MD, Melissa Mei-Hsia Chan, MBBS, Ravi Chandrashekhar, MD, MSEE, Nathan Cheung, OD, FAAO Claudia S. Cohen, MD, Vincent A. Deramo, MD, Cathy DiBernardo, RN, Laura B. Enyedi, MD, Sharon Fekrat, MD, Henry L. Feng, MD, Brenton D. Finklea, MD, Anna Ginter, MD, Tanya S. Glaser, MD, Michelle Sy Go, MD, MS, Mark Goerlitz-Jessen, MD, Herb Greenman, MD, Abhilash Guduru, MD, Preeya Gupta, MD, Renee Halberg, MSW, LCSW, S. Tammy Hsu, MD, Alessandro Iannaccone, MD, MS, FARVO, Charlene L. James, OD, Kim Jiramongkolchai, MD, Michael P. Kelly, FOPS, Muge R. Kesen, MD, Kirin Khan, MD, Wajiha Jurdi Kheir, MD, Jane S. Kim, MD, Jennifer Lira, MD, Katy C. Liu, MD, PhD, Ramiro S. Maldonado, MD, Ankur Mehra, MD, Priyatham S. Mettu, MD, Prithvi Mruthyunjaya, MD, MHS, Nisha Mukherjee, MD, Kenneth Neufeld, MD, Kristen Peterson, MD, James H. Powers, MD, S. Grace Prakalapakorn, MD, MPH, Michael Quist, MD, Leon Rafailov, MD, Roshni Ranjit-Reeves, MD, Nikolas Raufi, MD, William Raynor, BS, Cason Robbins, BS, Ananth Sastry, MD, Dianna L. Seldomridge, MD, MBA, Terry Semchyshyn, MD, Ann Shue, MD, Julia Song, MD, Brian Stagg, MD, Christopher Sun, MBBS, Anthony Therattil, BS, Daniel S.W. Ting, MBBS, Fay Jobe Tripp, MS, OTR/L, CLVT, CDRS, Obinna Umunakwe, MD, PhD, Lejla Vajzovic, MD, Susan M. Wakil, MD, C. Ellis Wisely, MD, MBA, Julie A. Woodward, MD
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All God's Mistakes
Genetic Counseling in a Pediatric Hospital
Charles L. Bosk
University of Chicago Press, 1992
In one case after another, Charles L. Bosk reveals the process by which parents, physicians and other health professionals come to guide decisions about pregnancies. A story of both extraordinary drama and ordinary routine, this is a pioneering case study of authority and control in a pediatric hospital, showing how genetic counselors work with colleagues and with parents to be, and how they deal with their powerlessness to control life-and-death decisions that they must address.
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Alterity
Jean-Michel Oughourlian
Michigan State University Press, 2023
Through the lens of mimetic theory, distinguished French psychiatrist Jean-Michel Oughourlian shows how to spot and address rivalry in our lives and become open to healthier, more genuine relationships. This important study demonstrates the toxic and pathogenic mechanisms at work in physical ailments and mental disturbances and reveals a common cause: alterity, the other. Oughourlian maintains that the real question in attempting to resolve issues of rivalry is not “What is your problem?” but rather “Who is your problem?” This type of discord with the other—be it a friend, colleague, or family member—becomes visible through generalized stress. This stress manifests in psychosomatic symptoms and may even contribute to the development of organic diseases. The most important factor in healing these maladies, then, is to recognize the other with whom we are in rivalry.
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American Sunshine
Diseases of Darkness and the Quest for Natural Light
Daniel Freund
University of Chicago Press, 2012
In the second half of the nineteenth century, American cities began to go dark. Hulking new buildings overspread blocks, pollution obscured the skies, and glass and smog screened out the health-giving rays of the sun. Doctors fed anxities about these new conditions with claims about a rising tide of the "diseases of darkness," especially rickets and tuberculosis.
In American Sunshine, Daniel Freund tracks the obsession with sunlight from those bleak days into the twentieth century. Before long, social reformers, medical professionals, scientists, and a growing nudist movement proffered remedies for America’s new dark age. Architects, city planners, and politicians made access to sunlight central to public housing and public health. and entrepreneurs, dairymen, and tourism boosters transformed the pursuit of sunlight and its effects into a commodity. Within this historical context, Freund sheds light on important questions about the commodification of health and nature and makes an original contribution to the histories of cities, consumerism, the environment, and medicine.
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Arresting Contagion
Science, Policy, and Conflicts over Animal Disease Control
Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode
Harvard University Press, 2015
Over sixty percent of all infectious human diseases, including tuberculosis, influenza, cholera, and hundreds more, are shared with other vertebrate animals. Arresting Contagion tells the story of how early efforts to combat livestock infections turned the United States from a disease-prone nation into a world leader in controlling communicable diseases. Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode show that many innovations devised in the fight against animal diseases, ranging from border control and food inspection to drug regulations and the creation of federal research labs, provided the foundation for modern food safety programs and remain at the heart of U.S. public health policy.
America’s first concerted effort to control livestock diseases dates to the founding of the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI) in 1884. Because the BAI represented a milestone in federal regulation of commerce and industry, the agency encountered major jurisdictional and constitutional obstacles. Nevertheless, it proved effective in halting the spread of diseases, counting among its early breakthroughs the discovery of Salmonella and advances in the understanding of vector-borne diseases.
By the 1940s, government policies had eliminated several major animal diseases, saving hundreds of thousands of lives and establishing a model for eradication that would be used around the world. Although scientific advances played a key role, government interventions did as well. Today, a dominant economic ideology frowns on government regulation of the economy, but the authors argue that in this case it was an essential force for good.
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Articulations
The Body and Illness in Poetry
Jon Mukand
University of Iowa Press, 1994
In 1987 poet and physician Jon Mukand published Sutured Words, a volume of contemporary poems to help patients, their families and friends, and all health care professionals embrace the complexity of healing, illness, and death. Robert Coles called the collection “a wonderful source of inspiration and instruction for any of us who are trying to figure out what our work means”; Norman Cousins was impressed by the “discernment and high quality of the selections.” Now, in Articulations, Mukand adds more than a hundred new poems to the strongest poems from Sutured Words to give us a lyrical, enlightened understanding of the human dimensions of suffering and illness
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Assessment of Chronic Pain Patients with the MMPI-2
Laura S. Keller
University of Minnesota Press, 1991
Supplies clinicians with data on the applicability of previous MMPI chronic pain research to the revised version of the test.
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Beauty without the Breast
Felicia Marie Knaul
Harvard University Press, 2012
Felicia Knaul, an economist who has lived and worked for two decades in Latin America on health and social development, documents the personal and professional sides of her breast cancer experience. Beauty without the Breast contrasts her difficult but inspiring journey with that of the majority of women throughout the world who face not only the disease but stigma, discrimination, and lack of access to health care. This wrenching contrast is the cancer divide—an equity imperative in global health.
Knaul exposes barriers affecting women in low and middle-income countries and highlights the role of men, family, and community in responding to the challenge of breast cancer. She shares striking data about breast cancer, a leading killer of young women in developing countries, and narrates the process of applying this evidence and launching Tómatelo a Pecho (also the book title in Spanish)—a Mexico-based program promoting awareness and access to health care. The book concludes with letters from Dr. Julio Frenk, her husband and former Minister of Health of Mexico, written while they shared the trauma of diagnosis and treatment. With force and lucidity, the book narrates the journey of patient and family as they courageously navigate disease and survivorship.
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Big Fleas Have Little Fleas
How Discoveries of Invertebrate Diseases Are Advancing Modern Science
Elizabeth W. Davidson
University of Arizona Press, 2006
Ever since Louis Pasteur saved the French silk industry by identifying a disease affecting silkworms, scientists have focused their attention on smaller and smaller organisms. Once upon a time, the rhinoceros beetle threatened the coconut plantations of Polynesia until scientists discovered the virus that would control it. In more modern times, the first experimental vaccine for HIV was produced using recombinant baculovirus introduced into insect eggs. Meanwhile, soybeans, corn, and cotton are protected from insects by genes from one insecticidal bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis—and a related strain might hold clues for combating West Nile virus and malaria.
In this book, Elizabeth Davidson shares amazing stories about diseases of insects and other invertebrates important to people—and about the scientists who learned to use those diseases to control pests and create products beneficial to humans. Focusing on insect-microbial interactions crucial to public health, she tells detective stories ranging across global history, from the silkworm farms of nineteenth-century Japan to the research labs of modern America. In these fascinating accounts, Davidson shows us how human health often comes down to a contest of bug against bug. Even habitats seething with bacteria, such as the runoff from cattle farms or sewage treatment plants, are also teeming with invertebrate life—animals that, like ourselves, have ways of fighting infection.
Scientific curiosity about what allows creatures as simple as water fleas to survive in such polluted environments has led to the discovery of chemicals with remarkable properties and potential usefulness to humankind. From diseases of shellfish to parasites of bees, Davidson opens a window on a world most of us never stop to consider—but which matters to all of us more than we might ever imagine. In our present era of pandemic scares, Big Fleas Have Little Fleas is a sweeping historical review that’s as timely as tomorrow’s headlines, showing us that the most exciting discoveries can emerge from the smallest sources.
In this book, Elizabeth Davidson shares amazing stories about diseases of insects and other invertebrates important to people—and about the scientists who learned to use those diseases to control pests and create products beneficial to humans. Focusing on insect-microbial interactions crucial to public health, she tells detective stories ranging across global history, from the silkworm farms of nineteenth-century Japan to the research labs of modern America. In these fascinating accounts, Davidson shows us how human health often comes down to a contest of bug against bug. Even habitats seething with bacteria, such as the runoff from cattle farms or sewage treatment plants, are also teeming with invertebrate life—animals that, like ourselves, have ways of fighting infection.
Scientific curiosity about what allows creatures as simple as water fleas to survive in such polluted environments has led to the discovery of chemicals with remarkable properties and potential usefulness to humankind. From diseases of shellfish to parasites of bees, Davidson opens a window on a world most of us never stop to consider—but which matters to all of us more than we might ever imagine. In our present era of pandemic scares, Big Fleas Have Little Fleas is a sweeping historical review that’s as timely as tomorrow’s headlines, showing us that the most exciting discoveries can emerge from the smallest sources.
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Biofeedback for the Brain
How Neurotherapy Effectively Treats Depression, ADHD, Autism, and More
Swingle, Paul G
Rutgers University Press, 2008
Neurofeedback is a cutting-edge, drug-free therapeutic technique used by over a thousand licensed therapists in North America to treat a range of conditions from attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders to epilepsy, stroke, anxiety, migraine, and depression. First popularized in the 1970s, this naturalistic method is based on the idea that we can control our brain activity and that, through training, the brain can learn to modify its own electrical patterns for more efficient processing or to overcome various states of dysfunction.
In Biofeedback for the Brain, Dr. Paul G. Swingle describes in clear and coherent language how these procedures work. With numerous actual case examples, readers follow the progress of clients from the initial “brain map” that shows the location and severity of the neurological abnormalities to the various stages of treatment. Conditions often considered untreatable by conventional health practitioners respond positively to neurotherapeutic treatment and Swingle describes many of these remarkable recoveries. Other chapters describe the use of neurotherapy for a variety of surprising purposes, including performance training for elite athletes, of which the most famous example is the Italian soccer team who considered the technique to be their “secret weapon” in attaining a World Cup victory.
Despite wide-ranging success stories and the endorsement of the American Psychological Association, many health care practitioners remain skeptical of neurofeedback and the procedures are still not well-known by the public or conventional health care providers. This book provides a thorough, definitive, and highly readable presentation of this remarkable health care alternative that offers millions of individuals a chance for healing.
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The Boundaries of Blackness
AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics
Cathy Cohen
University of Chicago Press, 1999
Last year, more African Americans were reported with AIDS than any other racial or ethnic group. And while African Americans make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population, they account for more than 55 percent of all newly diagnosed HIV infections. These alarming developments have caused reactions ranging from profound grief to extreme anger in African-American communities, yet the organized political reaction has remained remarkably restrained.
The Boundaries of Blackness is the first full-scale exploration of the social, political, and cultural impact of AIDS on the African-American community. Informed by interviews with activists, ministers, public officials, and people with AIDS, Cathy Cohen unflinchingly brings to light how the epidemic fractured, rather than united, the black community. She traces how the disease separated blacks along different fault lines and analyzes the ensuing struggles and debates.
More broadly, Cohen analyzes how other cross-cutting issues—of class, gender, and sexuality—challenge accepted ideas of who belongs in the community. Such issues, she predicts, will increasingly occupy the political agendas of black organizations and institutions and can lead to either greater inclusiveness or further divisiveness.
The Boundaries of Blackness, by examining the response of a changing community to an issue laced with stigma, has much to teach us about oppression, resistance, and marginalization. It also offers valuable insight into how the politics of the African-American community—and other marginal groups—will evolve in the twenty-first century.
The Boundaries of Blackness is the first full-scale exploration of the social, political, and cultural impact of AIDS on the African-American community. Informed by interviews with activists, ministers, public officials, and people with AIDS, Cathy Cohen unflinchingly brings to light how the epidemic fractured, rather than united, the black community. She traces how the disease separated blacks along different fault lines and analyzes the ensuing struggles and debates.
More broadly, Cohen analyzes how other cross-cutting issues—of class, gender, and sexuality—challenge accepted ideas of who belongs in the community. Such issues, she predicts, will increasingly occupy the political agendas of black organizations and institutions and can lead to either greater inclusiveness or further divisiveness.
The Boundaries of Blackness, by examining the response of a changing community to an issue laced with stigma, has much to teach us about oppression, resistance, and marginalization. It also offers valuable insight into how the politics of the African-American community—and other marginal groups—will evolve in the twenty-first century.
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Breathe Easy
Relieving the Symptoms of Chronic Lung Disease
Donald A. Mahler
University Press of New England, 2017
Most people don’t think about breathing; it is an automatic, unconscious act. However, the majority of those with asthma (26 million Americans); chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD (24 million Americans); or interstitial lung disease (1–2 million Americans) are aware of their shortness of breath because it interferes with work or other daily activities. As a result, these individuals seek medical attention for diagnosis and treatment. Breathe Easy, written by a pulmonologist, explains what constitutes normal breathing, what causes someone to feel short of breath, and what can be done to improve one’s breathing. In chapters on asthma, COPD, and interstitial lung disease, Dr. Donald A. Mahler addresses the origins and treatments of these conditions, and offers advice for both standard and alternative therapies to breathe easy. Other chapters describe how we breathe, how to understand respiratory difficulties like chronic shortness of breath, the correct use of inhalers, the effects of aging on the brain and body, and the benefits of exercise. His final chapter provides valuable advice about traveling with oxygen. Illustrated with over fifty enlightening medical graphics, Breathe Easy offers a complete and compact guide for the millions of Americans who are limited by their breathing.
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The Burdens of Disease
Epidemics and Human Response in Western History
J.N. Hays
Rutgers University Press, 2009
A review of the original edition of The Burdens of Disease that appeared in ISIS stated, "Hays has written a remarkable book. He too has a message: That epidemics are primarily dependent on poverty and that the West has consistently refused to accept this." This revised edition confirms the book's timely value and provides a sweeping approach to the history of disease.
In this updated volume, with revisions and additions to the original content, including the evolution of drug-resistant diseases and expanded coverage of HIV/AIDS, along with recent data on mortality figures and other relevant statistics, J. N. Hays chronicles perceptions and responses to plague and pestilence over two thousand years of western history. Disease is framed as a multidimensional construct, situated at the intersection of history, politics, culture, and medicine, and rooted in mentalities and social relations as much as in biological conditions of pathology. This revised edition of The Burdens of Disease also studies the victims of epidemics, paying close attention to the relationships among poverty, power, and disease.
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Cardiovascular Diseases in the United States
Iwao M. Moriyama, Dean E. Krueger, and Jeremiah Stamler
Harvard University Press, 1971
Cardiovascular diseases kill and disable more than a million Americans each year. The major types of this complex of diseases are coronary heart disease, hypertensive disease, cerebrovascular diseases, rheumatic heart disease, and congenital malformations of the circulatory system. Authors Moriyama, Krueger, and Stamler relate each of these types to etiology, age of patient at onset, clinical course, and socioeconomic impact on the population. For each type of cardiovascular disease they analyze the quantitative data on the incidence, prevalence, and levels and time trends of mortality and on the demographic characteristics of person affected. They also examine international differences in levels and trends in mortality and point out areas for further research. More than thirty-five figures as well as extensive tables document their text.
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China and the Cholera Pandemic
Restructuring Society under Mao
Xiaoping Fang
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021
Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward campaign organized millions of Chinese peasants into communes in a misguided attempt to rapidly collectivize agriculture with disastrous effects. Catastrophic famine lingered as the global cholera pandemic of the early 1960s spread rampantly through the infected waters of southeastern coastal China. Confronted with a political crisis and the seventh global cholera pandemic in recorded history, the communist government committed to social restructuring in order to affirm its legitimacy and prevent transmission of the disease. Focusing on the Wenzhou Prefecture in Zhejiang Province, the area most seriously stricken by cholera at the time, Xiaoping Fang demonstrates how China’s pandemic was far more than a health incident; it became a significant social and political influence during a dramatic transition for the People’s Republic.
China and the Cholera Pandemic reveals how disease control and prevention, executed through the government’s large-scale, clandestine anticholera campaign, were integral components of its restructuring initiatives, aimed at restoring social order. The subsequent rise of an emergency disciplinary health state furthered these aims through quarantine and isolation, which profoundly impacted the social epidemiology of the region, dividing Chinese society and reinforcing hierarchies according to place, gender, and socioeconomic status.
China and the Cholera Pandemic reveals how disease control and prevention, executed through the government’s large-scale, clandestine anticholera campaign, were integral components of its restructuring initiatives, aimed at restoring social order. The subsequent rise of an emergency disciplinary health state furthered these aims through quarantine and isolation, which profoundly impacted the social epidemiology of the region, dividing Chinese society and reinforcing hierarchies according to place, gender, and socioeconomic status.
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Chris Gets Ear Tubes
Betty Pace
Gallaudet University Press, 1987
Chronic Failures
Kidneys, Regimes of Care, and the Mexican State
Ciara Kierans
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Chronic Failures: Kidneys, Regimes of Care and the Mexican State is about Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) and the relentless search for renal care lived out in the context of poverty, inequality and uneven welfare arrangements. Based on ethnographic research conducted in the state of Jalisco, this book documents the routes uninsured Mexican patients take in order to access resource intensive biotechnical treatments, that is, different modes of dialysis and organ transplantation. It argues that these routes are normalized, bureaucratically, socially and epidemiologically, and turned into a locus for exploitation and profit. Without a coherent logic of healthcare access, negotiating regimes of renal care has catastrophic consequences for those with the least resources to expend in that effort. In carrying both the costs and the burden of care, the practices of patients without entitlement offer a critical vantage point on the interplay between the state, markets in healthcare and the sick body.
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The Costs and Cost-effectiveness of Tuberculosis Control
Anna Vassall
Amsterdam University Press, 2009
Tuberculosis is a leading cause of ill-health and death in low and middle income countries. Tuberculosis control is essential for achieving the Millennium Development Goals relating to health by 2015. However, despite efforts made to expand tuberculosis control over the past decades, tuberculosis remains a serious global health problem. This book aims to assist the expansion of tuberculosis control by adding to the evidence on the cost-effectiveness of different tuberculosis control strategies. It presents research from five countries: Egypt, Ethiopia, Syria, Peru and Ukraine. It examines the implementation of the World Health Organization recommended strategy, Directly Observed Treatment Strategy (dots). New technologies currently being developed to tackle drug resistance are also assessed. Emphasis throughout is placed on the importance of health systems and the costs for patients accessing treatment. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in economic aspects of tuberculosis control.
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Damaged Goods?
Women Living With Incurable Sexually Transmitted Diseases
Adina Nack
Temple University Press, 2008
How do women living with genital herpes and/or HPV (human papilloma virus) infections see themselves as sexual beings, and what choices do they make about sexual health issues? Adina Nack, a medical sociologist who specializes in sexual health and social psychology, conducted in-depth interviews with 43 women about their identities and sexuality in regards to chronic illness. The result is a fascinating book about an issue that affects over 15 million Americans, but is all too little discussed.
Damaged Goods adds to our knowledge of how women are affected by living with chronic STDs and reveals the stages of their sexual- self transformation. From the anxiety of being diagnosed with an STD to issues of blame and shame, Nack-herself diagnosed with a cervical HPV infection-shows why these women feeling that they are "damaged goods," question future relationships, marriage, and their ability to have healthy children.
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The Dana Guide to Brain Health
A Practical Family Reference from Medical Experts
Edited by Floyd E. Bloom, M.D.; M. Flint Beal, M.D.; and, David J. Kupfer, M.D.
Dana Press, 2006
A child crashes to the ground from the monkey bars head-first. A high school student prepares for months to take the SAT. A grandmother slowly slips away from her family through the deadly progression of Alzheimer’s Disease. Whether we realize it or not, the importance of brain health to our daily lives goes far beyond just being able to walk and talk. The Dana Guide to Brain Health offers the first comprehensive home medical reference book on the brain, providing an unparalleled, authoritative guide to improving the fitness of our brains and, ultimately, enriching our lives.
With contributions from over one hundred of the most prominent scientists and clinicians in the United States, The Dana Guide to Brain Health is an extensive and wholly accessible manual on the workings of the human brain. This richly illustrated volume contains a wealth of facts and advice, on simple yet effective ways to take care of our brains; the intimate connection between brain health and body health; brain development from the prenatal period through adulthood; and how we learn, remember, and imagine.
The brain is far too important to be excluded any longer from our daily health concerns. The Dana Guide to Brain Health remedies this oversight with a clearly written, definitive map to our brains that reveals how we can take care of them in order to sustain a long and rich life.
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The Deadly Truth
A History of Disease in America
Gerald N. Grob
Harvard University Press, 2005
The Deadly Truth chronicles the complex interactions between disease and the peoples of America from the pre-Columbian world to the present.
Grob's ultimate lesson is stark but valuable: there can be no final victory over disease. The world in which we live undergoes constant change, which in turn creates novel risks to human health and life. We conquer particular diseases, but others always arise in their stead. In a powerful challenge to our tendency to see disease as unnatural and its virtual elimination as a real possibility, Grob asserts the undeniable biological persistence of disease.
Diseases ranging from malaria to cancer have shaped the social landscape--sometimes through brief, furious outbreaks, and at other times through gradual occurrence, control, and recurrence. Grob integrates statistical data with particular peoples and places while giving us the larger patterns of the ebb and flow of disease over centuries. Throughout, we see how much of our history, culture, and nation-building was determined--in ways we often don't realize--by the environment and the diseases it fostered.
The way in which we live has shaped, and will continue to shape, the diseases from which we get sick and die. By accepting the presence of disease and understanding the way in which it has physically interacted with people and places in past eras, Grob illuminates the extraordinarily complex forces that shape our morbidity and mortality patterns and provides a realistic appreciation of the individual, social, environmental, and biological determinants of human health.
[more]
Death Stalks the Yakama
Epidemiological Transitions and Mortality on the Yakama Indian Reservation, 1888-1964
Clifford E. Trafzer
Michigan State University Press, 1997
Clifford Trafzer's disturbing new work, Death Stalks the Yakama, examines life, death, and the shockingly high mortality rates that have persisted among the fourteen tribes and bands living on the Yakama Reservation in the state of Washington. The work contains a valuable discussion of Indian beliefs about spirits, traditional causes of death, mourning ceremonies, and memorials. More significant, however, is Trafzer's research into heretofore unused parturition and death records from 1888-1964. In these documents, he discovers critical evidence to demonstrate how and why many reservation people died in "epidemics" of pneumonia, tuberculosis, and heart disease.
Death Stalks the Yakama, takes into account many variables, including age, gender, listed causes of death, residence, and blood quantum. In addition, analyses of fetal and infant mortality rates as well as crude death rates arising from tuberculosis, pneumonia, heart disease, accidents, and other causes are presented. Trafzer argues that Native Americans living on the Yakama Reservation were, in fact, in jeopardy as a result of the "reservation system" itself. Not only did this alien and artificial culture radically alter traditional ways of life, but sanitation methods, housing, hospitals, public education, medicine, and medical personnel affiliated with the reservation system all proved inadequate, and each in its own way contributed significantly to high Yakama death rates.
[more]
Diabetes among the Pima
Stories of Survival
Carolyn Smith-Morris
University of Arizona Press, 2006
For the past forty years, the Pima Indians living in the Gila River Indian Community have been among the most consistently studied diabetic populations in the world. But despite many medical advances, the epidemic is continuing and prevalence rates are increasing. Diabetes among the Pima is the first in-depth ethnographic volume to delve into the entire spectrum of causes, perspectives, and conditions that underlie the occurrence of diabetes in this community. Drawing on the narratives of pregnant Pima women and nearly ten years’ work in this community, this book reveals the Pimas’ perceptions and understanding of type 2 and gestational diabetes, and their experience as they live in the midst of a health crisis. Arguing that the prenatal period could offer the best hope for curbing this epidemic, Smith-Morris investigates many core values informing the Pimas’ experience of diabetes: motherhood, foodways, ethnic identity, exercise, attitude toward health care, and a willingness to seek care. Smith-Morris contrasts gripping first-person narratives with analyses of several political, economic, and biomedical factors that influence diabetes among the Pimas. She also integrates major theoretical explanations for the disease and illuminates the strengths and weaknesses of intervention strategies and treatment. An important contribution to the ongoing struggle to understand and prevent diabetes, this volume will be of special interest to experts in the fields of epidemiology, genetics, public health, and anthropology.
Click here for a Facilitator’s Guide to Diabetes among the Pima
Click here for a Facilitator’s Guide to Diabetes among the Pima
[more]
Digestion, Diet, and Disease
Irritable Bowel Syndrome and Gastrointestinal Function
Joneja, Janice Vickerstaff
Rutgers University Press, 2004
Malfunction in the digestive tract can arise from a variety of causes, and it requires the sciences of immunology, physiology, biochemistry, microbiology, and nutrition to fully explain the basis of the dysfunction as well as effective treatment options. Now Dr. Janice Vickerstaff Joneja has written the first book that:
- Applies current research data in all of the relevant sciences into a practical resource for the management of gastrointestinal disease, in particular irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).
- Supplies complete scientific references for the research scientist, the clinician, and the student.
- Provides specific dietary management strategies for IBS and related dysfunction in the gastrointestinal tract, based on scientific data.
- Includes meal plans, recipes, and dietary advice for balanced nutrition, while avoiding the foods most likely to trigger or exacerbate IBS.
These unique qualities make Digestion, Diet, and Disease the ideal choice for practitioners, educators, and researchers in the field of nutritional medicine, as well as nurses, alternative medicine professionals, and the educated general public suffering from IBS.
[more]
Digestive Diseases
Albert I. Mendeloff and James P. Dunn
Harvard University Press, 1971
Such chronic gastrointestinal diseases as peptic ulcer, cirrhosis, and cholelithiasis are becoming increasingly recognized as health problems. This is the first book to deal specifically with mortality data, broken down by geographic, socioeconomic, and other demographic parameters, from digestive diseases in the United States from 1959 to 1961.
Digestive Diseases interprets theses data in relation to clinical material regarding cause and clinical course of the disease and indicates their significance for understanding trends in incidence and prevalence as well as possible future trends. World literature on incidence and prevalence as well as mortality has also been utilized.
[more]
Disease in the History of Modern Latin America
From Malaria to AIDS
Diego Armus, ed.
Duke University Press, 2003
Challenging traditional approaches to medical history, Disease in the History of Modern Latin America advances understandings of disease as a social and cultural construction in Latin America. This innovative collection provides a vivid look at the latest research in the cultural history of medicine through insightful essays about how disease—whether it be cholera or aids, leprosy or mental illness—was experienced and managed in different Latin American countries and regions, at different times from the late nineteenth century to the present.
Based on the idea that the meanings of sickness—and health—are contestable and subject to controversy, Disease in the History of Modern Latin America displays the richness of an interdisciplinary approach to social and cultural history. Examining diseases in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, the contributors explore the production of scientific knowledge, literary metaphors for illness, domestic public health efforts, and initiatives shaped by the agendas of international agencies. They also analyze the connections between ideas of sexuality, disease, nation, and modernity; the instrumental role of certain illnesses in state-building processes; welfare efforts sponsored by the state and led by the medical professions; and the boundaries between individual and state responsibilities regarding sickness and health. Diego Armus’s introduction contextualizes the essays within the history of medicine, the history of public health, and the sociocultural history of disease.
Contributors. Diego Armus, Anne-Emanuelle Birn, Kathleen Elaine Bliss, Ann S. Blum, Marilia Coutinho, Marcus Cueto, Patrick Larvie, Gabriela Nouzeilles, Diana Obregón, Nancy Lays Stepan, Ann Zulawski
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Disease, War, and the Imperial State
The Welfare of the British Armed Forces during the Seven Years' War
Erica Charters
University of Chicago Press, 2014
The Seven Years’ War, often called the first global war, spanned North America, the West Indies, Europe, and India. In these locations diseases such as scurvy, smallpox, and yellow fever killed far more than combat did, stretching the resources of European states.
In Disease, War, and the Imperial State, Erica Charters demonstrates how disease played a vital role in shaping strategy and campaigning, British state policy, and imperial relations during the Seven Years’ War. Military medicine was a crucial component of the British war effort; it was central to both eighteenth-century scientific innovation and the moral authority of the British state. Looking beyond the traditional focus of the British state as a fiscal war-making machine, Charters uncovers an imperial state conspicuously attending to the welfare of its armed forces, investing in medical research, and responding to local public opinion. Charters shows military medicine to be a credible scientific endeavor that was similarly responsive to local conditions and demands.
Disease, War, and the Imperial State is an engaging study of early modern warfare and statecraft, one focused on the endless and laborious task of managing manpower in the face of virulent disease in the field, political opposition at home, and the clamor of public opinion in both Britain and its colonies.
In Disease, War, and the Imperial State, Erica Charters demonstrates how disease played a vital role in shaping strategy and campaigning, British state policy, and imperial relations during the Seven Years’ War. Military medicine was a crucial component of the British war effort; it was central to both eighteenth-century scientific innovation and the moral authority of the British state. Looking beyond the traditional focus of the British state as a fiscal war-making machine, Charters uncovers an imperial state conspicuously attending to the welfare of its armed forces, investing in medical research, and responding to local public opinion. Charters shows military medicine to be a credible scientific endeavor that was similarly responsive to local conditions and demands.
Disease, War, and the Imperial State is an engaging study of early modern warfare and statecraft, one focused on the endless and laborious task of managing manpower in the face of virulent disease in the field, political opposition at home, and the clamor of public opinion in both Britain and its colonies.
[more]
Diseases of Poverty
Epidemiology, Infectious Diseases, and Modern Plagues
Lisa V. Adams and John R. Butterly
Dartmouth College Press, 2015
Only a few decades ago, we were ready to declare victory over infectious diseases. Today, infectious diseases are responsible for significant morbidity and mortality throughout the world. This book examines the epidemiology and social impact of past and present infectious disease epidemics in the developing and developed world. In the introduction, the authors define global health as a discipline, justify its critical importance in the modern era, and introduce the Millennium Development Goals, which have become critical targets for most of the developing world. The first half of the volume provides an epidemiological overview, exploring early and contemporary perspectives on disease and disease control. An analysis of nutrition, water, and sanitation anchors the discussion of basic human needs. Specific diseases representing both “loud” and “silent” emergencies are investigated within broader structures of ecological and biological health such as economics, education, state infrastructure, culture, and personal liberty. The authors also examine antibiotic resistance, AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and pandemic influenza, and offer an epilogue on diseases of affluence, which now threaten citizens of countries both rich and poor. A readable guide to specific diseases, richly contextualized in environment and geography, this book will be used by health professionals in all disciplines interested in global health and its history and as a textbook in university courses on global health.
[more]
Diseases of Women 1–2
Hippocrates
Harvard University Press, 1923
This is the eleventh and final volume in the Loeb Classical Library’s complete edition of Hippocrates’ invaluable texts, which provide essential information about the practice of medicine in antiquity and about Greek theories concerning the human body. Here, Paul Potter presents the Greek text with facing English translation of Diseases of Women 1 and 2, which represent the most extensive accounts in the Hippocratic collection of female reproductive life, the pathological conditions affecting the female reproductive organs, and their proper terminology and recommended treatments. A lexicon of therapeutic agents is included for reference.
The works available in the Loeb Classical Library edition of Hippocrates are:
Volume I: Ancient Medicine. Airs, Waters, Places. Epidemics 1 and 3. The Oath. Precepts. Nutriment.
Volume II: Prognostic. Regimen in Acute Diseases. The Sacred Disease. The Art. Breaths. Law. Decorum. Physician (Ch. 1). Dentition.
Volume III: On Wounds in the Head. In the Surgery. On Fractures. On Joints. Mochlicon.
Volume IV: Nature of Man. Regimen in Health. Humours. Aphorisms. Regimen 1–3. Dreams.
Volume V: Affections. Diseases 1–2.
Volume VI: Diseases 3. Internal Affections. Regimen in Acute Diseases.
Volume VII: Epidemics 2 and 4–7.
Volume VIII: Places in Man. Glands. Fleshes. Prorrhetic 1–2. Physician. Use of Liquids. Ulcers. Haemorrhoids and Fistulas.
Volume IX: Anatomy. Nature of Bones. Heart. Eight Months’ Child. Coan Prenotions. Crises. Critical Days. Superfetation. Girls. Excision of the Fetus. Sight.
Volume X: Generation. Nature of the Child. Diseases 4. Nature of Women. Barrenness.
[more]
The Dying President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1944-1945
Robert H. Ferrell
University of Missouri Press, 1998
In this authoritative account, Robert H. Ferrell shows how the treatment of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's illness in 1944- 1945 was managed by none other than the president himself. Although this powerful American president knew that he suffered from cardiovascular disease, he went to great lengths to hide that fact—both from his physician and from the public. Why Roosevelt disguised the nature of his illness may be impossible to discern fully. He was a secretive man who liked to assign only parts of tasks to his assistants so that he, the president, would be the only one who knew the whole story. The presidency was his life, and he did not wish to give it up.
The president's duplicity, though not easily measurable, had a critical effect on his performance. Placed on a four-hour-a-day schedule by his physicians, Roosevelt could apply very little time to his presidential duties. He took long vacations in South Carolina, Warm Springs, the Catoctin Mountains, and Hyde Park, as well as lengthy journeys to Hawaii, Canada, and Yalta. Important decisions were delayed or poorly made. America's policy toward Germany was temporarily abandoned in favor of the so-called Morgenthau Plan, which proposed the "pastoralization" of Germany, turning the industrial heart of Europe into farmland. Roosevelt nearly ruined the choice of Senator Harry S. Truman as his running mate in 1944 by wavering in the days prior to the party's national convention. He negotiated an agreement with Winston Churchill on sharing postwar development of nuclear weapons but failed to let the State Department know. And, in perhaps the most profoundly unwise decision, Roosevelt accepted a fourth term when he could not possibly survive it.
In his final year, a year in which he faced crucial responsibility regarding World War II and American foreign policy, Franklin D. Roosevelt failed to serve the nation as a healthy president would have. Reading like a mystery story, The Dying President clears up many of the myths and misunderstandings that have surrounded Roosevelt's last year, finally revealing the truth about this missing chapter in FDR's life.
[more]
Epidemiology of Neurologic and Sense Organ Disorders
Leonard T. Kurland, John F. Kurtzke, and Irving D. Goldberg
Harvard University Press, 1973
This is the first book-length treatment of the frequency and distribution of neurologic and sense disorders. It is based primarily on special tabulations of mortality data for 1959–1961 applied to the U.S. census of 1960. Information on incidence, prevalence, and survivorship is provided for each major disorder and a summary chapter considers the frequency and geographic distribution of neurologic disorders in terms of age, sex, color, and demographic characteristics.
[more]
Epilepsy and the Family
A New Guide
Richard Lechtenberg M.D.
Harvard University Press, 2002
Epilepsy and the Family: A New Guide updates Richard Lechtenberg's classic handbook for people with seizure disorders and those closest to them. It offers coping strategies for the wide range of practical and emotional challenges that epilepsy can introduce into the family: marital and sexual difficulties, concerns about pregnancy and inheritance, drug compliance and abuse among teenagers, personality changes and suicide. This new guide addresses the personal questions that adults with epilepsy may be reluctant to ask their physician, and it offers chapters tailored to the special stresses of spouses, parents, and siblings who, like the patient, must live with a seizure disorder.
As many as two and a half million Americans have epilepsy. Thirty percent of them are children under the age of 18. And there are 125,000 newly diagnosed cases each year. A practicing neurologist with decades of clinical experience, Lechtenberg clearly and concisely explains the biology behind this complex and relatively widespread class of diseases. He discusses the various medical conditions that can cause seizures in children and adults and points out that the cause of many seizure disorders is never discovered. Patients and those who care about them will find authoritative but accessible advice on various medications and surgical approaches and the information they need to ask informed questions of their doctors. For the medical professional, this book offers important information on how to better treat the patient with epilepsy by recognizing the needs of the entire family.
This revised edition addresses:New drugs and surgical techniques that have been developed in the past 15 yearsPharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical treatment strategiesNew clinical data on drug combinations and side effectsUp-to-date statistics for mortality, reproduction, violent behavior, divorce, and suicide
[more]
Eradication
Ridding the World of Diseases Forever?
Nancy Leys Stepan
Reaktion Books, 2011
The dream of a world completely free of disease may seem utopian, but eradication—used in its modern sense to mean the reduction of the number of cases of a disease to zero by deliberate public health interventions—has been pursued repeatedly. Campaigns against yellow fever, malaria, and smallpox have been among the largest, most costly programs ever undertaken in international public health. But only one so far has been successful—that against smallpox. And yet in 2007 Bill and Melinda Gates surprised the world with the announcement that they were committing their foundation to eradicating malaria. Polio eradication is another of their priorities. Are such costly programs really justifiable?
The first comprehensive account of the major disease-eradication campaigns from the early twentieth century right up to the present, Eradication places these ambitious goals in their broad historical and contemporary contexts. From the life and times of the American arch-eradicationist Dr. Fred Lowe Soper (1893-1977), who was at the center of many of the campaigns and controversies surrounding eradication in his lifetime, to debates between proponents of primary health care approaches to ill health versus the eradicationists, Nancy Leys Stepan’s narrative suggests that today these differing public health approaches may be complementary rather than in conflict. Enlightening for general readers and specialists alike, Eradication is an illuminating look at some of the most urgent problems of health and disease around the world.
The first comprehensive account of the major disease-eradication campaigns from the early twentieth century right up to the present, Eradication places these ambitious goals in their broad historical and contemporary contexts. From the life and times of the American arch-eradicationist Dr. Fred Lowe Soper (1893-1977), who was at the center of many of the campaigns and controversies surrounding eradication in his lifetime, to debates between proponents of primary health care approaches to ill health versus the eradicationists, Nancy Leys Stepan’s narrative suggests that today these differing public health approaches may be complementary rather than in conflict. Enlightening for general readers and specialists alike, Eradication is an illuminating look at some of the most urgent problems of health and disease around the world.
[more]
Every Last Breath
A Memoir of Two Illnesses
Joanne Jacobson
University of Utah Press, 2020
When Joanne Jacobson’s writing about her mother’s respiratory illness was interrupted by her own diagnosis with a rare blood disorder, she found her perspective profoundly altered. Every Last Breath follows these two chronic illnesses as they grow unexpectedly intertwined. Rejecting a fixed, retrospective point of view and the forward-moving trajectory of conventional memoir, Jacobson brings the reader to the emotionally raw present—where potentially fatal illness and “end of life” both remain, emphatically, life. As chronic illness blurs the distinction between illness and wellness, she discovers how a lifetime of relapse and remission can invite transformation. Written at the fluid, unsettling boundary between prose and poetry, these essays offer a narrative diagnosis of ongoing revision.
[more]
Experiments in Skin
Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam
Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu
Duke University Press, 2021
In Experiments in Skin Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu examines the ongoing influence of the Vietnam War on contemporary ideas about race and beauty. Framing skin as the site around which these ideas have been formed, Tu foregrounds the histories of militarism in the production of US biomedical knowledge and commercial cosmetics. She uncovers the efforts of wartime scientists in the US Military Dermatology Research Program to alleviate the environmental and chemical risks to soldiers' skin. These dermatologists sought relief for white soldiers while denying that African American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians were also vulnerable to harm. Their experiments led to the development of pharmaceutical cosmetics, now used by women in Ho Chi Minh City to tend to their skin, and to grapple with the damage caused by the war's lingering toxicity. In showing how the US military laid the foundations for contemporary Vietnamese consumption of cosmetics and practices of beauty, Tu shows how the intersecting histories of militarism, biomedicine, race, and aesthetics become materially and metaphorically visible on skin.
[more]
Faith and the Pursuit of Health
Cardiometabolic Disorders in Samoa
Hardin, Jessica
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Faith and the Pursuit of Health explores how Pentecostal Christians manage chronic illness in ways that sheds light on health disparities and social suffering in Samoa, a place where rates of obesity and related cardiometabolic disorders have reached population-wide levels. Pentecostals grapple with how to maintain the health of their congregants in an environment that fosters cardiometabolic disorders. They find ways to manage these forms of sickness and inequality through their churches and the friendships developed within these institutions. Examining how Pentecostal Christianity provides many Samoans with tools to manage day-to-day issues around health and sickness, Jessica Hardin argues for understanding the synergies between how Christianity and biomedicine practice chronicity.
[more]
Fasting Girls
The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease
Joan Jacobs Brumberg
Harvard University Press, 1988
Health Dimensions of Sex and Reproduction
The Global Burden of Sexually Transmitted Diseases, HIV, Maternal Conditions, Perinatal Disorders, and Congenital Anomalies
Christopher J. L. Murray
Harvard University Press, 1998
From the health risks of sexual activity to those of pregnancy, abortion, and childbirth, reproduction constitutes enormous risks to a woman's health. Ill-health conditions related to sex and reproduction account for 25 percent of the global disease burden in adult women. In sub-Saharan Africa, they account for over 40 percent. The catastrophic effects of reproductive ill-health, however, are not limited to women; for infants and adult men, they inflict 25 percent and 1 percent respectively of the global burden.
This volume offers comprehensive data and detailed discussions of the epidemiologies of three sexually transmitted diseases, HIV, and five specific maternal conditions, as well as those of congenital anomalies and perinatal conditions. Projections of the HIV epidemic are provided: by 2020 HIV is projected to double to 2.5 percent of the global disease burden.
Health Dimensions of Sex and Reproduction will serve as a comprehensive reference for epidemiologists, public health specialists, practitioners and advocates of STD and HIV prevention, and reproductive and neonatal health.
[more]
Health, Disease, and Illness
Concepts in Medicine
Arthur L. Caplan, James J. McCartney, and Dominic A. Sisti, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 2004
In the 1850s, "Drapetomania" was the medical term for a disease found among black slaves in the United States. The main symptom was a strange desire to run away from their masters. In earlier centuries gout was understood as a metabolic disease of the affluent, so much so that it became a badge of uppercrust honor—and a medical excuse to avoid hard work. Today, is there such a thing as mental illness, or is mental illness just a myth? Is Alzheimer's really a disease? What is menopause—a biological or a social construction?
Historically one can see that health, disease, and illness are concepts that have been ever fluid. Modern science, sociology, philosophy, even society—among other factors—constantly have these issues under microscopes, learning more, defining and redefining ever more exactly. Yet often that scrutiny, instead of leading toward hard answers, only leads to more questions. Health, Disease, and Illness brings together a sterling list of classic and contemporary thinkers to examine the history, state, and future of ever-changing "concepts" in medicine.
Divided into four parts—Historical Discussions; Characterizing Health, Disease, and Illness; Clinical Applications of Health and Disease; and Normalcy, Genetic Disease, and Enhancement: The Future of the Concepts of Health and Disease—the reader can see the evolutionary arc of medical concepts from the Greek physician Galen of Pergamum (ca. 150 ce) who proposed that "the best doctor is also a philosopher," to contemporary discussions of the genome and morality. The editors have recognized a crucial need for a deeper integration of medicine and philosophy with each other, particularly in an age of dynamically changing medical science—and what it means, medically, philosophically, to be human.
[more]
Heart 2 Heart
Stories from Patients with Left Ventricular Assist Devices
Edited by Ruth Halben, M.S.W.
Michigan Publishing Services, 2016
Heart 2 Heart brings together stories of patients who suffered from a serious heart condition and therefore received an LVAD (Left Ventricular Assist Device). The patients describe the various
hardships they and their families endured as well as how many found hope after receiving an LVAD.
Each chapter is written by a different patient or a patient’s family member, creating a unique
collection of stories that reveals the realities of living life with an implanted heart pump. Heart 2 Heart is composed of seventeen patient voices, where fourteen males and three females of different ethnicities and ages share with the reader their tale--from their initial diagnosis, to their eventual LVAD procedure performed at the University of Michigan Hospital.
The editor, Ruth Halben, M.S.W., is a clinical social worker in the University of Michigan Health System who works with LVAD patients and their families. Ruth is one of the first LVAD social workers in the nation, and she draws both from her expertise and her heartfelt relationships with her patients to bring together this wonderful resource for current and future LVAD patients.
hardships they and their families endured as well as how many found hope after receiving an LVAD.
Each chapter is written by a different patient or a patient’s family member, creating a unique
collection of stories that reveals the realities of living life with an implanted heart pump. Heart 2 Heart is composed of seventeen patient voices, where fourteen males and three females of different ethnicities and ages share with the reader their tale--from their initial diagnosis, to their eventual LVAD procedure performed at the University of Michigan Hospital.
The editor, Ruth Halben, M.S.W., is a clinical social worker in the University of Michigan Health System who works with LVAD patients and their families. Ruth is one of the first LVAD social workers in the nation, and she draws both from her expertise and her heartfelt relationships with her patients to bring together this wonderful resource for current and future LVAD patients.
[more]
Hidden Arguments
Political Ideology and Disease Prevention Policy
Tesh, Sylvia N
Rutgers University Press, 1988
In this provocative book, Sylvia Tesh shows how "politics masquerades as science" in the debates over the causes and prevention of disease.Tesh argues that ideas about the causes of disease which dominate policy at any given time or place are rarely determined by scientific criteria alone. The more critical factors are beliefs about how much government can control industry, who should take risks when scientists are uncertain, and whether the individual or society has the ultimate responsibility for health. Tesh argues that instead of lamenting the presence of this extra-scientific reasoning, it should be brought out of hiding and welcomed. She illustrates her position by analyzing five different theories of disease causality that have vied for dominance during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and discusses in detail the political implications of each theory. Tesh also devotes specific chapters to the multicausal theory of disease, to health education policy in Cuba, to the 1981 air traffic controller's strike, to the debate over Agent Orange, and to an analysis of science as a belief system. Along the way she makes these prinicipal points: She criticizes as politically conservative the idea that diseases result from a multifactorial web of causes. Placing responsibility for disease prevention on "society" is ideological, she argues. In connection with the air traffic controllers she questions whether it is in a union's best interests to claim that workers' jobs are stressful. She shows why there are no entirely neutral answers to questions about the toxicity of environmental pollutants. In a final chapter, Tesh urges scientists to incorporate egalitarian values into their search for the truth, rather than pretending science can be divorced from that political ideology. Sylvia Noble Tesh, a political scientist, is on the faculty of the University of Michigan School of Public Health.
[more]
Hidden Illness in the White House
Kenneth R. Crispell and Carlos Gomez
Duke University Press, 1988
The serious illness of three presidents—Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy—as well as the injury Ronald Reagan received in the assassination attempt upon him have revealed our woefully inadequate system for handling presidential incapacity. The authors believe that this flawed system poses a major threat to the nation, and they provide sobering reports on how the government functioned (or failed to function) during times of presidential impairment. The public was kept in the dark regarding the gravity of the presidential condition, often unaware that critical decisions were being made while the president was suffering from a severe illness.
Hidden Illness in the White House contains startling new information on the severity of Roosevelt’s illness during the crucial Yalta negotiations and the fact that Kennedy suffered from Addison’s disease, a life-threatening illness, long before he was elected to the presidency. In each case the authors demonstrate that a largely successful effort was made to conceal the president’s true medical condition from the public.
Hidden Illness in the White House contains startling new information on the severity of Roosevelt’s illness during the crucial Yalta negotiations and the fact that Kennedy suffered from Addison’s disease, a life-threatening illness, long before he was elected to the presidency. In each case the authors demonstrate that a largely successful effort was made to conceal the president’s true medical condition from the public.
[more]
Iatrogenicity
Causes and Consequences of Iatrogenesis in Cardiovascular Medicine
Gussak, Ihor B
Rutgers University Press, 2017
Iatrogenesis is the occurrence of untoward effects resulting from actions of health care providers, including medical errors, medical malpractice, practicing beyond one’s expertise, adverse effects of medication, unnecessary treatment, inappropriate screenings, and surgical errors. This is a huge public health issue: tens to hundreds of thousands of deaths are attributed to iatrogenic causes each year in the U.S., and vulnerable populations such as the elderly and minorities are particularly susceptible.
Edited by two renowned cardiology experts, Iatrogenicity: Causes and Consequences of Iatrogenesis in Cardiovascular Medicine addresses both the iatrogenicity that arises with cardiovascular interventions, as well as non-cardiovascular interventions that result in adverse consequences on the cardiovascular system. The book aims to achieve three things: to summarize the available information on this topic in a single high-yield volume; to highlight the human and financial cost of iatrogenesis; and to describe and propose potential interventions to ameliorate the effects of iatrogenesis. This accessible book is a practical reference for any practicing physician who sees patients with cardiovascular issues. .
Edited by two renowned cardiology experts, Iatrogenicity: Causes and Consequences of Iatrogenesis in Cardiovascular Medicine addresses both the iatrogenicity that arises with cardiovascular interventions, as well as non-cardiovascular interventions that result in adverse consequences on the cardiovascular system. The book aims to achieve three things: to summarize the available information on this topic in a single high-yield volume; to highlight the human and financial cost of iatrogenesis; and to describe and propose potential interventions to ameliorate the effects of iatrogenesis. This accessible book is a practical reference for any practicing physician who sees patients with cardiovascular issues. .
[more]
Identifying Future Disease Hot Spots
Infectious Disease Vulnerability Index
Melinda Moore
RAND Corporation, 2016
Recent high-profile outbreaks such as Ebola and Zika have illustrated the transnational nature of infectious diseases. Countries that are most vulnerable to outbreaks may be higher priorities for technical support. RAND’s Infectious Disease Vulnerability Index should help U.S. government and international agencies identify these countries and inform programming to preemptively mitigate the spread and effects of potential transnational outbreaks.
[more]
Pneumonia by R. Heffron, Introduction by Maxwell Finland. The Biology of Pneumococcus by B. White, New Foreword by Robert Austin
Roderick Heffron and Benjamin White
Harvard University Press, 1979
The search for effective immunization against pneumonia was a principal avenue of investigation before the advent of The search for effective immunization against pneumonia was a principal avenue of investigation before the advent of antibiotics made such an effort appear unnecessary. Recently, however, the limitations of antibiotic therapy have become increasingly evident, and interest has been renewed in many of the threads of research which have all but lain dormant since the 1930s. In 1978, a pneumococcal vaccine was licensed by the F.D.A., merely as evidence of a renaissance in pneumococcal research which is now taking place. We are pleased to be reissuing two classic volumes which provide a unique repository of data amassed prior to the time when penicillin precluded further exhaustive observation of the unmodified infection.
Heffron’s Pneumonia is a compilation and analysis of all aspects of pneumococcal disease, including the distribution of pneumococcal types, the pathology of pneumonia, its epidemiology, symptoms, signs, complications, diagnosis, prognosis, and immunology. With a complete cross-reference index and an extensive bibliography, Heffron’s book is still the definitive work on pneumococcal infections.
White’s Biology of Pneumococcus contains the wealth of information acquired in the first six decades following the discovery of the pneumococcus. With a bibliography drawing together some 1593 papers, White’s volume is of unquestionable significance as a historical record and the basis for further study.
[more]
Keeping Heart
A Memoir of Family Struggle, Race, and Medicine
Otis Trotter
Ohio University Press, 2015
“After saying our good-byes to friends and neighbors, we all got in the cars and headed up the hill and down the road toward a future in Ohio that we hoped would be brighter,” Otis Trotter writes in his affecting memoir, Keeping Heart: A Memoir of Family Struggle, Race, and Medicine.
Organized around the life histories, medical struggles, and recollections of Trotter and his thirteen siblings, the story begins in 1914 with his parents, Joe William Trotter Sr. and Thelma Odell Foster Trotter, in rural Alabama. By telling his story alongside the experiences of his parents as well as his siblings, Otis reveals cohesion and tensions in twentieth-century African American family and community life in Alabama, West Virginia, and Ohio.
This engaging chronicle illuminates the journeys not only of a black man born with heart disease in the southern Appalachian coalfields, but of his family and community. It fills an important gap in the literature on an underexamined aspect of American experience: the lives of blacks in rural Appalachia and in the nonurban endpoints of the Great Migration. Its emotional power is a testament to the importance of ordinary lives.
[more]
Living with Lupus
Women and Chronic Illness in Ecuador
By Ann Miles
University of Texas Press, 2013
Once associated only with the wealthy and privileged in Latin America, lifelong illnesses are now emerging among a wider cross section of the population as an unfortunate consequence of growing urbanization and increased life expectancy. One of these diseases is the chronic autoimmune disorder lupus erythematosus. Difficult to diagnose and harder still to effectively manage, lupus challenges the very foundations of women’s lives, their real and imagined futures, and their carefully constructed gendered identities. While the illness is validated by medical science, it is poorly understood by women, their families, and their communities, which creates multiple tensions as women attempt to make sense of an unpredictable, expensive, and culturally suspect medically managed illness.
Living with Lupus vividly chronicles the struggles of Ecuadorian women as they come to terms with the experience of debilitating chronic illness. Drawing on years of ethnographic research, Ann Miles sensitively portrays the experiences and stories of Ecuadorian women who suffer with the intractable and stigmatizing disease. She uses in-depth case histories, rich in ethnographic detail, to explore not only how chronic illness can tear at the seams of women’s precarious lives, but also how meanings are reconfigured when a biomedical illness category moves across a cultural landscape. One of the few books that deals with the meanings and experiences of chronic illness in the developing world, Living with Lupus contributes to our understanding of a significant global health transition.
[more]
The Medical Library Association Guide to Finding Out about Heart Disease
The Best Print and Electronic Resources
American Library Association
American Library Association, 2013
Medicating Race
Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference
Anne Pollock
Duke University Press, 2012
In Medicating Race, Anne Pollock traces the intersecting discourses of race, pharmaceuticals, and heart disease in the United States over the past century, from the founding of cardiology through the FDA's approval of BiDil, the first drug sanctioned for use in a specific race. She examines wide-ranging aspects of the dynamic interplay of race and heart disease: articulations, among the founders of American cardiology, of heart disease as a modern, and therefore white, illness; constructions of "normal" populations in epidemiological research, including the influential Framingham Heart Study; debates about the distinctiveness African American hypertension, which turn on disparate yet intersecting arguments about genetic legacies of slavery and the comparative efficacy of generic drugs; and physician advocacy for the urgent needs of black patients on professional, scientific, and social justice grounds. Ultimately, Pollock insists that those grappling with the meaning of racialized medical technologies must consider not only the troubled history of race and biomedicine but also its fraught yet vital present. Medical treatment should be seen as a site of, rather than an alternative to, political and social contestation. The aim of scholarly analysis should not be to settle matters of race and genetics, but to hold medicine more broadly accountable to truth and justice.
[more]
Network Medicine
Complex Systems in Human Disease and Therapeutics
Joseph Loscalzo
Harvard University Press, 2017
Big data, genomics, and quantitative approaches to network-based analysis are combining to advance the frontiers of medicine as never before. Network Medicine introduces this rapidly evolving field of medical research, which promises to revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of human diseases. With contributions from leading experts that highlight the necessity of a team-based approach in network medicine, this definitive volume provides readers with a state-of-the-art synthesis of the progress being made and the challenges that remain.
Medical researchers have long sought to identify single molecular defects that cause diseases, with the goal of developing silver-bullet therapies to treat them. But this paradigm overlooks the inherent complexity of human diseases and has often led to treatments that are inadequate or fraught with adverse side effects. Rather than trying to force disease pathogenesis into a reductionist model, network medicine embraces the complexity of multiple influences on disease and relies on many different types of networks: from the cellular-molecular level of protein-protein interactions to correlational studies of gene expression in biological samples. The authors offer a systematic approach to understanding complex diseases while explaining network medicine’s unique features, including the application of modern genomics technologies, biostatistics and bioinformatics, and dynamic systems analysis of complex molecular networks in an integrative context.
By developing techniques and technologies that comprehensively assess genetic variation, cellular metabolism, and protein function, network medicine is opening up new vistas for uncovering causes and identifying cures of disease.
[more]
The New Harvard Guide to Women’s Health
Karen J. Carlson, M.D., Stephanie A. Eisenstat, M.D., and Terra Ziporyn, Ph.D.
Harvard University Press, 2004
With the publication in 1996 of The Harvard Guide to Women's Health, women seeking answers to questions about their health had access to the combined expertise of physicians from three of the world's most prestigious medical institutions: Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Brigham and Women's Hospital. With complete information on women's health concerns, physical and behavioral, this A to Z reference quickly became a definitive resource, praised especially for its coverage of topics not previously considered under the umbrella of women's health. The New Harvard Guide to Women's Health reunites the authors to bring a valued health reference up to date for a new generation--and for those women who have come to rely on the Harvard Guide and are now wondering what to do about their health as they enter a new stage of life, asking questions like the following: I've been on hormone replacement therapy. Should I stop? How?
Could this rash be lupus?
I've been on the Pill. What is my risk for stroke?
Fat is bad, fat is good: What should I believe? And what's left to eat?
When does ordinary worry become chronic anxiety?
What screening tests do I need now?
In addition to revised recommendations reflecting the current medical thinking on menopause and hormone replacement therapy, the New Harvard Guide includes updated recommendations about cardiac health and heart disease--the #1 killer of women in the United States
entries reflecting recent advances in the understanding and treatment of autoimmune diseases
better coverage of health concerns throughout a woman's life span, from her first period to menopause and beyond, with a new entry on perimenopause
expanded nutritional recommendations, including a unique chart of the U.S. government's Daily Reference Intakes for micronutrients, broken down for teens and women whose needs may differ because they are pregnant, breastfeeding, or postmenopausal
updated information on over-the-counter medications, prescription drugs, procedures, screenings, and diagnostic tests
[more]
Notorious H.I.V.
The Media Spectacle Of Nushawn Williams
Thomas Shevory
University of Minnesota Press, 2004
Outbreak Culture
The Ebola Crisis and the Next Epidemic, With a New Preface and Epilogue
Pardis Sabeti and Lara Salahi
Harvard University Press, 2021
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year
“A critical, poignant postmortem of the epidemic.”
—Washington Post
“Forceful and instructive…Sabeti and Salahi uncover competition, sabotage, fear, blame, and disorganization bordering on chaos, features that are seen in just about any lethal epidemic.”
—Paul Farmer, cofounder of Partners in Health
“The central theme of the book…is that common threads of dysfunction run through responses to epidemics…The power of Outbreak Culture is its universality.”
—Nature
“Sabeti and Salahi present a wealth of evidence supporting the imperative that outbreak response must operate in a coordinated, real-time manner.”
—Science
As we saw with the Ebola outbreak—and the disastrous early handling of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic—a lack of preparedness, delays, and system-wide problems with the distribution of critical medical supplies can have deadly consequences. Yet after every outbreak, the systems put in place to coordinate emergency responses are generally dismantled.
One of America’s top biomedical researchers, Dr. Pardis Sabeti, and her Pulitzer Prize–winning collaborator, Lara Salahi, argue that these problems are built into the ecosystem of our emergency responses. With an understanding of the path of disease and insight into political psychology, they show how secrecy, competition, and poor coordination plague nearly every major public health crisis and reveal how much more could be done to safeguard the well-being of caregivers, patients, and vulnerable communities. A work of fearless integrity and unassailable authority, Outbreak Culture seeks to ensure that we make some urgently needed changes before the next pandemic.
[more]
Periphery
How Your Nervous System Predicts and Protects against Disease
Moses V. Chao
Harvard University Press, 2023
A leading neuroscientist argues that the peripheral nervous system, long understood to play a key role in regulating basic bodily functions, also signals the onset of illness.
Millions of years ago, one of the first organisms—a deep-ocean worm—functioned without a brain. It detected the light around itself through a mesh of cells that enabled sensation, performing all manner of bodily functions through its peripheral nervous system. In humans, these sensory nerves and fibers regulate digestion, heart rate, perspiration, and other involuntary systems. And beyond these critical roles in our bodies, Moses Chao argues, the peripheral nervous system can also warn us about neurodegenerative disorders that may be in our futures.
Periphery describes how the peripheral nervous system evolved to detect sensations—smells, sounds, and touch. The organs of the PNS prove to be an integral part of how we make sense of the world, packaging and transmitting information throughout the body to inform our cognition, attention, perception, and memory. But Chao contends that the peripheral nerves may do more than regulate and detect—they may also allow us to predict the onset of disease. Thorough investigation of historical findings, clinical cases, and contemporary research suggests that peripheral activities create markers of neurological and psychiatric conditions, including Parkinson’s disease, autism, and dementia. These are bold claims, some of them speculative, but Chao marshals compelling evidence. With optimal clinical management and even potential treatment increasingly dependent on the earliest possible detection, his insights may prove invaluable to patients and clinicians.
Full of new ideas and provocative interpretations of the latest data, Periphery opens exciting avenues for medical research while deepening our understanding of a crucial and little appreciated biological system, foundational to all animal life.
[more]
Physics
The First Science
Lindenfeld, Peter
Rutgers University Press, 2011
Today's physics textbooks have become encyclopedic, offering students dry discussions, rote formulas, and exercises with little relation to the real world. Physics: The First Science takes a different approach by offering uniquely accessible, student-friendly explanations, historical and philosophical perspectives and mathematics in easy-to-comprehend dialogue. It emphasizes the unity of physics and its place as the basis for all science. Examples and worked solutions are scattered throughout the narrative to help increase understanding. Students are tested and challenged at the end of each chapter with questions ranging from a guided-review designed to mirror the examples, to problems, reasoning skill building exercises that encourage students to analyze unfamiliar situations, and interactive simulations developed at the University of Colorado. With their experience instructing both students and teachers of physics for decades, Peter Lindenfeld and Suzanne White Brahmia have developed an algebra-based physics book with features to help readers see the physics in their lives. Students will welcome the engaging style, condensed format, and economical price.
[more]
The Process of Neurologic Care in Medical Practice
Thomas H. Glick
Harvard University Press, 1984
Most neurology is done by general physicians rather than by neurologists. Still, neurology is perceived by doctors to be one of the most troublesome and difficult medical specialties. Neurologic symptoms are often vague and uncertain, and seemingly insignificant symptoms can reflect frightening disorders.
Thomas Glick, a superb teacher as well as an experienced clinician, has written this book in the belief that errors in handling neurologic cases stem not so much from a failure to command a daunting body of knowledge as from inadequate clinical reasoning. Dr. Glick shows how the skills of the primary-care physician can be applied to the special problems of neurologic history-taking and physical examination. He emphasizes time-saving ways to focus the exam and avoid diagnostic error. The book describes clear procedures for cases that the generalist can handle comfortably and offers guidelines on when (and how) to seek the advice of the consultant neurologist. Case histories, scattered liberally throughout the text, highlight the discussions and give the reader a rich sampling of specific methods of problem solving.
Clinicians who feel skeptical about the effectiveness of neurologic therapy or frustrated by its application will find here a commonsense approach to therapeutic planning. Chapters on ambulatory and chronic neurologic care also convey a positive sense of the broader therapeutic possibilities that exist in neurologic practice. Neurologic residents, senior medical students, psychiatrists, and allied health professionals, as well as primary caregivers, will benefit from the insights contained in this sensitive and articulate book.
[more]
The Province of Affliction
Illness and the Making of Early New England
Ben Mutschler
University of Chicago Press, 2020
In The Province of Affliction, Ben Mutschler explores the surprising roles that illness played in shaping the foundations of New England society and government from the late seventeenth century through the early nineteenth century. Considered healthier than people in many other regions of early America, and yet still riddled with disease, New Englanders grappled steadily with what could be expected of the sick and what allowances were made to them and their providers. Mutschler integrates the history of disease into the narrative of early American social and political development, illuminating the fragility of autonomy, individualism, and advancement . Each sickness in early New England created its own web of interdependent social relations that could both enable survival and set off a long bureaucratic struggle to determine responsibility for the misfortune. From families and households to townships, colonies, and states, illness both defined and strained the institutions of the day, bringing people together in the face of calamity, yet also driving them apart when the cost of persevering grew overwhelming. In the process, domestic turmoil circulated through the social and political world to permeate the very bedrock of early American civic life.
[more]
The Public's Health
A Narrative History Of Health And Disease In Arkansas
Sam Taggert
Arkansas Times Press, 2013
August 1st, 1878 The preceding winter had been mild, the spring and summer was hot and rainy; there were mosquitoes everywhere. "Yellow Jack" had been reported in New Orleans. William Warren, a steamboat crewman at Presidents Island just south of Memphis, left his ship and entered the city. One day later he was admitted to the City Hospital and two days hence he was dead of yellow fever. When word got out of a yellow fever death in the city the citizens began to flee. Schools and churches closed their doors. Passenger boat services from New Orleans were forced to disembark their passengers on the Arkansas side. In the end 5,100 people died in the city of Memphis. The hardest-hit towns in Arkansas were Helena, Hopefield (West Memphis) and Augusta on the White River. Trains and boats entering the state of Arkansas were quarantined. Many little towns across the Delta established "shotgun" quarantines: if you weren’t recognized by the men manning the barrier, you were asked to leave through the sights of a gun. Smallpox,malaria, tuberculosis, cholera, yellow fever were ever present dangers in nineteenth and early twentieth century Arkansas. This story is a narrative history of the health and disease of the people of Arkansas, what they faced and how they dealt with it.
[more]
Rationalizing Epidemics
Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600
David S. Jones
Harvard University Press, 2004
Ever since their arrival in North America, European colonists and their descendants have struggled to explain the epidemics that decimated native populations. Century after century, they tried to understand the causes of epidemics, the vulnerability of American Indians, and the persistence of health disparities. They confronted their own responsibility for the epidemics, accepted the obligation to intervene, and imposed social and medical reforms to improve conditions. In Rationalizing Epidemics, David Jones examines crucial episodes in this history: Puritan responses to Indian depopulation in the seventeenth century; attempts to spread or prevent smallpox on the Western frontier in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; tuberculosis campaigns on the Sioux reservations from 1870 until 1910; and programs to test new antibiotics and implement modern medicine on the Navajo reservation in the 1950s. These encounters were always complex. Colonists, traders, physicians, and bureaucrats often saw epidemics as markers of social injustice and worked to improve Indians' health. At the same time, they exploited epidemics to obtain land, fur, and research subjects, and used health disparities as grounds for "civilizing" American Indians. Revealing the economic and political patterns that link these cases, Jones provides insight into the dilemmas of modern health policy in which desire and action stand alongside indifference and inaction.
[more]
The Red Cell
Production, Metabolism, Destruction—Normal and Abnormal, Revised Edition
John Harris
Harvard University Press, 1970
Every chapter in this classic on hematology has been entirely updated. Beginning at the molecular level, the book gives a detailed description of the way a red blood cell is produced, its metabolic processes, and how it is destroyed. Data and examples drawn from experiments illustrate current knowledge of the subject and substantiate conclusions. Although the work is clinically oriented, the text emphasizes the experimental approach to seeking the pathophysiology and mechanisms of disease resulting from alterations in the life processes of the red cell. Nearly 100 illustrations accompany the text.
[more]
The Reef
Elizabeth Arnold
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Elizabeth Arnold's first book of poems documents her struggle with cancer. A book-length sequence of poems, The Reef rockets the reader through a Heraclitean chute of accelerated life experience by way of anecdote, satire, facts from medical science, and lyrical sweep. This multilayered work explores the depths of illness, investigating the way one's attitude toward it changes over time and how one gathers and processes information in order to make sense of it.
"Arnold's poetry, much more mature than most writers' first book, links lyrics, slight narratives, and a bit of satire into a work of glorious affirmation. The book is a splendid read."—Mary Sue Koeppel, Florida Times-Union
"For this commitment to both the autobiographical honesty and aesthetic risk, The Reef should be valuable to anyone who has been waiting for where contemporary American poetry is going."—Agni
"Arnold's poetry, much more mature than most writers' first book, links lyrics, slight narratives, and a bit of satire into a work of glorious affirmation. The book is a splendid read."—Mary Sue Koeppel, Florida Times-Union
"For this commitment to both the autobiographical honesty and aesthetic risk, The Reef should be valuable to anyone who has been waiting for where contemporary American poetry is going."—Agni
[more]
Rest Uneasy
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in Twentieth-Century America
Cowgill, Brittany
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Tracing the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) diagnosis from its mid-century origins through the late 1900s, Rest Uneasy investigates the processes by which SIDS became both a discrete medical enigma and a source of social anxiety construed differently over time and according to varying perspectives. American medicine reinterpreted and reconceived of the problem of sudden infant death multiple times over the course of the twentieth century. Its various approaches linked sudden infant deaths to all kinds of different causes—biological, anatomical, environmental, and social. In the context of a nation increasingly skeptical, yet increasingly expectant, of medicine, Americans struggled to cope with the paradoxes of sudden infant death; they worked to admit their powerlessness to prevent SIDS even while they tried to overcome it. Brittany Cowgill chronicles and assesses Americans’ fraught but consequential efforts to explain and conquer SIDS, illuminating how and why SIDS has continued to cast a shadow over doctors and parents.
[more]
Risky Medicine
Our Quest to Cure Fear and Uncertainty
Robert Aronowitz
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Will ever-more sensitive screening tests for cancer lead to longer, better lives? Will anticipating and trying to prevent the future complications of chronic disease lead to better health? Not always, says Robert Aronowitz in Risky Medicine. In fact, it often is hurting us.
Exploring the transformation of health care over the last several decades that has led doctors to become more attentive to treating risk than treating symptoms or curing disease, Aronowitz shows how many aspects of the health system and clinical practice are now aimed at risk reduction and risk control. He argues that this transformation has been driven in part by the pharmaceutical industry, which benefits by promoting its products to the larger percentage of the population at risk for a particular illness, rather than the smaller percentage who are actually affected by it. Meanwhile, for those suffering from chronic illness, the experience of risk and disease has been conflated by medical practitioners who focus on anticipatory treatment as much if not more than on relieving suffering caused by disease. Drawing on such controversial examples as HPV vaccines, cancer screening programs, and the cancer survivorship movement, Aronowitz argues that patients and their doctors have come to believe, perilously, that far too many medical interventions are worthwhile because they promise to control our fears and reduce uncertainty.
Risky Medicine is a timely call for a skeptical response to medicine’s obsession with risk, as well as for higher standards of evidence for risk-reducing interventions and a rebalancing of health care to restore an emphasis on the actual curing of and caring for people suffering from disease.
Exploring the transformation of health care over the last several decades that has led doctors to become more attentive to treating risk than treating symptoms or curing disease, Aronowitz shows how many aspects of the health system and clinical practice are now aimed at risk reduction and risk control. He argues that this transformation has been driven in part by the pharmaceutical industry, which benefits by promoting its products to the larger percentage of the population at risk for a particular illness, rather than the smaller percentage who are actually affected by it. Meanwhile, for those suffering from chronic illness, the experience of risk and disease has been conflated by medical practitioners who focus on anticipatory treatment as much if not more than on relieving suffering caused by disease. Drawing on such controversial examples as HPV vaccines, cancer screening programs, and the cancer survivorship movement, Aronowitz argues that patients and their doctors have come to believe, perilously, that far too many medical interventions are worthwhile because they promise to control our fears and reduce uncertainty.
Risky Medicine is a timely call for a skeptical response to medicine’s obsession with risk, as well as for higher standards of evidence for risk-reducing interventions and a rebalancing of health care to restore an emphasis on the actual curing of and caring for people suffering from disease.
[more]
Saving Babies?
The Consequences of Newborn Genetic Screening
Stefan Timmermans and Mara Buchbinder
University of Chicago Press, 2012
It has been close to six decades since Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA and more than ten years since the human genome was decoded. Today, through the collection and analysis of a small blood sample, every baby born in the United States is screened for more than fifty genetic disorders. Though the early detection of these abnormalities can potentially save lives, the test also has a high percentage of false positives—inaccurate results that can take a brutal emotional toll on parents before they are corrected. Now some doctors are questioning whether the benefits of these screenings outweigh the stress and pain they sometimes produce. In Saving Babies?, Stefan Timmermans and Mara Buchbinder evaluate the consequences and benefits of state-mandated newborn screening—and the larger policy questions they raise about the inherent inequalities in American medical care that limit the effectiveness of this potentially lifesaving technology.
Drawing on observations and interviews with families, doctors, and policy actors, Timmermans and Buchbinder have given us the first ethnographic study of how parents and geneticists resolve the many uncertainties in screening newborns. Ideal for scholars of medicine, public health, and public policy, this book is destined to become a classic in its field.
[more]
Selling Science
Polio and the Promise of Gamma Globulin
Mawdsley, Stephen E
Rutgers University Press, 2016
Today, when many parents seem reluctant to have their children vaccinated, even with long proven medications, the Salk vaccine trial, which enrolled millions of healthy children to test an unproven medical intervention, seems nothing short of astonishing. In Selling Science, medical historian Stephen E. Mawdsley recounts the untold story of the first large clinical trial to control polio using healthy children—55,000 healthy children—revealing how this long-forgotten incident cleared the path for Salk’s later trial.
Mawdsley describes how, in the early 1950s, Dr. William Hammon and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis launched a pioneering medical experiment on a previously untried scale. Conducted on over 55,000 healthy children in Texas, Utah, Iowa, and Nebraska, this landmark study assessed the safety and effectiveness of a blood component, gamma globulin, to prevent paralytic polio. The value of the proposed experiment was questioned by many prominent health professionals as it harbored potential health risks, but as Mawdsley points out, compromise and coercion moved it forward. And though the trial returned dubious results, it was presented to the public as a triumph and used to justify a federally sanctioned mass immunization study on thousands of families between 1953 and 1954. Indeed, the concept, conduct, and outcome of the GG study were sold to health professionals, medical researchers, and the public at each stage. At a time when most Americans trusted scientists, their mutual encounter under the auspices of conquering disease was shaped by politics, marketing, and at times, deception.
Drawing on oral history interviews, medical journals, newspapers, meeting minutes, and private institutional records, Selling Science sheds light on the ethics of scientific conduct, and on the power of marketing to shape public opinion about medical experimentation.
[more]
Sex, Sickness, and Slavery
Illness in the Antebellum South
Marli F. Weiner with Mazie Hough
University of Illinois Press, 2014
Marli F. Wiener skillfully integrates the history of medicine with social and intellectual history in this study of how race and sex complicated medical treatment in the antebellum South. Sex, Sickness, and Slavery argues that Southern physicians' scientific training and practice uniquely entitled them to formulate medical justification for the imbalanced racial hierarchies of the period. Challenged with both helping to preserve the slave system (by acknowledging and preserving clear distinctions of race and sex) and enhancing their own authority (with correct medical diagnoses and effective treatment), doctors sought to understand bodies that did not necessarily fit into neat dichotomies or agree with suggested treatments.
Focusing on Southern states from Virginia to Alabama, Weiner examines medical and lay perspectives on the body through a range of sources, including medical journals, notes, diaries, daybooks, and letters. These personal and revealing sources show how physicians, medical students, and patients--both free whites and slaves--felt about vulnerability to disease and mental illnesses, how bodily differences between races and sexes were explained, and how emotions, common sense, working conditions, and climate were understood to have an effect on the body.
Physicians' authority did not go uncontested, however. Weiner also describes the ways in which laypeople, both black and white, resisted medical authority, clearly refusing to cede explanatory power to doctors without measuring medical views against their own bodily experiences or personal beliefs. Expertly drawing the dynamic tensions during this period in which Southern culture and the demands of slavery often trumped science, Weiner explores how doctors struggled with contradictions as medicine became a key arena for debate over the meanings of male and female, sick and well, black and white, North and South.
[more]
Shadows in the Valley
A Cultural History of Illness, Death, and Loss in New England, 1840-1916
Alan Swedlund
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009
How does the experience of sickness, death, and loss change over time? We know that the incidence and virulence of particular diseases have varied from one period to another, as has their medical treatment. But what was it like for the individuals who suffered and died from those illnesses, for the health practitioners and institutions that attended to them, and for the families who buried and mourned them?
In Shadows in the Valley, Alan Swedlund addresses these questions by closely examining the history of mortality in several small communities in western Massachusetts from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century—from just before the acceptance of the germ theory of disease through the early days of public health reform in the United States. This was a time when most Americans lived in rural areas or small towns rather than large cities. It was also a time when a wide range of healing practices was available to the American public, and when the modern form of Western medicine was striving for dominance and authority. As Swedlund shows, this juncture of competing practices and ideologies provides a rich opportunity for exploring the rise of modern medicine and its impact on the everyday lives of ordinary Americans.
To indicate how individuals in different stages of their lives were exposed to varying assaults on their health, the book is structured in a way that superimposes what the author calls "life-course time" onto chronological time. Thus the early chapters look at issues of infancy and childhood in the 1840s and 1850s and the last chapters at the problems of old age after 1900. The reader becomes familiar with specific individuals and families as they cope with the recurrent loss of children, struggle to understand the causes of new contagions, and seek to find meaning in untimely death. By using a broad time frame and a narrow geographical lens, Swedlund is able to engage with both the particularities and generalities of evolving medical knowledge and changing practice, and to highlight the differences in personal as well as collective responses to illness and loss.
In Shadows in the Valley, Alan Swedlund addresses these questions by closely examining the history of mortality in several small communities in western Massachusetts from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century—from just before the acceptance of the germ theory of disease through the early days of public health reform in the United States. This was a time when most Americans lived in rural areas or small towns rather than large cities. It was also a time when a wide range of healing practices was available to the American public, and when the modern form of Western medicine was striving for dominance and authority. As Swedlund shows, this juncture of competing practices and ideologies provides a rich opportunity for exploring the rise of modern medicine and its impact on the everyday lives of ordinary Americans.
To indicate how individuals in different stages of their lives were exposed to varying assaults on their health, the book is structured in a way that superimposes what the author calls "life-course time" onto chronological time. Thus the early chapters look at issues of infancy and childhood in the 1840s and 1850s and the last chapters at the problems of old age after 1900. The reader becomes familiar with specific individuals and families as they cope with the recurrent loss of children, struggle to understand the causes of new contagions, and seek to find meaning in untimely death. By using a broad time frame and a narrow geographical lens, Swedlund is able to engage with both the particularities and generalities of evolving medical knowledge and changing practice, and to highlight the differences in personal as well as collective responses to illness and loss.
[more]
Silent Violence
Global Health, Malaria, and Child Survival in Tanzania
Vinay R. Kamat
University of Arizona Press, 2013
Silent Violence engages the harsh reality of malaria and its effects on marginalized communities in Tanzania. Vinay R. Kamat presents an ethnographic analysis of the shifting global discourses and practices surrounding malaria control and their impact on the people of Tanzania, especially mothers of children sickened by malaria.
Malaria control, according to Kamat, has become increasingly medicalized, a trend that overemphasizes biomedical and pharmaceutical interventions while neglecting the social, political, and economic conditions he maintains are central to Africa’s malaria problem. Kamat offers recent findings on global health governance, neoliberal economic and health policies, and their impact on local communities.
Seeking to link wider social, economic, and political forces to local experiences of sickness and suffering, Kamat analyzes the lived experiences and practices of people most seriously affected by malaria—infants and children. The persistence of childhood malaria is a form of structural violence, he contends, and the resultant social suffering in poor communities is closely tied to social inequalities.
Silent Violence illustrates the evolving nature of local responses to the global discourse on malaria control. It advocates for the close study of disease treatment in poor communities as an integral component of global health funding. This ethnography combines a decade of fieldwork with critical review and a rare anthropological perspective on the limitations of the bureaucratic, technological, institutional, medical, and political practices that currently determine malaria interventions in Africa.
Malaria control, according to Kamat, has become increasingly medicalized, a trend that overemphasizes biomedical and pharmaceutical interventions while neglecting the social, political, and economic conditions he maintains are central to Africa’s malaria problem. Kamat offers recent findings on global health governance, neoliberal economic and health policies, and their impact on local communities.
Seeking to link wider social, economic, and political forces to local experiences of sickness and suffering, Kamat analyzes the lived experiences and practices of people most seriously affected by malaria—infants and children. The persistence of childhood malaria is a form of structural violence, he contends, and the resultant social suffering in poor communities is closely tied to social inequalities.
Silent Violence illustrates the evolving nature of local responses to the global discourse on malaria control. It advocates for the close study of disease treatment in poor communities as an integral component of global health funding. This ethnography combines a decade of fieldwork with critical review and a rare anthropological perspective on the limitations of the bureaucratic, technological, institutional, medical, and political practices that currently determine malaria interventions in Africa.
[more]
Stigma Stories
Rhetoric, Lived Experience, and Chronic Illness
Molly Margaret Kessler
The Ohio State University Press, 2022
In Stigma Stories: Rhetoric, Lived Experience, and Chronic Illness, Molly Margaret Kessler focuses on ostomies and gastrointestinal conditions to show how stigma is nearly as central to living with chronic conditions as the conditions themselves. Drawing on a multi-year study that includes participant observations, interviews, and rhetorical engagement with public health campaigns, blogs, social media posts, and news articles, Stigma Stories advocates for a rhetorical praxiographic approach that is attuned to the rhetorical processes, experiences, and practices in which stigma is enacted or countered.
Engaging interdisciplinary conversations from the rhetoric of health and medicine, disability studies, narrative medicine, and sociology, Kessler takes an innovative look at how stigma functions on individual, interpersonal, and societal levels. In doing so, Kessler reveals how stories and lived experiences have much to teach us not only about how stigma functions but also about how it can be dismantled.
[more]
A Strong and Steady Pulse
Stories from a Cardiologist
Gregory D. Chapman, MD
University of Alabama Press, 2021
A seasoned cardiologist shares his experiences, opinions, and recommendations about heart disease and other cardiac problems
A Strong and Steady Pulse: Stories from a Cardiologist provides an insider’s perspective on the field of cardiovascular medicine told through vignettes and insights drawn from Gregory D. Chapman’s three decades as a cardiologist and professor of medicine. In twenty-six bite-sized chapters based on real-life patients and experiences, Chapman provides an overview of contemporary cardiovascular diseases and treatments, illuminating the art and science of medical practice for lay audiences and professionals alike.
With A Strong and Steady Pulse, Chapman provides medical students and general readers with a better understanding of cardiac disease and its contributing factors in modern life, and he also provides insights on the diagnostic process, medical decision making, and patient care. Each chapter presents a patient and their initial appearance, described in clear detail as Chapman gently walks us through his evaluation and the steps he and his associates take to determine the underlying problem. Chapman’s stories are about real people dealing with life and death situations—including the physicians, nurses, medical students, and other team members who try to save lives in emergent, confusing conditions.
The sometimes hard-won solutions to these medical challenges combine new technology and cutting-edge research together with insights drawn from Chapman’s past experiences as an intern and resident in Manhattan during the AIDS epidemic, as a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University in the 1990s, and in practice in Nashville, Tennessee, and Birmingham, Alabama. Conditions addressed include the recognition and management of heart attack, heart failure, arrhythmia, valvular heart disease, cardiac transplantation, broken heart syndrome, hypertension, and the depression some people experience after a heart attack, as well as related topics like statin drugs, the Apple Watch ECG feature, and oral anticoagulants. Finally, the emergence of the COVID-19 virus and its disruption of normal hospital routines as the pandemic unfolded is addressed in an epilogue.
A Strong and Steady Pulse: Stories from a Cardiologist provides an insider’s perspective on the field of cardiovascular medicine told through vignettes and insights drawn from Gregory D. Chapman’s three decades as a cardiologist and professor of medicine. In twenty-six bite-sized chapters based on real-life patients and experiences, Chapman provides an overview of contemporary cardiovascular diseases and treatments, illuminating the art and science of medical practice for lay audiences and professionals alike.
With A Strong and Steady Pulse, Chapman provides medical students and general readers with a better understanding of cardiac disease and its contributing factors in modern life, and he also provides insights on the diagnostic process, medical decision making, and patient care. Each chapter presents a patient and their initial appearance, described in clear detail as Chapman gently walks us through his evaluation and the steps he and his associates take to determine the underlying problem. Chapman’s stories are about real people dealing with life and death situations—including the physicians, nurses, medical students, and other team members who try to save lives in emergent, confusing conditions.
The sometimes hard-won solutions to these medical challenges combine new technology and cutting-edge research together with insights drawn from Chapman’s past experiences as an intern and resident in Manhattan during the AIDS epidemic, as a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University in the 1990s, and in practice in Nashville, Tennessee, and Birmingham, Alabama. Conditions addressed include the recognition and management of heart attack, heart failure, arrhythmia, valvular heart disease, cardiac transplantation, broken heart syndrome, hypertension, and the depression some people experience after a heart attack, as well as related topics like statin drugs, the Apple Watch ECG feature, and oral anticoagulants. Finally, the emergence of the COVID-19 virus and its disruption of normal hospital routines as the pandemic unfolded is addressed in an epilogue.
[more]
Structural Intimacies
Sexual Stories in the Black AIDS Epidemic
Mackenzie, Sonja
Rutgers University Press, 2013
One of the most relevant social problems in contemporary American life is the continuing HIV epidemic in the Black population. With vivid ethnographic detail, this book brings together scholarship on the structural dimensions of the AIDS epidemic and the social construction of sexuality to assert that shifting forms of sexual stories—structural intimacies—are emerging, produced by the meeting of intimate lives and social structural patterns. These stories render such inequalities as racism, poverty, gender power disparities, sexual stigma, and discrimination as central not just to the dramatic, disproportionate spread of HIV in Black communities in the United States, but to the formation of Black sexualities.
Sonja Mackenzie elegantly argues that structural vulnerability is felt—quite literally—in the blood, in the possibilities and constraints on sexual lives, and in the rhetorics of their telling. The circulation of structural intimacies in daily life and in the political domain reflects possibilities for seeking what Mackenzie calls intimate justice at the nexus of cultural, economic, political, and moral spheres. Structural Intimacies presents a compelling case: in an era of deepening medicalization of HIV/AIDS, public health must move beyond individual-level interventions to community-level health equity frames and policy changes
Sonja Mackenzie elegantly argues that structural vulnerability is felt—quite literally—in the blood, in the possibilities and constraints on sexual lives, and in the rhetorics of their telling. The circulation of structural intimacies in daily life and in the political domain reflects possibilities for seeking what Mackenzie calls intimate justice at the nexus of cultural, economic, political, and moral spheres. Structural Intimacies presents a compelling case: in an era of deepening medicalization of HIV/AIDS, public health must move beyond individual-level interventions to community-level health equity frames and policy changes
[more]
Sugar and Tension
Diabetes and Gender in Modern India
Weaver, Lesley Jo
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Women in North India are socialized to care for others, so what do they do when they get a disease like diabetes that requires intensive self-care? In Sugar and Tension, Lesley Jo Weaver uses women’s experiences with diabetes in New Delhi as a lens to explore how gendered roles and expectations are taking shape in contemporary India. Weaver argues that although women’s domestic care of others may be at odds with the self-care mandates of biomedically-managed diabetes, these roles nevertheless do important cultural work that may buffer women’s mental and physical health by fostering social belonging. Weaver describes how women negotiate the many responsibilities in their lives when chronic disease is at stake. As women weigh their options, the choices they make raise questions about whose priorities should count in domestic, health, and family worlds. The varied experiences of women illustrate that there are many routes to living well or poorly with diabetes, and these are not always the ones canonized in biomedical models of diabetes management.
[more]
Suppressing the Diseases of Animals and Man
Theobald Smith, Microbiologist
Claude E. Dolman and Richard J. Wolfe
Harvard University Press, 2003
Theobald Smith (1859-1934) is widely considered to be America's first significant medical scientist and the world's leading comparative pathologist. Entering the new field of infectious diseases as a young medical graduate, his research in bacteriology, immunology, and parasitology produced many important and basic discoveries. His most significant accomplishment was proving for the first time that an infectious disease could be transmitted by an arthropod agent. He also made significant discoveries on anaphylaxis, vaccine production, bacterial variation, and a host of other methods and diseases. His work on hog cholera led to the selection of the paratyphoid species causing enteric fever as the prototype of the eponymous Salmonella genus, mistakenly named for his chief at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Daniel Salmon, who first reported the discovery in 1886, although the work was undertaken by Smith alone.
In 1895, Smith began a twenty-year career as teacher and researcher at the Harvard Medical School and director of the biological laboratory at the Massachusetts State Board of Health. In 1902, when the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research was founded, he was offered but declined its directorship; however, in 1914, when the Institute established a division of animal pathology, he became director of its research division. Suppressing the Diseases of Animals and Man, the first book-length biography of Smith to appear in print, is based primarily on personal papers and correspondence that have remained in the possession of his family until now.
[more]
Surviving HIV/AIDS in the Inner City
How Resourceful Latinas Beat the Odds
Chase, Sabrina
Rutgers University Press, 2011
Surviving HIV/AIDS in the Inner City explores the survival strategies of poor, HIV-positive Puerto Rican women by asking four key questions: Given their limited resources, how did they manage an illness as serious as HIV/AIDS? Did they look for alternatives to conventional medical treatment? Did the challenges they faced deprive them of self-determination, or could they help themselves and each other? What can we learn from these resourceful women?
Based on her work with minority women living in Newark, New Jersey, Sabrina Marie Chase illuminates the hidden traps and land mines burdening our current health care system as a whole. For the women she studied, alliances with doctors, nurses, and social workers could literally mean the difference between life and death. By applying the theories of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to the day-to-day experiences of HIV-positive Latinas, Chase explains why some struggled and even died while others flourished and thrived under difficult conditions. These gripping, true-life stories advocate for those living with chronic illness who depend on the health care "safety net." Through her exploration of life and death among Newark's resourceful women, Chase provides the groundwork for inciting positive change in the U.S. health care system.
Based on her work with minority women living in Newark, New Jersey, Sabrina Marie Chase illuminates the hidden traps and land mines burdening our current health care system as a whole. For the women she studied, alliances with doctors, nurses, and social workers could literally mean the difference between life and death. By applying the theories of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to the day-to-day experiences of HIV-positive Latinas, Chase explains why some struggled and even died while others flourished and thrived under difficult conditions. These gripping, true-life stories advocate for those living with chronic illness who depend on the health care "safety net." Through her exploration of life and death among Newark's resourceful women, Chase provides the groundwork for inciting positive change in the U.S. health care system.
[more]
Tangled Diagnoses
Prenatal Testing, Women, and Risk
Ilana Löwy
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Since the late nineteenth century, medicine has sought to foster the birth of healthy children by attending to the bodies of pregnant women, through what we have come to call prenatal care. Women, and not their unborn children, were the initial focus of that medical attention, but prenatal diagnosis in its present form, which couples scrutiny of the fetus with the option to terminate pregnancy, came into being in the early 1970s.
Tangled Diagnoses examines the multiple consequences of the widespread diffusion of this medical innovation. Prenatal testing, Ilana Löwy argues, has become mainly a risk-management technology—the goal of which is to prevent inborn impairments, ideally through the development of efficient therapies but in practice mainly through the prevention of the birth of children with such impairments. Using scholarship, interviews, and direct observation in France and Brazil of two groups of professionals who play an especially important role in the production of knowledge about fetal development—fetopathologists and clinical geneticists—to expose the real-life dilemmas prenatal testing creates, this book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the sociopolitical conditions of biomedical innovation, the politics of women’s bodies, disability, and the ethics of modern medicine.
Tangled Diagnoses examines the multiple consequences of the widespread diffusion of this medical innovation. Prenatal testing, Ilana Löwy argues, has become mainly a risk-management technology—the goal of which is to prevent inborn impairments, ideally through the development of efficient therapies but in practice mainly through the prevention of the birth of children with such impairments. Using scholarship, interviews, and direct observation in France and Brazil of two groups of professionals who play an especially important role in the production of knowledge about fetal development—fetopathologists and clinical geneticists—to expose the real-life dilemmas prenatal testing creates, this book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the sociopolitical conditions of biomedical innovation, the politics of women’s bodies, disability, and the ethics of modern medicine.
[more]
Tell Me Why My Children Died
Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice
Charles L. Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs
Duke University Press, 2016
Tell Me Why My Children Died tells the gripping story of indigenous leaders' efforts to identify a strange disease that killed thirty-two children and six young adults in a Venezuelan rain forest between 2007 and 2008. In this pathbreaking book, Charles L. Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs relay the nightmarish and difficult experiences of doctors, patients, parents, local leaders, healers, and epidemiologists; detail how journalists first created a smoke screen, then projected the epidemic worldwide; discuss the Chávez government's hesitant and sometimes ambivalent reactions; and narrate the eventual diagnosis of bat-transmitted rabies. The book provides a new framework for analyzing how the uneven distribution of rights to produce and circulate knowledge about health are wedded at the hip with health inequities. By recounting residents' quest to learn why their children died and documenting their creative approaches to democratizing health, the authors open up new ways to address some of global health's most intractable problems.
[more]
Testing Baby
The Transformation of Newborn Screening, Parenting, and Policymaking
Grob, Rachel
Rutgers University Press, 2011
Within forty-eight hours after birth, the heel of every baby in the United States has been pricked and the blood sent for compulsory screening to detect or rule out a large number of disorders. Newborn screening is expanding rapidly, fueled by the prospect of saving lives. Yet many lives are also changed by it in ways not yet recognized.
Testing Baby is the first book to draw on parents’ experiences with newborn screening in order to examine its far-reaching sociological consequences. Rachel Grob’s cautionary tale also explores the powerful ways that parents’ narratives have shaped this emotionally charged policy arena. Newborn screening occurs almost always without parents’ consent and often without their knowledge or understanding, yet it has the power to alter such things as family dynamics at the household level, the context of parenting, the way we manage disease identity, and how parents’ interests are understood and solicited in policy debates.
[more]
Theories of Illness
A World Survey
George Peter Murdock
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980
An important contribution to medical anthropology, this work defines the principal causes if illness that are reported throughout the world, distinguishing those involving natural causation from the more widely prevalent hypotheses advancing supernatural explanations.
[more]
Treating the Brain
What the Best Doctors Know
Walter G. Bradley DM FRCP
Dana Press, 2009
Even in this information age, it is a daunting task to find clear, concise, and credible sources for essential medical facts. And for those dealing with the symptoms of often serious neurological disorders, finding trustworthy and straightforward information is gravely important.
Treating the Brain is precisely what has been missing for non-specialists. Focusing on the most common neurological conditions, it provides accurate, reliable information to patients, caregivers, and health practitioners from the neurologist whose professional text informs neurologists worldwide.. Walter G. Bradley, one of the nation’s foremost neurologists and the editor of the leading neurology textbook Neurology in Clinical Practice, navigates the complexities of the brain in highly accessible language. Treating the Brain is the definitive resource for patients, offering a coherent and up-to-date understanding of what physicians know about the brain. In the United States alone, one-quarter of all new consultations between patients and their family physician is a result of a neurological problem. Using case histories as examples, Treating the Brain explains the neurological examinations and tests and clinical features, causes, and treatments available for Alzheimer’s disease, migraines, stroke, epilepsy, Parkinson’s and other frequently diagnosed neurological disorders.
For anyone who has ever had a neurological symptom, from a headache to tingling hands, and for anyone with a personal interest in how the brain works in health and disease, Treating the Brain will prove to be a valuable, easy-to-read source of a wide-range of information.
[more]
Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion
A History of Public Health and Migration to Los Angeles
Abel, Emily K.
Rutgers University Press, 2007
Winner of the 2008 Arthur J. Viseltear Prize from the American Public Health Association and Nominated for the 2008 William H. Welch Medal, AAHM
Though notorious for its polluted air today, the city of Los Angeles once touted itself as a health resort. After the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in 1876, publicists launched a campaign to portray the city as the promised land, circulating countless stories of miraculous cures for the sick and debilitated. As more and more migrants poured in, however, a gap emerged between the city’s glittering image and its dark reality.
Emily K. Abel shows how the association of the disease with “tramps” during the 1880s and 1890s and Dust Bowl refugees during the 1930s provoked exclusionary measures against both groups. In addition, public health officials sought not only to restrict the entry of Mexicans (the majority of immigrants) during the 1920s but also to expel them during the 1930s.
Abel’s revealing account provides a critical lens through which to view both the contemporary debate about immigration and the U.S. response to the emergent global tuberculosis epidemic.
[more]
Understanding Dogs
Clinton R. Sanders
Temple University Press, 1999
Can people have authentic social relationships with speechless animals? What does your dog mean to you, your understanding of yourself, and your perceived and actual relationships with other s and the world? What do you mean to your dog?
In Understanding Dogs, sociologist and faithful dog companion Clinton R. Sanders explores the day-to-day experiences of living and working with domestic dogs. Based on a decade of research in veterinary offices and hospitals, dog guide training schools, and obediences classes -- and colored with his personal experiences and observations at and outside home with his own canine companions -- Sanders's book examines how everyday dog owners come to know their animal companions as thinking, emotional, and responsive individuals.
Linking animal companionship with social as well as personal identity, Understanding Dogs uses detailed ethnographic data in viewing human and animal efforts to understand, manipulate, care for, and interact with each other. From nineteenth-century disapproval of what was seen as irresponsibly indulgent pet ownership among the poor to Bill Clinton's caring and fun-loving image and populist connection to the "common person" as achieved through his labrador companion Buddy, Sanders looks at how dogs serve not only as social facilitators but also as adornments to social identity. He also reveals how, while we often strive to teach and shape our dogs' behavior, dogs often teach us to appreciate with more awareness a nourishing meal, physical warmth, a walk in the woods, and the simple joys of the immediate moment.
Sanders devotes chapters to the specialized work of guide dog trainers; the problems and joys experienced by guide dog owners; the day-to-day work of veterinarians dealing with the healing, death, and euthanizing of their animal patients; and the everyday interactions, assumptions, and approaches of people who choose, for various reasons and in various ways, to spend their lives in the company of dogs.
Understanding Dogs will interest those who live and work with animals as well as those studying the sociology of human-animal interactions.
In Understanding Dogs, sociologist and faithful dog companion Clinton R. Sanders explores the day-to-day experiences of living and working with domestic dogs. Based on a decade of research in veterinary offices and hospitals, dog guide training schools, and obediences classes -- and colored with his personal experiences and observations at and outside home with his own canine companions -- Sanders's book examines how everyday dog owners come to know their animal companions as thinking, emotional, and responsive individuals.
Linking animal companionship with social as well as personal identity, Understanding Dogs uses detailed ethnographic data in viewing human and animal efforts to understand, manipulate, care for, and interact with each other. From nineteenth-century disapproval of what was seen as irresponsibly indulgent pet ownership among the poor to Bill Clinton's caring and fun-loving image and populist connection to the "common person" as achieved through his labrador companion Buddy, Sanders looks at how dogs serve not only as social facilitators but also as adornments to social identity. He also reveals how, while we often strive to teach and shape our dogs' behavior, dogs often teach us to appreciate with more awareness a nourishing meal, physical warmth, a walk in the woods, and the simple joys of the immediate moment.
Sanders devotes chapters to the specialized work of guide dog trainers; the problems and joys experienced by guide dog owners; the day-to-day work of veterinarians dealing with the healing, death, and euthanizing of their animal patients; and the everyday interactions, assumptions, and approaches of people who choose, for various reasons and in various ways, to spend their lives in the company of dogs.
Understanding Dogs will interest those who live and work with animals as well as those studying the sociology of human-animal interactions.
[more]
Unraveling
Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer
University of Minnesota Press, 2020
Developing a cybernetic model of subjectivity and personhood that honors disability experiences to reconceptualize the category of the human
Twentieth-century neuroscience fixed the brain as the basis of consciousness, the self, identity, individuality, even life itself, obscuring the fundamental relationships between bodies and the worlds that they inhabit. In Unraveling, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on narratives of family and individual experiences with neurological disorders, paired with texts by neuroscientists and psychiatrists, to decenter the brain and expose the ableist biases in the dominant thinking about personhood.
Unraveling articulates a novel cybernetic theory of subjectivity in which the nervous system is connected to the world it inhabits rather than being walled off inside the body, moving beyond neuroscientific, symbolic, and materialist approaches to the self to focus instead on such concepts as animation, modularity, and facilitation. It does so through close readings of memoirs by individuals who lost their hearing or developed trauma-induced aphasia, as well as family members of people diagnosed as autistic—texts that rethink modes of subjectivity through experiences with communication, caregiving, and the demands of everyday life.
Arguing for a radical antinormative bioethics, Unraveling shifts the discourse on neurological disorders from such value-laden concepts as “quality of life” to develop an inclusive model of personhood that honors disability experiences and reconceptualizes the category of the human in all of its social, technological, and environmental contexts.
[more]
Valuing Health for Policy
An Economic Approach
Edited by George Tolley, Donald Kenkel, and Robert Fabian
University of Chicago Press, 1994
How much should citizens invest in promoting health, and how should resources be allocated to cover the costs? A major contribution to economic approaches to the value of health, this volume brings together classic and up-to-date research by economists and public health experts on theories and measurements of health values, providing useful information for shaping public policy.
[more]
Victory Deferred
How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America
John-Manuel Andriote
University of Chicago Press, 1999
There is no question that AIDS has been, and continues to be, one of the most destructive diseases of the century, taking thousands of lives, devastating communities, and exposing prejudice and bigotry. But AIDS has also been a disease of transformation—it has fueled the national gay civil rights movement, altered medical research and federal drug testing, shaken up both federal and local politics, and inspired a vast cultural outpouring. Victory Deferred, the most comprehensive account of the epidemic in more than ten years, is the history of both the destruction and transformation wrought by AIDS.
John-Manuel Andriote chronicles the impact of the disease from the coming-out revelry of the 1970s to the post-AIDS gay community of the 1990s, showing how it has changed both individual lives and national organizations. He tells the truly remarkable story of how a health crisis pushed a disjointed jumble of local activists to become a nationally visible and politically powerful civil rights movement, a full-fledged minority group challenging the authority of some of the nation's most powerful institutions. Based on hundreds of interviews with those at the forefront of the medical, political, and cultural
responses to the disease, Victory Deferred artfully blends personal narratives with institutional histories and organizational politics to show how AIDS forced gay men from their closets and ghettos into the hallways of power to lobby and into the streets to protest.
Andriote, who has been at the center of national advocacy and AIDS politics in Washington, is judicious without being uncritical, and his account of the political maturation of the gay community is one of the most stirring civil rights stories of our time.
Victory Deferred draws on hundreds of original interviews, including first-hand accounts from: Virginia Apuzzo, Reverend Carl Bean, Marcus Conant, M.D., John D'Emilio, Anthony Fauci, M.D, Fenton Johnson, Larry Kramer, Lawrence D. Mass, M.D., Armistead Maupin, Walt Odets, Torie Osborn, Eric Rofes, Urvashi Vaid, Timothy Westmoreland, and Reggie Williams.
"[Victory Deferred] is a richly textured account of the rise of the AIDS sector, that though detailed and comprehensive, reads quickly. The thematic organization of the book works especially well. The clear chronology of the events reveals how competing models of service delivery, treatment activism and private-public cooperation were subsumed into a national AIDS movement. The book should prove excellent for teaching or recreational reading."—Jose Gabilondo, Washington Post
"[A] fine history of the epidemic. . . . Andriote shines with chapters on less-covered but no less important subjects, including the multibillion-dollar 'AIDS industry' and private fund-raising groups. He brings together in one place many facts and figures heretofore unsynthesized."—Joe R. Neel, Boston Globe
"While many books have explored aspects of the impact of AIDS, Victory Deferred is among the most comprehensive. Andriote's adroit integration of the personal and the historical results is an illustrative, analytical account of the disease and its impact on the gay civil-rights movement. His depiction of the poignant struggles, heroic responses and resultant social and political gains emanating from AIDS is a perceptive document for our time—relevant to all readers, regardless of their sexual orientation."—John R. Killacky, Minneapolis Star Tribune
"[A] well-researched and nuanced portrait of the many lives on which this grave disease has wrought both destruction and transformation."—Publishers Weekly
"Andriote combines broad strokes and telling details in this engaging history of the complicated war against both disease and bigotry."—Library Journal
John-Manuel Andriote chronicles the impact of the disease from the coming-out revelry of the 1970s to the post-AIDS gay community of the 1990s, showing how it has changed both individual lives and national organizations. He tells the truly remarkable story of how a health crisis pushed a disjointed jumble of local activists to become a nationally visible and politically powerful civil rights movement, a full-fledged minority group challenging the authority of some of the nation's most powerful institutions. Based on hundreds of interviews with those at the forefront of the medical, political, and cultural
responses to the disease, Victory Deferred artfully blends personal narratives with institutional histories and organizational politics to show how AIDS forced gay men from their closets and ghettos into the hallways of power to lobby and into the streets to protest.
Andriote, who has been at the center of national advocacy and AIDS politics in Washington, is judicious without being uncritical, and his account of the political maturation of the gay community is one of the most stirring civil rights stories of our time.
Victory Deferred draws on hundreds of original interviews, including first-hand accounts from: Virginia Apuzzo, Reverend Carl Bean, Marcus Conant, M.D., John D'Emilio, Anthony Fauci, M.D, Fenton Johnson, Larry Kramer, Lawrence D. Mass, M.D., Armistead Maupin, Walt Odets, Torie Osborn, Eric Rofes, Urvashi Vaid, Timothy Westmoreland, and Reggie Williams.
"[Victory Deferred] is a richly textured account of the rise of the AIDS sector, that though detailed and comprehensive, reads quickly. The thematic organization of the book works especially well. The clear chronology of the events reveals how competing models of service delivery, treatment activism and private-public cooperation were subsumed into a national AIDS movement. The book should prove excellent for teaching or recreational reading."—Jose Gabilondo, Washington Post
"[A] fine history of the epidemic. . . . Andriote shines with chapters on less-covered but no less important subjects, including the multibillion-dollar 'AIDS industry' and private fund-raising groups. He brings together in one place many facts and figures heretofore unsynthesized."—Joe R. Neel, Boston Globe
"While many books have explored aspects of the impact of AIDS, Victory Deferred is among the most comprehensive. Andriote's adroit integration of the personal and the historical results is an illustrative, analytical account of the disease and its impact on the gay civil-rights movement. His depiction of the poignant struggles, heroic responses and resultant social and political gains emanating from AIDS is a perceptive document for our time—relevant to all readers, regardless of their sexual orientation."—John R. Killacky, Minneapolis Star Tribune
"[A] well-researched and nuanced portrait of the many lives on which this grave disease has wrought both destruction and transformation."—Publishers Weekly
"Andriote combines broad strokes and telling details in this engaging history of the complicated war against both disease and bigotry."—Library Journal
[more]
Wet Engine
Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart
Brian Doyle
Oregon State University Press, 2012
In this poignant and startlingly original book, Brian Doyle examines the heart as a physical organ—how it is supposed to work, how surgeons try to fix it when it doesn’t—and as a metaphor: the seat of the soul, the power house of the body, the essence of spirituality. In a series of profoundly moving ruminations, Doyle considers the scientific, emotional, literary, philosophical, and spiritual understandings of the heart—from cardiology to courage, from love letters and pop songs to Jesus. Weaving these strands together is the torment of Doyle’s own infant son’s heart surgery and the inspiring story of the young heart doctor who saved Liam’s life.
The Wet Engine is a book that will change how you feel and think about the mysterious, fragile human heart. This new paperback edition includes a foreword by Dr. Marla Salmon, dean of the University of Washington School of Nursing.
[more]
What does ‘Tropical Medicine’ stand for today?
Martin Grobusch
Amsterdam University Press, 2011
‘The Tropics’ in geographical and astronomical terms simply refers to the area between the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer; Tropical Medicine as a discipline, however, whose origins date back at least to the age of exploration, remains ill-defined and encompasses a wealth of different medical specialties and scientific areas, forming altogether the highly dynamic field of Medicine in the Tropics. The Tropencentrum within Infectious Diseases, Tropical Medicine and AIDS at the Amsterdam Medical Center contributes together with numerous partners and collaborators worldwide to the broad field of Tropical Medicine and Travel Medicine through a wealth of clinical care, teaching and research activities in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and abroad.
[more]
When the Air Became Important
A Social History of the New England and Lancashire Textile Industries
Janet Greenlees
Rutgers University Press, 2019
In When the Air Became Important, medical historian Janet Greenlees examines the working environments of the heartlands of the British and American cotton textile industries from the nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. Greenlees contends that the air quality within these pioneering workplaces was a key contributor to the health of the wider communities of which they were a part. Such enclosed environments, where large numbers of people labored in close quarters, were ideal settings for the rapid spread of diseases including tuberculosis, bronchitis and pneumonia. When workers left the factories for home, these diseases were transmitted throughout the local population, yet operatives also brought diseases into the factory. Other aerial hazards common to both the community and workplace included poor ventilation and noise. Emphasizing the importance of the peculiarities of place as well as employers’ balance of workers’ health against manufacturing needs, Greenlees’s pioneering book sheds light on the roots of contemporary environmentalism and occupational health reform. Her work highlights the complicated relationships among local business, local and national politics of health, and community priorities.
[more]
Women and Health in America, 2nd Ed.
Historical Readings
Judith W. Leavitt
University of Wisconsin Press, 1999
In this thoroughly updated second edition, Judith Walzer Leavitt, a leading authority on the history of women's health issues, has collected thirty-five articles representing important scholarship in this once-neglected field. Timely and fascinating, this volume is organized chronologically and then by topic, covering studies of women and health in the colonial and revolutionary periods and the nineteenth century through the Civil War. The remainder of the book concentrates on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and addresses such controversial issues as body image and physical fitness, sexuality, fertility, abortion and birth control, childbirth and motherhood, mental illness, women's health care providers (midwives, nurses, physicians), and health reform and public health.
[more]
The Women’s Concise Guide to a Healthier Heart
Karen J. Carlson, M.D.; Stephanie A. Eisenstat, M.D.; and Terra Ziporyn, Ph.D.
Harvard University Press, 1997
From the authors of The Harvard Guide to Women's Health
Heart disease is the number one killer of women in this country. Every year half a million American women die of heart problems--and another 2.5 million are hospitalized for heart disease. This book brings the risks and realities of cardiovascular disease for women into clear focus. Where previous books have concentrated on men, The Women's Concise Guide to a Healthier Heart recognizes and clarifies the significant differences between men and women in the diagnosis and treatment of cardiac conditions.
The book lays out in plain English all that we currently know about preventing, recognizing, and living with a heart problem. Does an aspirin a day prevent heart disease in women? Does moderate alcohol consumption help or hurt? What about weight gain in middle age? Estrogen replacement therapy? These are the kinds of everyday, life-and-death questions that are addressed specifically for women in this concise guide. It considers questions of cholesterol and diabetes, stress and depression, diet and smoking. It explores diagnostic procedures and surgeries and explains their differing reliability and benefits for women and men.
Helpfully illustrated and easy to use, clear and comprehensive on every heart problem and related symptom and behavior, this book is the best resource for any woman wishing to understand the health and workings of her heart.
[more]
The Wonderful Art of the Eye
A Critical Edition of the Middle English Translation of his De Probatissimo Arte Oculorum
L. M. Eldredge
Michigan State University Press, 1996
A thirteenth-century treatise on the theory and practice of ophthalmology, this unique work provides a window on what passed for medical knowledge of the eye during the late Middle Ages. Although little is known of the author, Benevenutus Grassus, he seems to have roamed Italy in the early thirteenth century as a medical practitioner specializing in diseases of the eye.
[more]
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