A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Female and male brains are different, thanks to hormones coursing through the brain before birth. That’s taught as fact in psychology textbooks, academic journals, and bestselling books. And these hardwired differences explain everything from sexual orientation to gender identity, to why there aren’t more women physicists or more stay-at-home dads.
In this compelling book, Rebecca Jordan-Young takes on the evidence that sex differences are hardwired into the brain. Analyzing virtually all published research that supports the claims of “human brain organization theory,” Jordan-Young reveals how often these studies fail the standards of science. Even if careful researchers point out the limits of their own studies, other researchers and journalists can easily ignore them because brain organization theory just sounds so right. But if a series of methodological weaknesses, questionable assumptions, inconsistent definitions, and enormous gaps between ambiguous findings and grand conclusions have accumulated through the years, then science isn’t scientific at all.
Elegantly written, this book argues passionately that the analysis of gender differences deserves far more rigorous, biologically sophisticated science. “The evidence for hormonal sex differentiation of the human brain better resembles a hodge-podge pile than a solid structure…Once we have cleared the rubble, we can begin to build newer, more scientific stories about human development.”
Whether you're a polar bear giving birth to cubs in an Arctic winter, a camel going days without water in the desert heat, or merely a suburbanite without air conditioning in a heat wave, your comfort and even survival depend on how well you adapt to extreme temperatures.
In this entertaining and illuminating book, biopsychologist Mark Blumberg explores the many ways that temperature rules the lives of all animals (including us). He moves from the physical principles that govern the flow of heat in and out of our bodies to the many complex evolutionary devices animals use to exploit those principles for their own benefit.
In the process Blumberg tells wonderful stories of evolutionary and scientific ingenuity--how penguins withstand Antarctic winters by huddling together by the thousands, how vulnerable embryos of many species are to extremes of temperature during their development, why people survive hour-long drowning accidents in winter but not in summer, how certain plants generate heat (the skunk cabbage enough to melt snow around it). We also hear of systems gone awry--how desert species given too much water can drink themselves into bloated immobility, why anorexics often complain of feeling cold, and why you can't sleep if the room is too hot or too cold. After reading this book, you'll never look at a thermostat in quite the same way again.
We hear about a woman with an artificial arm controlled by her mind, read stories about the creative potential of “right-brain” and “left-brain” people, and watch science fiction films featuring characters with implanted mind chips. Yet few of us understand the science behind these and other visionary advances being made today in brain research. Leading neuroscientists and scholars have charted the stream of new findings in Scientific American and Scientific American Mind, and their articles from the past eight years, compiled here in a comprehensive volume, offer diverse and provocative perspectives on various cutting-edge brain science projects.
Scientific American, the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States, has long been the standard bearer of science journalism, and the brain science articles published in its pages offer unparalleled insights into the world of neuroscience. The expert articles assembled here, divided into three sections, reveal the latest developments of brain research in a compelling and wholly readable fashion and explore the range of fields and topics now included under the umbrella of neuroscience.
Consciousness and creativity are the focus of the “Mind” section, which features such compelling essays as science writer Carl Zimmer’s examination of how the brain creates a sense of self. Steven E. Hyman, Harvard Provost and former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, proposes new ways of diagnosing psychiatric disorders in “Matter,” a section that also features articles on psychological disorders, addictions, and other topics related to the interaction between body and brain. And “Tomorrow’s Brain” reveals the intriguing future potential of man-machine interactions, as well as pioneering new methods of brain treatment. Eminent neuroscientist Floyd E. Bloom also contributes an engaging introduction that situates these pieces on the front lines of brain research.
In today’s technologically driven world, our lives are changing faster than ever, and neuroscience is becoming an integral part of that transformation. Best of the Brain from Scientific American gathers the very best writings on this sea change, providing an invaluable guide to the exhilarating possibilities of neuroscience.
The major goal of developmental neurobiology is to understand how the nervous system is put together. A central theme that has emerged from research in this field over the last several decades is the crucial role of trophic interactions in neural assembly, and indeed throughout an animal's life. Trophic—which means nutritive—refers to long-term interdependencies between nerve cells and the cells they innervate.
The theory of trophic effects presented in this book offers an explanation of how the vertebrate nervous system is related to—and regulated by—the body it serves. The theory rationalizes the nervous system's accommodation, throughout life, to the changing size and form of the body it tenants, indicating the way connections between nerve cells change in response to stimuli as diverse as growth, injury, experience, and natural selection.
Dale Purves, a leading neurobiologist best known for his work on the formation and maintenance of synaptic connections, presents this theory within the historical setting of earlier ideas about neural organization—from Weiss's theory of functional reorganization to the chemoaffinity theory championed by Sperry. In addition to illuminating eighty years of work on trophic interactions, this book asks its own compelling questions: Are trophic interactions characteristic of all animals or only of those with complex nervous systems? Are trophic interactions related to learning? What does the trophic theory of neural connections imply about the currently fashionable view that the nervous system operates according to Darwinian principles?
Purves lays the theoretical foundation for practical exploration of trophic interactions as they apply to neural connections, a pursuit that will help us understand how our own nervous systems generate change. The ideas in this book not only enrich neurobiology but also convey the profound relevance of neuroscience to other fields of life science.
Movement has long been considered the most obvious expression of brain activity and its correlative, mental activity. By studying movement, the neurophysiologist hopes to penetrate the interior of the living being and uncover the hidden source of action and its clues to the origin of life. We presume a role for the brain in movement—but should the brain be viewed simply as a machine that reacts to diverse stimuli, or is it an intelligent machine that organizes and controls not only itself but also the world around it?
Drawing upon the many disciplines that have contributed to brain research—anatomy, physiology, clinical neurology, psychology, psychiatry—Marc Jeannerod traces three centuries of ideas about movement and the brain. His critique of neural science takes into account the work of thinkers ranging from Descartes and Willis to Held, Hubel and Wiesel, Piaget and Chomsky. In his historical survey Jeannerod sees parallels between the influential neurological theories and dominating philosophical questions of the time: What is the nature of the soul? How does knowledge originate? What is the relation between the living organism and its milieu? Jeannerod's elegant arguments demonstrate that the “brain-movement problem” is the essential paradigm of the “brain-mind problem.” He advances a view of the neural organization of movement that has far-reaching implications for psychology and all neural sciences.
Arousal is fundamental to all cognition. It is intuitively obvious, absolutely necessary, but what exactly is it? In Brain Arousal and Information Theory, Donald Pfaff presents a daring perspective on this long-standing puzzle. Pfaff argues that, beneath our mental functions and emotional dispositions, a primitive neuronal system governs arousal. Employing the simple but powerful framework of information theory, Pfaff revolutionizes our understanding of arousal systems in the brain.
Starting with a review of the neuroanatomical, neurophysiological, and neurochemical components of arousal, Pfaff asks us to look at the gene networks and neural pathways underlying the brain’s arousal systems much as a design engineer would contemplate information systems. This allows Pfaff to postulate that there is a bilaterally symmetric, bipolar system universal among mammals that readies the animal or the human being to respond to stimuli, initiate voluntary locomotion, and react to emotional challenges. Applying his hypothesis to heightened states of arousal—sex and fear—Pfaff shows us how his theory opens new scientific approaches to understanding the structure of brain arousal.
A major synthesis of disparate data by a preeminent neuroscientist, Brain Arousal and Information Theory challenges current thinking about cognition and behavior. Whether you subscribe to Pfaff’s theory or not, this book will stimulate debate about the nature of arousal itself.
The neuroscientist Alain Berthoz experimented on Russian astronauts in space to answer these questions: How does weightlessness affect motion? How are motion and three-dimensional space perceived? In this erudite and witty book, Berthoz describes how human beings on earth perceive and control bodily movement. Reviewing a wealth of research in neurophysiology and experimental psychology, he argues for a rethinking of the traditional separation between action and perception, and for the division of perception into five senses.
In Berthoz’s view, perception and cognition are inherently predictive, functioning to allow us to anticipate the consequences of current or potential actions. The brain acts like a simulator that is constantly inventing models to project onto the changing world, models that are corrected by steady, minute feedback from the world. We move in the direction we are looking, anticipate the trajectory of a falling ball, recover when we stumble, and continually update our own physical position, all thanks to this sense of movement.
This interpretation of perception and action allows Berthoz, in The Brain’s Sense of Movement, to focus on psychological phenomena largely ignored in standard texts: proprioception and kinaesthesis, the mechanisms that maintain balance and coordinate actions, and basic perceptual and memory processes involved in navigation.
Fabrics that are not only stain resistant but actually clean themselves. Airplane wings that change shape in midair to take advantage of shifts in wind currents. Hypodermic needles that use tiny serrations to render injections virtually pain free.
Though they may sound like the stuff of science fiction, in fact such inventions represent only the most recent iterations of natural mechanisms that are billions of years old—the focus of the rapidly growing field of biomimetics. Based on the realization that natural selection has for countless eons been conducting trial-and-error experiments with the laws of physics, chemistry, material science, and engineering, biomimetics takes nature as its laboratory, looking to the most successful developments and strategies of an array of plants and animals as a source of technological innovation and ideas. Thus the lotus flower, with its waxy, water-resistant surface, gives us stainproofing; the feathers of raptors become transformable airplane wings; and the nerve-deadening serrations on a mosquito’s proboscis are adapted to hypodermics.
With Bulletproof Feathers, Robert Allen brings together some of the greatest minds in the field of biomimetics to provide a fascinating—at times even jaw-dropping—overview of cutting-edge research in the field. In chapters packed with illustrations, Steven Vogel explains how architects and building engineers are drawing lessons from prairie dogs, termites, and even sand dollars in order to heat and cool buildings more efficiently; Julian Vincent goes to the very building blocks of nature, revealing how different structures and arrangements of molecules have inspired the development of some fascinating new materials, such as waterproof clothing based on shark skin; Tomonari Akamatsu shows how sonar technology has been greatly improved through detailed research into dolphin communication; Yoseph Bar-Cohen delves into the ways that robotics engineers have learned to solve design problems through reference to human musculature; Jeannette Yen explores how marine creatures have inspired a new generation of underwater robots; and Robert Allen shows us how cooperative behavior between birds, fish, and insects has inspired technological innovations in fields ranging from Web hosting to underwater exploration.
A readable, yet authoritative introduction to a field that is at the forefront of design and technology—and poised to become even more important in the coming decades as population pressures and climate change make the need for efficient technological solutions more acute—Bulletproof Feathers offers adventurous readers a tantalizing peek into the future, by way of our evolutionary past.
The discovery of how opiates such as morphine and heroin relieve pain and produce euphoria is one of the most dramatic tales of modern science. It begins in 1971 when, at the height of the undeclared war in Vietnam, Richard Nixon officially announced a war on drugs. Heroin addiction--no longer confined to urban ghettos--was causing bad public relations for the White House. The specter of young American soldiers demoralized, drugged, and committing atrocities was not the image President Nixon wished to convey as he argued for further bombings of North Vietnam.
In this book Solomon Snyder describes the political maneuverings and scientific sleuthing that led him and Candace Pert, then a graduate student in his lab, to a critical breakthrough in the effort to understand addiction. Their discovery--the so-called opiate receptor--is a structure on the surface of certain nerve cells that attracts opiates. Heroin or morphine molecules fit into opiate receptors much as a key fits into the ignition switch of a car--thus turning on the engine of the cell. Snyder and his students were able to show that nerve cells which possess opiate receptors are found in precisely those parts of the brain that control emotion and pain.
Dr. Snyder describes the friendly yet intense competition from other researchers to expand upon this initial discovery. From the work of two Scottish investigators, Hans Kosterlitz and John Hughes, neuroscientists now know not only where opiate receptors are found in the brain but also why they are there: to serve as binding sites for an opiate-like substance produced by the brain itself--the brain's own morphine. This substance, called enkephalin, regulates pain, mood, and a host of other physiological functions.
From this very human chronicle of scientific battles in the ongoing war against pain and addiction, we gain an appreciation of the extraordinary intellectual processes of an eminent scientist. But Dr. Snyder's story of scientific brainstorming also affords us rare glimpses into the fruitful, sometimes frustrating, relationships among scientists which enrich and complicate creative work. We are reminded of the delicate political alliances that are forged at every level of organization, from the lab bench to the Oval Office, as the scientific community attempts to fit its needs to those of the larger society.
The book is the result of intense bibliographic research and of original documents aimed not just at the examination of Barton’s life and work, but also the examination of today’s perspectives and future work in the field of infectious and “neglected” diseases. The authors address current scientific information on the relevant bacteria Bartonella bacilliformis, besides current research and clinical status of the other Bartonellas, making it a useful and practical text for those studying infectious diseases.
The immune system holds the key to human health. In The Beautiful Cure, leading immunologist Daniel M. Davis describes how the scientific quest to understand how the immune system works—and how it is affected by stress, sleep, age, and our state of mind—is now unlocking a revolutionary new approach to medicine and well-being.
The body’s ability to fight disease and heal itself is one of the great mysteries and marvels of nature. But in recent years, painstaking research has resulted in major advances in our grasp of this breathtakingly beautiful inner world: a vast and intricate network of specialist cells, regulatory proteins, and dedicated genes that are continually protecting our bodies. Far more powerful than any medicine ever invented, the immune system plays a crucial role in our daily lives. We have found ways to harness these natural defenses to create breakthrough drugs and so-called immunotherapies that help us fight cancer, diabetes, arthritis, and many age-related diseases, and we are starting to understand whether activities such as mindfulness might play a role in enhancing our physical resilience.
Written by a researcher at the forefront of this adventure, The Beautiful Cure tells a dramatic story of scientific detective work and discovery, of puzzles solved and mysteries that linger, of lives sacrificed and saved. With expertise and eloquence, Davis introduces us to this revelatory new understanding of the human body and what it takes to be healthy.
Inspired by Michel Foucault’s writings about biopolitics and biopower, Cohen traces the migration of immunity from politics and law into the domains of medicine and science. Offering a genealogy of the concept, he illuminates a complex of thinking about modern bodies that percolates through European political, legal, philosophical, economic, governmental, scientific, and medical discourses from the mid-seventeenth century through the twentieth. He shows that by the late nineteenth century, “the body” literally incarnates modern notions of personhood. In this lively cultural rumination, Cohen argues that by embracing the idea of immunity-as-defense so exclusively, biomedicine naturalizes the individual as the privileged focus for identifying and treating illness, thereby devaluing or obscuring approaches to healing situated within communities or collectives.
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.
A memoir by an African American physician in Alabama whose story in many ways typifies the lives and careers of black doctors in the south during the segregationist era
Beside the Troubled Waters is a memoir by an African American physician in Alabama whose story in many ways typifies the lives and careers of black doctors in the south during the segregationist era while also illustrating the diversity of the black experience in the medical profession. Based on interviews conducted with Hereford over ten years, the account includes his childhood and youth as the son of a black sharecropper and Primitive Baptist minister in Madison County, Alabama, during the Depression; his education at Huntsville’s all-black CouncillSchool and medical training at MeharryMedicalCollege in Nashville; his medical practice in Huntsville’s black community beginning in 1956; his efforts to overcome the racism he met in the white medical community; his participation in the civil rights movement in Huntsville; and his later problems with the Medicaid program and state medical authorities, which eventually led to the loss of his license.
Bodies in Flux explores the inventive ways humans and nonhumans work together to manufacture medical evidence. Each chapter draws on rhetorical theory to investigate a specific scientific method for negotiating medical uncertainty in cancer care, including evidential visualization, assessment, synthesis, and computation. Case studies unveil how doctors rely on visuals when deliberating about a patient’s treatment options, how members of the FDA use inferential statistics to predict a drug’s effectiveness, how researchers synthesize hundreds of clinical trials into a single evidence-based recommendation, and how genetic testing companies compute and commoditize human health. Teston concludes by advocating for an ethic of care that pushes back against the fetishization of certainty—an ethic of care that honors human fragility and bodily flux.
The original essays in this volume use qualitative research methods to expose the multiple contexts within which the problems of bioethics arise, are defined and debated, and ultimately resolved. In a provocative concluding essay, one contributor asks his fellow ethnographers to reflect on the ethical problems of ethnography.
In Beyond a Western Bioethics, physicians Angeles Tan Alora and Josephine M. Lumitao join eight other contributors to provide a comprehensive exploration of bioethical issues outside of the dominant American and western European model. Using the Philippines as a case study, they address how a developing country's economy, religion, and culture affect the bioethical landscape for doctors, patients, families, and the society as a whole.
American principles of medical ethics assume the primacy of individual autonomy, the importance of truth-telling, and secular standards of justice and morality. In the Philippines, these standards are often at odds with a culture in which family relationships take precedence over individualism, and ideas of community, friendship, and religion can deeply influence personal behavior. Pervasive poverty further complicates the equation. Contributors move from a general discussion of the moral vision informing health care decisions in the Philippines to an exploration of a wide range of specific cases: family planning, care of the elderly, organ transplants, death and dying, medical research, AIDS care, doctor-patient relationships, informed consent, and the allocation of scarce health-care resources.
Written for both students and professionals, the book provides a much-needed perspective on how medical ethics are practiced in a developing nation, and it successfully challenges the wisdom of global bioethical standards that do not account for local cultural and economic differences.
Once rarely discussed in medical circles, the relationship between spirituality and health has become an important topic in health care. This change is evidenced in courses on religion and medicine taught in most medical schools, articles in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, and conferences being held all over the country. Yet, much of the discussion of the role of religion and spirituality in health care keeps the critical distance of only being about spirituality. A Balm for Gilead goes further, offering a work of spirituality.
Sulmasy moves between the poetic and the speculative, addressing his subject in the tradition of great spiritual writers like Augustine and Bonaventure. He draws from philosophical and theological sources—specifically, Hebrew and Christian scripture—to illuminate how the art of healing is integrally tied to a sense of the divine and our ultimate interconnectedness. Health care professionals—and anyone else involved with the care of the sick and dying—will find this series of meditations both inspiring and instructive.
Sulmasy addresses the spiritual malaise that physicians, nurses, and other health care workers experience in their professional lives, and explores how these Christian healers can be inspired to persevere in the care of the sick. Drawing on the parable of the prodigal son, for instance, Sulmasy illustrates how some physicians have put financial gain ahead of their patients, and how genuine spirituality might change their hearts. He examines both enigmatic topics such as the relationship between sinfulness, sickness, and suffering and the spirituality of more routine topics such as preventive medicine. In one especially stirring and poignant meditation, he reflects on the spirituality of dying in the light of Christian hope.
A Balm for Gilead interweaves prayer and reflection, pointing the way to a twenty-first-century spirituality for health care professionals and their patients.
Unevenly distributed resources and rising costs have become enduring problems in the American health care system. Health care is more expensive in the United States than in other wealthy nations, and access varies significantly across space and social classes. James A. Schafer Jr. shows that these problems are not inevitable features of modern medicine, but instead reflect the informal organization of health care in a free market system in which profit and demand, rather than social welfare and public health needs, direct the distribution and cost of crucial resources.
The Business of Private Medical Practice is a case study of how market forces influenced the office locations and career paths of doctors in one early twentieth-century city, Philadelphia, the birthplace of American medicine. Without financial incentives to locate in poor neighborhoods, Philadelphia doctors instead clustered in central business districts and wealthy suburbs. In order to differentiate their services in a competitive marketplace, they also began to limit their practices to particular specialties, thereby further restricting access to primary care. Such trends worsened with ongoing urbanization.
Illustrated with numerous maps of the Philadelphia neighborhoods he studies, Schafer’s work helps underscore the role of economic self-interest in shaping the geography of private medical practice and the growth of medical specialization in the United States.
Integration of divergent philosophies, paradigms, and practices requires responsible investigation, informed judgment, and open-minded yet critical study and analysis of various systems of healing. Michael H. Cohen offers providers and policymakers vitally important information by addressing questions such as credentialing, malpractice, informed consent, and liability for referrals. He describes both practical strategies for minimizing liability, as well as the necessary future evolution of the legal and regulatory structure.
Cohen also probes uncharted ethical and bioethical issues in complementary medicine and integrative health care. He further explores the connection between law, medicine, and spirituality and the role of this connection in human evolution. The book's range mirrors the integrative process itself, a process of grappling with, and meaningfully assimilating, disparate traditions and unfamiliar ways of thinking about the significance of health, body, and being.
Beyond Complementary Medicine is required reading for anyone involved in health care, including executives, insurers, managed care organizations, attorneys, ethicists, and lawmakers; physicians integrating complementary and alternative therapies; complementary and alternative medicine practitioners; medical schools, law schools, and educational institutions offering programs in health care, public health, and complementary therapies; companies manufacturing herbs and dietary supplements; and most of all, patients and their families.
Michael H. Cohen is President of the Institute for Integrative and Energy Medicine, a nonprofit organization in health care policy, ethics, and legal and regulatory affairs, and an attorney with an international practice in integrative health care.
Bounding Biomedicine centers on this boundary-changing era, looking at how consumer demand shook the health care hierarchy. Drawing on scholarship in rhetoric and science and technology studies, the book examines how the medical profession scrambled to maintain its position of privilege and prestige, even as its foothold appeared to be crumbling. Colleen Derkatch analyzes CAM-themed medical journals and related discourse to illustrate how members of the medical establishment applied Western standards of evaluation and peer review to test health practices that did not fit easily (or at all) within standard frameworks of medical research. And she shows that, despite many practitioners’ efforts to eliminate the boundaries between “regular” and “alternative,” this research on CAM and the forms of communication that surrounded it ultimately ended up creating an even greater division between what counts as safe, effective health care and what does not.
At a time when debates over treatment choices have flared up again, Bounding Biomedicine gives us a possible blueprint for understanding how the medical establishment will react to this new era of therapeutic change.
Research with human subjects has long been controversial because of the conflicts that often arise between promoting scientific knowledge and protecting the rights and welfare of subjects. Twenty-five years ago the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research addressed these conflicts. The result was the Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidance for Research Involving Human Subjects, a report that identified foundational principles for ethical research with human subjects: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice.
Since the publication of Belmont, these three principles have greatly influenced discussions of research with human subjects. While they are often regarded as the single-most influential set of guidelines for biomedical research and practice in the United States (and other parts of the world), not everyone agrees that they provide adequate guidance. Belmont Revisited brings together a stellar group of scholars in bioethics to revisit the findings of that original report. Their responses constitute a broad overview of the development of the Belmont Report and the extent of its influence, especially on governmental commissions, as well as an assessment of its virtues and shortcomings.
Belmont Revisited looks back to reexamine the creation and influence of the Belmont Report, and also looks forward to the future of research—with a strong call to rethink how institutions and investigators can conduct research more ethically.
Robotic exoskeletons that allow stroke survivors to regain use of their limbs, 3D-printed replacement body parts, and dozens of other innovations still in schematic design are revolutionizing the treatment of debilitating injuries and nervous system disorders. What all these technologies have in common is that they are modeled after engineering strategies found in nature—strategies developed by a vast array of organisms over eons of evolutionary trial and error.
Eugene Goldfield lays out many principles of engineering found in the natural world, with a focus on how evolutionary and developmental adaptations, such as sensory organs and spinal cords, function within complex organisms. He shows how the component parts of highly coordinated structures organize themselves into autonomous functional systems. For example, when people walk, spinal cord neurons generate coordinated signals that continuously reorganize patterns of muscle activations during the gait cycle. This self-organizing capacity is just one of many qualities that allow biological systems to be robust, adaptive, anticipatory, and self-repairing. To exploit the full potential of technologies designed to interact seamlessly with human bodies, properties like these must be better understood and harnessed at every level, from molecules to cells to organ systems.
Bioinspired Devices brings together insights from a wide range of fields. A member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Goldfield offers an insider’s view of cutting-edge research, and envisions a future in which synthetic and biological devices share energy sources and control, blurring the boundary between nature and medicine.
Health, though essential to the revolutionary vision and crucial to Soviet plans for utopia, has been neglected by traditional histories caught up in Cold War debates. The Body Soviet recovers this significant aspect of Soviet thought by providing a cross-disciplinary, comparative history of Soviet health programs that draws upon rich sources of health care propaganda, including posters, plays, museum displays, films, and mock trials. The analysis of propaganda makes The Body Soviet more than an institutional history; it is also an insightful critique of the ideologies of the body fabricated by health organizations.
"A masterpiece that will thoroughly fascinate and delight readers. Starks's understanding of propaganda and hygiene in the early Soviet state is second to none. She tells the stories of Soviet efforts in this field with tremendous insight and ingenuity, providing a rich picture of Soviet life as it was actually lived."— Elizabeth Wood, author of From Baba to Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia
Medicine's changing economics have already fundamentally, permanently altered the relationship between physician and patient, E. Haavi Morreim argues. Physicians must weigh a patient's interests against the legitimate, competing claims of other patients, of payers, of society as a whole, and sometimes even of the physician himself.
Focusing on actual situations in the clinical setting, Morreim explores the complex moral problems that current economic realities pose for the practicing physician. She redefines the moral obligations of both physicians and patients, traces the specific effects of these redefined obligations on clinical practice, and explores the implications for patients as individuals and for national health policy. Although the book focuses on health care in the United States, physicians everywhere are likely to face many of the same basic issues of clinical ethics, because every system of health care financing and distribution today is constrained by finite resources.
An ideal entry point into health economics for everyone from aspiring economists to healthcare professionals.
The economics of healthcare are messy. For most consumers, there’s little control over costs or services. Sometimes doctors are paid a lot; other times they aren’t paid at all. Insurance and drug companies are evil, except when they’re not. If economics is the study of market efficiency, how do we make sense of this?
Better Health Economics is a warts-and-all introduction to a field that is more exceptions than rules. Economists Tal Gross and Matthew J. Notowidigdo offer readers an accessible primer on the field’s essential concepts, a review of the latest research, and a framework for thinking about this increasingly imperfect market.
A love letter to a traditionally unlovable topic, Better Health Economics provides an ideal entry point for students in social science, business, public policy, and healthcare. It’s a reminder that healthcare may be a failed market—but it’s our failed market.
”Every social mechanism appears to have a dual potential for good and evil. Prepayment for medical care is no exception. On the one hand, it provides assurance of necessary care as a safeguard to health, economic well-being, and peace of mind. On the other hand, it opens the way to wasteful and harmful care, to price inflation, and to concealed redistributions in socially undesirable directions. The problem is to devise a plan that allows us to reap the most advantages while we incur the fewest drawbacks.”
Benefits in Medical Care Programs is a comprehensive treatment of this problem. Dr. Donabedian begins with a clear and straight forward analysis of his own assumptions about the social mandate for medical care benefits, the objectives of medical care programs, and the magnitude and distribution of the unmet need that these programs are designed to alleviate. The problem of defining and measuring the need for care is considered within the con text of the data yielded by alternative definitions. The analysis then shifts to the impact of benefits on certain key features of the medical care system.
Program benefits are weighed against program objectives, and policy implications are drawn from this comparison. We are shown what can and cannot be accomplished through medical care benefits and what goals are served by specific aspects of existing or proposed plans. Although Dr. Donabedian counsels a fairly thorough reform of existing systems, he remains skeptical about the possibility of designing a perfect system, and he does not hesitate to point out that increased access to care "increases exposure to both what is good and what is bad in our system of medical care. . . The machinery of medical care has a sinister potential for those who fall into it in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Dr. Donabedian's previous book Aspects of Medical Care Administration has been called the "bible" of its field. Benefits in Medical Care Programs should prove equally invaluable.
Examining medical pluralism in the United States from the Revolutionary War period through the end of the twentieth century, Hans Baer brings together in one convenient reference a vast array of information on healing systems as diverse as Christian Science, osteopathy, acupuncture, Santeria, southern Appalachian herbalism, evangelical faith healing, and Navajo healing.
In a country where the dominant paradigm of biomedicine (medical schools, research hospitals, clinics staffed by M.D.s and R.N.s) has been long established and supported by laws and regulations, the continuing appeal of other medical systems and subsystems bears careful consideration. Distinctions of class, Baer emphasizes, as well as differences in race, ethnicity, and gender, are fundamental to the diversity of beliefs, techniques, and social organizations represented in the phenomenon of medical pluralism.
Baer traces the simultaneous emergence in the nineteenth century of formalized biomedicine and of homeopathy, botanic medicine, hydropathy, Christian Science, osteopathy, and chiropractic. He examines present-day osteopathic medicine as a system parallel to biomedicine with an emphasis on primary care; chiropractic, naturopathy, and acupuncture as professionalized heterodox medical systems; homeopathy, herbalism, bodywork, and lay midwifery in the context of the holistic health movement; Anglo-American religious healing; and folk medical systems, particularly among racial and ethnic minorities. In closing he focuses on the persistence of folk medical systems among working-class Americans and considers the growing interest of biomedical physicians, pharmaceutical and healthcare corporations, and government in the holistic health movement
Contributors. Natalie Boero, Adele E. Clarke, Jennifer R. Fishman, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, Kelly Joyce, Jonathan Kahn, Laura Mamo, Jackie Orr, Elianne Riska, Janet K. Shim, Sara Shostak
What do we know about the possible poisons that industrial technologies leave in our air and water? How reliable is the science that federal regulators and legislators use to protect the public from dangerous products? As this disturbing book shows, ideological or economic attacks on research are part of an extensive pattern of abuse.
Thomas O. McGarity and Wendy E. Wagner reveal the range of sophisticated legal and financial tactics political and corporate advocates use to discredit or suppress research on potential human health hazards. Scientists can find their research blocked, or find themselves threatened with financial ruin. Corporations, plaintiff attorneys, think tanks, even government agencies have been caught suppressing or distorting research on the safety of chemical products.
With alarming stories drawn from the public record, McGarity and Wagner describe how advocates attempt to bend science or “spin” findings. They reveal an immense range of tools available to shrewd partisans determined to manipulate research.
Bending Science exposes an astonishing pattern of corruption and makes a compelling case for reforms to safeguard both the integrity of science and the public health.
Body, Society, and Nation tells the story of China’s unfolding modernity by exploring the changing ideas, practices, and systems related to health and body in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Shanghai. The pursuit of good health loomed large in Chinese political, social, and economic life. Yet, “good health” had a range of associations beyond individual well-being. It was also an integral part of Chinese nation-building, a goal of charitable activities, a notable outcome of Western medical science, a marker of modern civilization, and a commercial catchphrase. With the advent of Western powers, Chinese notions about personal hygiene and the body gradually expanded. This transformation was complicated by indigenous medical ideas, preexisting institutions and social groups, and local cultures and customs.
This study explores the many ways that members of the various strata of Shanghai society experienced and understood multiple meanings of health and body within their everyday lives. Chieko Nakajima traces the institutions they established, the regulations they implemented, and the practices they brought to the city as part of efforts to promote health. In doing so, she explains how local practices and customs fashioned and constrained public health and, in turn, how hygienic modernity helped shape and develop local cultures and influenced people’s behavior.
The implications of biodiversity loss for the global environment have been widely discussed, but only recently has attention been paid to its direct and serious effects on human health. Biodiversity loss affects the spread of human diseases, causes a loss of medical models, diminishes the supplies of raw materials for drug discovery and biotechnology, and threatens food production and water quality.
Biodiversity and Human Health brings together leading thinkers on the global environment and biomedicine to explore the human health consequences of the loss of biological diversity. Based on a two-day conference sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution, the book opens a dialogue among experts from the fields of public health, biology, epidemiology, botany, ecology, demography, and pharmacology on this vital but often neglected concern.
Contributors discuss the uses and significance of biodiversity to the practice of medicine today, and develop strategies for conservation of these critical resources. Topics examined include:
- the causes and consequences of biodiversity loss
- emerging infectious diseases and the loss of biodiversity
- the significance and use of both prescription and herbal biodiversity-derived remedies
- indigenous and local peoples and their health care systems
- sustainable use of biodiversity for medicine
- an agenda for the future
The book provides a common framework for physicians and biomedical researchers who wish to learn more about environmental concerns, and for members of the environmental community who desire a greater understanding of biomedical issues.
Humans have lived in close proximity to other animals for thousands of years. Recent scientific studies have even shown that the presence of animals has a positive effect on our physical and mental health. People with pets typically have lower blood pressure, show fewer symptoms of depression, and tend to get more exercise.
But there is a darker side to the relationship between animals and humans. Animals are carriers of harmful infectious agents and the source of a myriad of human diseases. In recent years, the emergence of high-profile illnesses such as AIDS, SARS, West Nile virus, and bird flu has drawn much public attention, but as E. Fuller Torrey and Robert H. Yolken reveal, the transfer of deadly microbes from animals to humans is neither a new nor an easily avoided problem.
Beginning with the domestication of farm animals nearly 10,000 years ago, Beasts of the Earth traces the ways that human-animal contact has evolved over time. Today, shared living quarters, overlapping ecosystems, and experimental surgical practices where organs or tissues are transplanted from non-humans into humans continue to open new avenues for the transmission of infectious agents. Other changes in human behavior like increased air travel, automated food processing, and threats of bioterrorism are increasing the contagion factor by transporting microbes further distances and to larger populations in virtually no time at all.
While the authors urge that a better understanding of past diseases may help us lessen the severity of some illnesses, they also warn that, given our increasingly crowded planet, it is not a question of if but when and how often animal-transmitted diseases will pose serious challenges to human health in the future.
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.
Despite vernacular’s potential nod to dominant or external culture, it is the strong connection to the local that grounds the vernacular within the experiential context that it occupies. Exploring the nature and shape of vernacular responses to the ongoing public health crisis, Behind the Mask documents processes that are otherwise likely to be forgotten. Including different ethnographic presents, contributors capture moments during the pandemic rather than upon reflection, making the work important to students and scholars of folklore and ethnology, as well as general readers interested in the COVID pandemic.
Being Human during COVID documents the first year of the pandemic in real time, bringing together humanities scholars from the University of Michigan to address what it feels like to be human during the COVID-19 crisis. Over the course of the pandemic, the questions that occupy the humanities—about grieving and publics, the social contract and individual rights, racial formation and xenophobia, ideas of home and conceptions of gender, narrative and representations and power—have become shared life-or-death questions about how human societies work and how culture determines our collective fate. The contributors in this collection draw on scholarly expertise and lived experience to try to make sense of the unfamiliar present in works that range from traditional scholarly essays, to personal essays, to visual art projects. The resulting book is shot through with fear, dread, frustration, and prejudice, and, on a few occasions, with a thrilling sense of hope.
Analyzing historical documents on both sides of the vaccination debate, Durbach focuses on the key events and rhetorical strategies of the resistance campaign. She shows that those for and against the vaccine had very different ideas about how human bodies worked and how best to safeguard them from disease. Individuals opposed to mandatory vaccination saw their own and their children’s bodies not as potentially contagious and thus dangerous to society but rather as highly vulnerable to contamination and violation. Bodily Matters challenges the notion that resistance to vaccination can best be understood, and thus easily dismissed, as the ravings of an unscientific “lunatic fringe.” It locates the anti-vaccination movement at the very center of broad public debates in Victorian England over medical developments, the politics of class, the extent of government intervention into the private lives of its citizens, and the values of a liberal society.
In this sweeping approach to the history of disease, historian J. N. Hays chronicles perceptions and responses to plague and pestilence over two thousand years of western history. Hays frames disease as a multi-dimensional 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. He shows how diseases affect social and political change, reveal social tensions, and are mediated both within and outside the realm of scientific medicine.
Beginning with the legacy of Greek, Roman, and early Christian ideas about disease, the book then discusses many of the dramatic epidemics from the fourteenth through the twentieth centuries, moving from leprosy and bubonic plague through syphilis, smallpox, cholera, tuberculosis, influenza, and poliomyelitis to AIDS. Hays examines the devastating exchange of diseases between cultures and continents that ensued during the age of exploration. He also describes disease through the lenses of medical theory, public health, folk traditions, and government response. The history of epidemics is also the history of their victims. Hays pays close attention to the relationships between poverty and power and disease, using contemporary case studies to support his argument that diseases concentrate their pathological effects on the poor, while elites associate the cause of disease with the culture and habits of the poor.
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.
In the late nineteenth century, medical educators intent on transforming American physicians into scientifically trained, elite professionals recognized the value of medical school design for their reform efforts. Between 1893 and 1940, nearly every medical college in the country rebuilt or substantially renovated its facility. In Building Schools, Making Doctors, Katherine Carroll reveals how the schools constructed during this fifty-year period did more than passively house a remodeled system of medical training; they actively participated in defining and promoting an innovative pedagogy, modern science, and the new physician.
Interdisciplinary and wide ranging, her study moves architecture from the periphery of medical education to the center, uncovering a network of medical educators, architects, and philanthropists who believed that the educational environment itself shaped how students learned and the type of physicians they became. Carroll offers the first comprehensive study of the science and pedagogy formulated by the buildings, the influence of the schools’ donors and architects, the impact of the structures on the urban landscape and the local community, and the facilities’ privileging of white men within the medical profession during this formative period for physicians and medical schools.
Drawing on decades of combined expertise in health care consolidation, Dranove and Burns trace Big Med’s emergence in the 1990s, followed by its swift rise amid false promises of scale economies and organizational collaboration. In the decades since, megaproviders have gobbled up market share and turned independent physicians into salaried employees of big bureaucracies, while delivering on none of their early promises. For patients this means higher costs and lesser care. Meanwhile, physicians report increasingly low morale, making it all but impossible for most systems to implement meaningful reforms.
In Big Med, Dranove and Burns combine their respective skills in economics and management to provide a nuanced explanation of how the provision of health care has been corrupted and submerged under consolidation. They offer practical recommendations for improving competition policies that would reform megaproviders to actually achieve the efficiencies and quality improvements they have long promised.
This is an essential read for understanding the current state of the health care system in America—and the steps urgently needed to create an environment of better care for all of us.
In the hospital's clinics, biomedical practitioners struggle amid severe resource shortages to make the diseased body visible and knowable to the clinical gaze. That struggle is entangled with attempts by doctors, nurses, and patients to make themselves visible to external others—to kin, clinical experts, global scientists, politicians, and international development workers—as socially recognizable and valuable persons. Here hospital infrastructures emerge as relational technologies that are fundamentally fragile but also offer crucial opportunities for making people visible and knowable in new, unpredictable, and powerful ways.
In both form and content, The Body Alone represents boundary-pressing work that subverts the traditional narrative by putting pressure on the medical, cultural, and political systems that impact women’s access to fair and equal healthcare. This is more than an illness narrative, it is a battle cry demanding change.
Throughout the fourteenth century AD/eighth century H, waves of plague swept out of Central Asia and decimated populations from China to Iceland. So devastating was the Black Death across the Old World that some historians have compared its effects to those of a nuclear holocaust. As countries began to recover from the plague during the following century, sharp contrasts arose between the East, where societies slumped into long-term economic and social decline, and the West, where technological and social innovation set the stage for Europe's dominance into the twentieth century. Why were there such opposite outcomes from the same catastrophic event?
In contrast to previous studies that have looked to differences between Islam and Christianity for the solution to the puzzle, this pioneering work proposes that a country's system of landholding primarily determined how successfully it recovered from the calamity of the Black Death. Stuart Borsch compares the specific cases of Egypt and England, countries whose economies were based in agriculture and whose pre-plague levels of total and agrarian gross domestic product were roughly equivalent. Undertaking a thorough analysis of medieval economic data, he cogently explains why Egypt's centralized and urban landholding system was unable to adapt to massive depopulation, while England's localized and rural landholding system had fully recovered by the year 1500.
In 1985 the media announced a new therapy for cancer. It was expensive, labor-intensive, and toxic--but, they said, it worked. How it worked is the story Ilana Löwy tells in Between Bench and Bedside, a compelling account of the clinical trials of interleukin-2 at a major French cancer hospital. Her book offers a remarkable insider's view of the culture of clinical experimentation in oncology--and of how this culture affects the development of new treatments for cancer.
Löwy, a historian of science who trained as an immunologist, makes the life of the laboratory and the hospital comprehensible and immediate. Before immersing us in the clinical drama, she fills in the history behind the action--a background of chemotherapy and radiation, controlled clinical trials, and the long line of immunological approaches that finally led to interleukin-2. The story then shifts to the introduction of interleukin-2 in a cancer ward. Löwy conveys the clinical investigation as a complex, multilayered phenomenon that defies the stereotypes of modern biomedicine. In this picture, the miracle-makers and arrogant, self-centered professionals of myth give way to moving images of real people negotiating the tensions between institutional and professional constraints, the search for a scientific breakthrough, and the obligation to alleviate the suffering of a patient. The result is a rare firsthand look at the multiple factors that shape real-life clinical experiments and the institutional tangle and emotional muddle that surround such trials--an invaluable view at a time when medicine is undergoing such great and confusing changes.
This indispensable book aids those diagnosed with recurrent or late-stage breast cancer, those wanting to reduce the chance of a recurrence, and those with other types of late-stage cancer. It is also a valuable resource for healthcare professionals, friends, and family members.
Topics covered include
• Types of recurrence, their symptoms, and ways of minimizing the chance of a recurrence
• Diagnostic tests, potential surgeries, and treatments to manage late-stage cancer
• Getting the best care, evaluating complementary therapies, and alleviating pain and depression
• Cessation of treatment and what one may experience as the disease progresses
• End-of-life issues including dealing with financial and legal matters, communicating with loved ones and hospice workers, and planning memorial services
Breast Cancer Recurrence and Advanced Disease includes a glossary of medical terms, appendices on nutrition and integrative health centers, and links to current Web sites addressing matters such as clinical trials, patients’ rights, and medical expenses.
For nearly forty years, feminists and patient activists have argued that medicine is a deeply individualizing and depoliticizing institution. According to this view, medical practices are incidental to people’s transformation from patients to patient activists. The Biopolitics of Breast Cancer turns this understanding upside down.
Maren Klawiter analyzes the evolution of the breast cancer movement to show the broad social impact of how diseases come to be medically managed and publicly administered. Examining surgical procedures, adjuvant therapies, early detection campaigns, and the rise in discourses of risk, Klawiter demonstrates that these practices created a change in the social relations-if not the mortality rate-of breast cancer that initially inhibited, but later enabled, collective action. Her research focuses on the emergence and development of new forms of activism that range from grassroots patient empowerment to environmental activism and corporate-funded breast cancer awareness.
The Biopolitics of Breast Cancer opens a window onto a larger set of changes currently transforming medically advanced societies and ultimately challenges our understanding of the origins, politics, and future of the breast cancer movement.
Maren Klawiter holds a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently pursuing a law degree at Yale University.
Depending on one’s vantage point, breast cancer can be a very different experience, and indeed, a very different concern. It is, for some, a personal struggle; for others, it is a disease posing scientific and environmental challenges; and for others it is a highly charged and politicized issue around which policy wars rage. Beyond Slash, Burn, and Poison brings a unique perspective to breast cancer by recognizing the overlapping relationship of all these realities.
Drawing on the writings of Rachel Carson, Betty Ford, Rose Kushner, and Audre Lorde, this book explores the various ways in which patient-centered texts continue to leave their mark on the political realm of breast cancer and, ultimately, the disease itself. Ordered chronologically, the selections trace the progression of discussions about breast cancer from a time when the subject was kept private and silent to when it became part of public discourse. The texts included are personal accounts, written by women struggling to play an active role in their healing process and, at the same time, hoping to help others do the same.
Knopf-Newman also shows us how these writings eventually changed public opinion and the underlying tendency to blame women for their illness. She argues that changes in medical practice and public policy are linked to textual interventions, and makes a case for the politicization of cultural studies of disease through personal and literary expression.
Passionately written and well-researched, Beyond Slash, Burn, and Poison transforms how we think about breast cancer. Rather than facilitating forums for separate discussions, this book brings conversations into dialog with each other. It is essential reading for anyone concerned with breast cancer and its history, as well as for those interested in the effect of the environment on public health and the role that literature plays in public policy and medicine.
Neural grafting, virtual reality, gene therapy, psychotropic drugs As startling new treatments emerge for disorders of the brain, new concerns are arising along with them. In the first book to examine the implications of the full range of revolutionary interventions now possible in the human brain, Robert H. Blank warns that while these new techniques may promise medical wonders, they also raise profound political questions.
Our rapidly unfolding knowledge about the brain and the accompanying applications have three main policy dimensions: funding research initiatives, controlling individual use, and assessing social consequences. But underlying these aspects, Blank argues, are more disturbing issues that pose fundamental challenges to our conceptions of equality, autonomy, freedom, responsibility, and human nature itself.
Brain Policy makes the key facts from the technical literature readily accessible to social scientists and general readers and points out the implications for our society. Blank first explains the structure and function of the nervous system and current theories of brain operation; he then assesses the uses and potential abuses of various intervention techniques. He identifies the public policy issues raised by discoveries in the neurosciences and calls for intensified scrutiny of the advantages and disadvantages of new technologies.
Warning that the risks and dangers of the dramatic developments in neuroscience are potentially large, Blank offers a means of understanding these scientific advances and the philosophical and political issues they entail. This book will be of interest to social scientists, policy analysts, policy makers, bioethicists, scientists who want to see the bigger picture, and the informed reader with an interest in the implications of neuroscience for themselves and society.
Brain Culture investigates the American obsession with the health of the brain. The brain has become more than a bodily organ, acquiring a near-mystical status. The message that this organ is the key to everything is everywhere--in self-help books that tell us to work on our brains to achieve happiness and enlightenment, in drug advertisements that promise a few tweaks to our brain chemistry will cure us of our discontents, and in politicians' speeches that tell us that our brains are national resources essential to our economic prosperity.
Davi Johnson Thornton looks at these familiar messages, tracing the ways that brain science and colorful brain images produced by novel scientific technologies are taken up and distributed in popular media. She tracks the impact of the message that, "you are your brain" across multiple contemporary contexts, analyzing its influence on child development, family life, education, and public policy. Brain Culture shows that our fixation on the brain is not simply a reaction to scientific progress, but a cultural phenomenon deeply tied to social and political values of individualism and limitless achievement.
Black Skin, White Coats is a history of psychiatry in Nigeria from the 1950s to the 1980s. Working in the contexts of decolonization and anticolonial nationalism, Nigerian psychiatrists sought to replace racist colonial psychiatric theories about the psychological inferiority of Africans with a universal and egalitarian model focusing on broad psychological similarities across cultural and racial boundaries. Particular emphasis is placed on Dr. T. Adeoye Lambo, the first indigenous Nigerian to earn a specialty degree in psychiatry in the United Kingdom in 1954. Lambo returned to Nigeria to become the medical superintendent of the newly founded Aro Mental Hospital in Abeokuta, Nigeria’s first “modern” mental hospital. At Aro, Lambo began to revolutionize psychiatric research and clinical practice in Nigeria, working to integrate “modern” western medical theory and technologies with “traditional” cultural understandings of mental illness. Lambo’s research focused on deracializing psychiatric thinking and redefining mental illness in terms of a model of universal human similarities that crossed racial and cultural divides.
Black Skin, White Coats is the first work to focus primarily on black Africans as producers of psychiatric knowledge and as definers of mental illness in their own right. By examining the ways that Nigerian psychiatrists worked to integrate their psychiatric training with their indigenous backgrounds and cultural and civic nationalisms, Black Skin, White Coats provides a foil to Frantz Fanon’s widely publicized reactionary articulations of the relationship between colonialism and psychiatry. Black Skin, White Coats is also on the cutting edge of histories of psychiatry that are increasingly drawing connections between local and national developments in late-colonial and postcolonial settings and international scientific networks. Heaton argues that Nigerian psychiatrists were intimately aware of the need to engage in international discourses as part and parcel of the transformation of psychiatry at home.
George Devereux, a psychoanalyst and anthropologist, discusses crime, sexual delinquency, dreams in non-Western cultures, and cannibalistic drives of parents. He frequently cites case material from his extensive field work with the Mahave Indians of Arizona and the Sedang Moi of Vietnam and from his clinical work with non-Western patients.
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.
The Basic Fault continues to illuminate the crucial current issues in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in general: the nature of self, the role of developmental defects, the value of empathy, and the central importance of the relationship between therapist and patient. This paperback edition includes a foreword by Paul H. Ornstein discussing the impact of Balint's work at the time of its publication and its continued importance now.
Library of Congress subject headings for this publication:
Schizophrenia -- Physiological aspects.
Schizophrenia -- Chemotherapy.
Schizophrenia -- drug therapy.
Schizophrenia -- physiopathology.
Schizophr�enie -- Aspect physiologique.
Schizophr�enie -- Chimioth�erapie.