The alarm calls of birds make them difficult for predators to locate, while the howl of wolves and the croak of bullfrogs are designed to carry across long distances. From an engineer's perspective, how do such specialized adaptations among living things really work? And how does physics constrain evolution, channeling it in particular directions?
Writing with wit and a richly informed sense of wonder, Denny and McFadzean offer an expert look at animals as works of engineering, each exquisitely adapted to a specific manner of survival, whether that means spinning webs or flying across continents or hunting in the dark-or writing books. This particular book, containing more than a hundred illustrations, conveys clearly, for engineers and nonengineers alike, the physical principles underlying animal structure and behavior.
Pigeons, for instance-when understood as marvels of engineering-are flying remote sensors: they have wideband acoustical receivers, hi-res optics, magnetic sensing, and celestial navigation. Albatrosses expend little energy while traveling across vast southern oceans, by exploiting a technique known to glider pilots as dynamic soaring. Among insects, one species of fly can locate the source of a sound precisely, even though the fly itself is much smaller than the wavelength of the sound it hears. And that big-brained, upright Great Ape? Evolution has equipped us to figure out an important fact about the natural world: that there is more to life than engineering, but no life at all without it.
Along with reproduction, balancing energy expenditure with the limits of resource acquisition is essential for both a species and a population to survive. But energy is a limited resource, as we know well, so birds and mammals—the most energy-intensive fauna on the planet—must reduce energy expenditures to maintain this balance, some taking small steps, and others extreme measures.
Here Brian K. McNab draws on his over sixty years in the field to provide a comprehensive account of the energetics of birds and mammals, one fully integrated with their natural history. McNab begins with an overview of thermal rates—much of our own energy is spent maintaining our 98.6?F temperature—and explains how the basal rate of metabolism drives energy use, especially in extreme environments. He then explores those variables that interact with the basal rate of metabolism, like body size and scale and environments, highlighting their influence on behavior, distribution, and even reproductive output. Successive chapters take up energy and population dynamics and evolution. A critical central theme that runs through the book is how the energetic needs of birds and mammals come up against rapid environmental change and how this is hastening the pace of extinction.
In social relationships—whether between mates, parents and offspring, or friends—we find much of life’s meaning. But in these relationships, so critical to our well-being, might we also detect the workings, even directives, of biology? This book, a rare melding of human and animal research and theoretical and empirical science, ventures into the most interesting realms of behavioral biology to examine the intimate role of endocrinology in social relationships.
The importance of hormones to reproductive behavior—from breeding cycles to male sexual display—is well known. What this book considers is the increasing evidence that hormones are just as important to social behavior. Peter Ellison and Peter Gray include the latest findings—both practical and theoretical—on the hormonal component of both casual interactions and fundamental bonds. The contributors, senior scholars and rising scientists whose work is shaping the field, go beyond the proximate mechanics of neuroendocrine physiology to integrate behavioral endocrinology with areas such as reproductive ecology and life history theory. Ranging broadly across taxa, from birds and rodents to primates, the volume pays particular attention to human endocrinology and social relationships, a focus largely missing from most works of behavioral endocrinology.
Tracing the leading role of emotions in the evolution of the mind, a philosopher and a psychologist pair up to reveal how thought and culture owe less to our faculty for reason than to our capacity to feel.
Many accounts of the human mind concentrate on the brain’s computational power. Yet, in evolutionary terms, rational cognition emerged only the day before yesterday. For nearly 200 million years before humans developed a capacity to reason, the emotional centers of the brain were hard at work. If we want to properly understand the evolution of the mind, we must explore this more primal capability that we share with other animals: the power to feel.
Emotions saturate every thought and perception with the weight of feelings. The Emotional Mind reveals that many of the distinctive behaviors and social structures of our species are best discerned through the lens of emotions. Even the roots of so much that makes us uniquely human—art, mythology, religion—can be traced to feelings of caring, longing, fear, loneliness, awe, rage, lust, playfulness, and more.
From prehistoric cave art to the songs of Hank Williams, Stephen T. Asma and Rami Gabriel explore how the evolution of the emotional mind stimulated our species’ cultural expression in all its rich variety. Bringing together insights and data from philosophy, biology, anthropology, neuroscience, and psychology, The Emotional Mind offers a new paradigm for understanding what it is that makes us so unique.
A pioneer in the birth control movement both in the United States and abroad, Dr. Clarence J. Gamble began his work as a volunteer in Philadelphia in 1929. Because he was convinced that the health and happiness of women and children and, in fact, entire families depended on adequate spacing of their babies, he helped to establish family planning clinics in a dozen American cities before he was forty years old.
Dr. Gamble's major concern was to provide a safe, reliable, and cheap contraceptive that poor women who had no access to running water or modern conveniences could use. After World War II and the population explosion that followed it, Dr. Gamble expanded his efforts in what he called the Great Cause to help those in the developing nations who wanted their people to be able to choose when to have children and how many to have.
Every Child a Wanted Child is more than the biography of a unique man. It is a record of the ups and downs of the birth control movement in the United States and in Italy, Japan, India, and parts of Asia and Africa.
In the wake of the successful cloning of animals and the promises—or fears—of stem cell research, new discoveries in science and medicine need more than ever to be accompanied by careful moral reflection. Contending that concern over the ethical dimensions of these and other like issues are no longer just in the domain of those involved in medical practice, the third edition of Ethics of Health Care claims these are vital topics that should matter deeply to all citizens.
While stressing the Catholic tradition in health care ethics, Ethics of Health Care is ecumenical, incorporating a broader Christian tradition as well as humanistic approaches, and takes as common ground for mutual understanding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations. This new third edition is a response to the many developments in theology and the startlingly rapid changes in the arenas of medicine and health care over the past decade, from the dominance of managed care to increased surgery on an "outpatient" basis; from hospice care for the dying to the increasing use of drugs in the treatment of mental illness.
Revised and thoroughly up-to-date, this third edition continues with its valuable teaching aids, including case studies, study questions, chapter summaries, a bibliography, and complete index.
This collection of thirty-one cases and commentaries addresses ethical problems commonly encountered by the average health care professional, not just those working on such high-tech specialties as organ transplants or genetic engineering. It deals with familiar issues that are rarely considered in ethics casebooks, including such fundamental matters as informed consent, patient decision-making capacity, the role of the family, and end-of-life decisions. It also provides resources for basic but neglected ethical issues involving placement decisions for elderly or technologically dependent patients, rehabilitation care, confidentiality regarding AIDS, professional responsibility, and organizational and institutional ethics.
The authors describe in detail the perspectives of each party to the case, the kind of language that ethicists use to discuss the issues, and the outcome of the case. A short bibliography suggests useful articles for further reading or curriculum development.
Easily understood by readers with no prior training in ethics, this book offers guidance on everyday problems from across the broad continuum of care. It will be valuable for health-care professionals, hospital ethics committees, and for students preparing for careers in health-care professions.
Originally published in 1999, this classic textbook includes twenty-six cases with commentary and bibliographic resources designed especially for medical students and the training of ethics consultants. The majority of the cases reflect the day-to-day moral struggles within the walls of hospitals. As a result, the cases do not focus on esoteric, high-tech dilemmas like genetic engineering or experimental protocols, but rather on fundamental problems that are pervasive in basic healthcare delivery in the United States: where to send a frail, elderly patient who refuses to go to a nursing home, what role the family should play in making a treatment decision, what a hospital should do when it is getting stuck with too many unpaid bills.
This thoroughly revised and updated second edition includes thirteen new cases, five of which are designated as "skill builder" cases aimed specifically at persons who wish to conduct clinical ethics case consultations. The new cases highlight current ethical challenges that arise in caring for populations such as undocumented immigrant patients, persons with substance use disorders involving opioids, and ethical issues that arise beyond the bedside at the organizational level. The reader is invited to use the supplemental videos and assessment tools available on the website of the Loyola University Chicago ACES project (www.LUC.edu/ethicsconsult).
Susan Sontag once described illness as “the night-side of life.” When we or our loved ones fall ill, our world is thrown into darkness and disarray, our routines are interrupted, our deepest beliefs shaken. The modern regime of hyper-logical biomedicine offers little solace when it comes to the effects of ill health on our inner lives. By exploring the role of desire in illness, Eros and Illness offers an alternative: an unconventional, deeply human exploration of what it means to live with, and live through, disease.
When we face down illness, something beyond biomedicine’s extremely valuable advances in treatment and prevention is sorely needed. Desire in its many guises plays a crucial part in illness, David Morris shows. Emotions, dreams, and stories—even romance and eroticism—shape our experiences as patients and as caregivers. Our perception of the world we enter through illness—including too often a world of pain—is shaped by desire.
Writing from his own heartbreaking experience as a caretaker for his wife, Morris relates how desire can worsen or, with care, mitigate the heavy weight of disease. He looks to myths, memoirs, paintings, performances, and narratives to understand how illness is intertwined with the things we value most dearly. Drawing on cultural resources from many centuries and media, Eros and Illness reaches out a hand to guide us through the long night of illness, showing us how to find productive desire where we expected only despair and defeat.
The thirteen essays in Educating for Professionalism examine the often conflicting ethical, social, emotional, and intellectual messages that medical institutions send to students about what it means to be a doctor. Because this disconnection between what medical educators profess and what students experience is partly to blame for the current crisis in medical professionalism, the authors offer timely, reflective analyses of the work and opportunities facing medical education if doctors are to win public trust.
In their drive to improve medical professionalism within the world of academic medicine, editors Delese Wear and Janet Bickel have assembled thought-provoking essays that elucidate the many facets of teaching, valuing, and maintaining medical professionalism in the middle of the myriad challenges facing medicine at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
The collection traces how the values of altruism and service can influence not only mission statements and admission policies but also the content of medical school ethics courses, student-led task forces, and mentoring programs, along with larger environmental issues in medical schools and the communities they serve.
Stanley Joel Reiser
Jack Coulehan
Peter C. Williams
Frederic W. Hafferty
Richard Martinez
Judith Andre
Jake Foglio
Howard Brody
Sheila Woods
Sue Fosson
Lois Margaret Nora
Mary Anne C. Johnston
Tana A. Grady-Weliky
Cynthia N. Kettyle
Edward M. Hundert
Norma E. Wagoner
Frederick A. Miller
William D. Mellon
Howard Waitzkin
Donald Wasylenki
Niall Byrne
Barbara McRobb
Edward J. Eckenfels
Lucy Wolf Tuton
Claudia H. Siegel
Timothy B. Campbell
The Experiment Must Continue is a beautifully articulated ethnographic history of medical experimentation in East Africa from 1940 through 2014. In it, Melissa Graboyes combines her training in public health and in history to treat her subject with the dual sensitivities of a medical ethicist and a fine historian. She breathes life into the fascinating histories of research on human subjects, elucidating the hopes of the interventionists and the experiences of the putative beneficiaries.
Historical case studies highlight failed attempts to eliminate tropical diseases, while modern examples delve into ongoing malaria and HIV/AIDS research. Collectively, these show how East Africans have perceived research differently than researchers do and that the active participation of subjects led to the creation of a hybrid ethical form.
By writing an ethnography of the past and a history of the present, Graboyes casts medical experimentation in a new light, and makes the resounding case that we must readjust our dominant ideas of consent, participation, and exploitation. With global implications, this lively book is as relevant for scholars as it is for anyone invested in the place of medicine in society.
A timely investigation of the potential economic effects, both realized and unrealized, of artificial intelligence within the United States healthcare system.
In sweeping conversations about the impact of artificial intelligence on many sectors of the economy, healthcare has received relatively little attention. Yet it seems unlikely that an industry that represents nearly one-fifth of the economy could escape the efficiency and cost-driven disruptions of AI.
The Economics of Artificial Intelligence: Health Care Challenges brings together contributions from health economists, physicians, philosophers, and scholars in law, public health, and machine learning to identify the primary barriers to entry of AI in the healthcare sector. Across original papers and in wide-ranging responses, the contributors analyze barriers of four types: incentives, management, data availability, and regulation. They also suggest that AI has the potential to improve outcomes and lower costs. Understanding both the benefits of and barriers to AI adoption is essential for designing policies that will affect the evolution of the healthcare system.
The rapid rise of managed care in the United States has introduced new complexities into ethical dilemmas in health care by changing the traditional relationships among health plans, payers, providers, and patients. Through twenty case studies that provide snapshots of a wide range of ethical challenges, this book explores the goals, methods, and practices of managed care.
Accompanying each case are questions for consideration and a pair of commentaries by prominent contributors from diverse fields. Through the cases and commentaries, this book clarifies the internal workings of managed care, explains relevant concepts, and offers practical, constructive guidance in addressing the ethical and policy issues.
The cases address a broad spectrum of issues concerning rationing shared resources, financial incentives, quality of care, and responsibilities to patients, vulnerable populations, and the community. Specific topics range from coverage of emergency services through funding medical education to respecting patients' religious beliefs and caring for the seriously mentally ill.
This casebook offers a wealth of insights into critical issues that affect the delivery of managed care in an increasingly competitive market. It will be invaluable for those managing the delivery and financing of health care and for students and practitioners of the health professions and health administration, as well as interested recipients of managed care.
A review of the complex ethical problems that confront many professionals and decision makers in managed care systems.
Ethnicity and Medical Care equips health professionals with the ethnographic data they need to deliver better health care within American communities of urban blacks, Chinese, Haitians, Italians, Mexicans, Navajos, and Puerto Ricans. Each chapter, dealing in turn with one of these seven American subcultures, reviews the available demographic and epidemiological data and examines sociocultural influences on each major phase of illness.
Topics range from culture-specific syndromes such as susto or “evil eye,” to concepts of disease based on blood perturbations or God's punishment, to lay-referral networks, consultation of mainstream and non-mainstream sources of medical care, and adherence to treatment regimens. But ethnic behavior often entails general styles of interaction—attitudes toward authority figures, sex-role allocations, and ways of expressing emotion and asking for help—that are carried over into the healthcare setting. Accordingly, Ethnicity and Medical Care also offers general guidelines for providing more personalized, culturally relevant care for any ethnically affiliated patient.
When the first edition of Environmental Health appeared in 1992 it was quickly recognized as the single best resource for students, public health professionals, and general readers concerned with the well-being of the environment and its inhabitants. Now, four completely new chapters and an additional two hundred pages of text bring this definitive work up to date.
This new edition maintains the earlier edition's balanced coverage of a broad spectrum of timely topics, including air, water, and food; occupational health; insect and rodent control; the effects, uses, and management of ionizing and nonionizing radiation; accidents as a cause of injuries and deaths; natural and man-made disasters; the impact of energy usage; and environmental standards and monitoring. The new edition also offers completely new chapters on four crucial subjects: environmental toxicology, environmental epidemiology, environmental law, and risk assessment. In addition, drinking water and liquid wastes, formerly discussed in combination, are now covered in separate chapters.
Environmental Health has established itself as the most succinct and comprehensive textbook on the subject. This extensively revised and rewritten third edition continues this tradition by incorporating new developments and by adding timely coverage of topics such as environmental economics and terrorism.
As in previous volumes, the new edition presents balanced assessments of environmental problems, examining their local and global implications, their short- and long-range impacts, and their importance in both developed and less developed countries of the world. The Third Edition also addresses emerging issues such as environmental justice, deforestation, the protection of endangered species, multiple chemical sensitivity, and the application of the threshold concept in evaluating the effects of toxic and radioactive materials.
Whether discussing acid rain, ozone depletion, global warming, or more traditional subjects such as the management and control of air, water, and food, Dade Moeller emphasizes the need for a systems approach. As with previous volumes, Environmental Health, Third Edition, offers a depth of understanding that is without peer. While it covers technical details, it is also a book that anyone with an interest in the environment can pick up and browse at random.
Dramatic changes in the field of environmental health since the Third Edition was published in 2004 demand a new, radically updated version of this essential textbook.
Based on the recommendations of advisory bodies and federal agency regulations, as well as a thorough review of the scientific literature, Moeller’s Fourth Edition is the only fully current text in this burgeoning field. It features new tables and figures, and revisions of those retained from previous editions. Environmental Health is also enriched with the knowledge and insights of professionals who are deeply involved in “real world” aspects of each subject covered.
In eighteen chapters, students receive a complete but manageable introduction to the complex nature of the environment, how humans interact with it, and the mutual impact between people and the environments where they work or live. This new edition emphasizes the challenges students will face in the field: the local and global implications of environmental health initiatives, their short- and long-range effects, their importance to both developing and developed nations, and the roles individuals can play in helping to resolve these problems.
Whether discussing toxicology, injury prevention, risk assessment, and ionizing and non-ionizing radiation, or more traditional subjects like the management and control of air, water, and food, Dade Moeller emphasizes the need for a systems approach to analyzing new projects prior to their construction and operation.
Environmental Health is indispensable reading for practitioners, students, and anyone considering a career in public health.
Lyme disease--virtually unknown in the United States only a decade ago--has now been reported from almost every state; in the Northeast, it has become a major public health crisis. Under the name of borreliosis, the disease is also common in Europe. As Americans have become aware of the hazard they face from Lyme disease, they have become anxious to know how to avoid or control the disease. But the complex ecological interactions of Lyme disease make that extremely difficult. The disease is caused by a microorganism, a spirochete, which is carried by tiny ticks. The ticks, in turn, are transported from place to place by their hosts: humans, deer, white-tailed mice, dogs, lizards, and many other animals and birds. Both ticks and their hosts serve as a reservoir for the disease. As with any tick-borne disease, the best hope of prevention lies in understanding and interrupting the lifecycle of the microorganism, its vectors, and their hosts.
This book is the first attempt to survey the natural history, ecology, population dynamics, geography, and environmental management of Lyme disease. Eighteen leading American researchers on Lyme disease explain the current state of knowledge and comment candidly on the theoretical and practical advantages and difficulties with each technique of surveillance, self-protection, and tick control. The book includes suggestions for personal protection against the disease,
This is an essential resource for naturalists, ecologists, physicians, nurses, epidemiologists, public health officials, entomologists, veterinarians, pest control operators, wildlife managers, town planners, and anyone concerned with Lyme disease.
In the early fall of 1897, yellow fever shuttered businesses, paralyzed trade, and caused tens of thousand of people living in the southern United States to abandon their homes and flee for their lives. Originating in Cuba, the deadly plague inspired disease-control measures that not only protected U.S. trade interests but also justified the political and economic domination of the island nation from which the pestilence came. By focusing on yellow fever, Epidemic Invasions uncovers for the first time how the devastating power of this virus profoundly shaped the relationship between the two countries.
Yellow fever in Cuba, Mariola Espinosa demonstrates, motivated the United States to declare war against Spain in 1898, and, after the war was won and the disease eradicated, the United States demanded that Cuba pledge in its new constitution to maintain the sanitation standards established during the occupation. By situating the history of the fight against yellow fever within its political, military, and economic context, Espinosa reveals that the U.S. program of sanitation and disease control in Cuba was not a charitable endeavor. Instead, she shows that it was an exercise in colonial public health that served to eliminate threats to the continued expansion of U.S. influence in the world.
In the past three decades, the number of obese adults in the United States has doubled and the number of obese children almost tripled, which may lead to increased medical expenditures, productivity loss, and stress on the health care system. Economic analysis now shows that weight gain is the result of individual choices in response to economic environments and demonstrates that incentives can influence individual behaviors affecting weight. Determinants are varied and include year- and area-specific food prices, availability of food outlets and recreational facilities, health insurance, and minimum wage levels. Timely and important, Economic Aspects of Obesity provides a strong foundation for evaluating the costs and benefits of various proposals designed to control obesity rates.
Folklore studies brings important and useful perspectives to understanding cultural responses to the outbreak of disease. Through this etiological study Lee shows the similarities between the narratives of the SARS outbreak and the narratives of other contemporary disease outbreaks like AIDS and the H1N1 virus. His analysis suggests that these disease narratives do not spring up with new outbreaks or diseases but are in continuous circulation and are recycled opportunistically. Lee also explores whether this predictability of vernacular disease narratives presents the opportunity to create counter-narratives released systematically from the government or medical science to stymie the negative effects of the fearful rumors that so often inflame humanity.
With potential for practical application to public health and health policy, An Epidemic of Rumors will be of interest to students and scholars of health, medicine, and folklore.
This is the first history of epidemics in South Africa, lethal episodes that significantly shaped this society over three centuries. Focusing on five devastating diseases between 1713 and today—smallpox, bubonic plague, “Spanish influenza,” polio, and HIV/AIDS—the book probes their origins, their catastrophic courses, and their consequences in both the short and long terms. The impacts of these epidemics ranged from the demographic—the “Spanish flu,” for instance, claimed the lives of six percent of the country’s population in six weeks—to the political, the social, the economic, the spiritual, the psychological, and the cultural. Moreover, as each of these epidemics occurred at crucial moments in the country’s history—such as during the South African War and World War I—the book also examines how these processes affected and were affected by the five epidemics. To those who read this book, history will not look the same again.
Researchers often hope that their work will inform social change. The questions that motivate them to pursue research careers in the first place often stem from observations about gaps between the world as we wish it to be and the world as it is, accompanied by a deep curiosity about how it might be made different. Researchers view their profession as providing important information about what is, what could be, and how to get there. However, if research is to inform social change, we must first change the way in which research is done.
Engaging the Intersection of Housing and Health offers case studies of research that is interdisciplinary, stakeholder-engaged and intentionally designed for “translation” into practice. There are numerous ways in which housing and health are intertwined. This intertwining—which is the focus of this volume—is lived daily by the children whose asthma is exacerbated by mold in their homes, the adults whose mental illness increases their risk for homelessness and whose homelessness worsens their mental and physical health, the seniors whose home environment enhances their risk of falls, and the families who must choose between paying for housing and paying for healthcare.
All manner of medical practitioners have had their scruples dissected ad infinitum. In spite of the attention paid to medical ethics and bioethics, little has been paid to the ethical roles and responsibilities of those who are ultimately in charge of hospital governance: hospital trustees.
Deriving from a Hastings Center research project involving meetings with a national task force of experts and extensive interviews with 98 nonprofit hospital trustees and CEOs over a two-year period, The Ethics of Hospital Trustees shows that the decisions made by these often overlooked members of the health community do raise important ethical issues, and that ethical dimensions of trustee service should be more explicitly recognized and discussed.
Practical as well as theoretical, The Ethics of Hospital Trustees uncovers four basic principles: 1. Fidelity to mission; 2. Service to patients; 3. Service to the community; and 4. Institutional stewardship. In delineating the extremely important functions of hospital trustees, from patient safety to financial responsibility, the contributors outline not only how hospital trustees do perform—they give a fresh understanding to how they should perform as well.
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 years
— Pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical treatment strategies
— New clinical data on drug combinations and side effects
— Up-to-date statistics for mortality, reproduction, violent behavior, divorce, and suicide
This volume explores ethical issues specific to working with deaf clients, particularly matters of confidentiality, managing multiple relationships, and the clinician’s competency to provide services, particularly in communicating with and understanding deaf people. Led by editor Virginia Gutman, a unique assembly of respected mental health professionals share their experiences and knowledge in working with deaf clients.
Irene Leigh commences Ethics in Mental Health and Deafness with her varied experiences as a deaf mental health practitioner, and Gutman follows with insights on ethics in the “small world” of the Deaf community. William McCrone discusses the law and ethics, and Patrick Brice considers ethical issues regarding deaf children, adolescents, and their families. In contrast, Janet Pray addresses concerns about deaf and hard of hearing older clients.
Minority deaf populations pose additional ethical aspects, which are detailed by Carolyn Corbett. Kathleen Peoples explores the challenges of training professionals in mental health services specifically for deaf clients. Closely related to these topics is the influence of interpreters with deaf clients in mental health settings, which Lynnette Taylor thoroughly treats. Ethics and Mental Health in Deafness also features a chapter on genetic counseling and testing for deafness by Kathleen Arnos. The final section, written by Robert Pollard, examines ethical conduct in research with deaf people, a fitting conclusion to a volume that will become required reading for all professionals and students in this discipline.
"This is about a society of isolates who all communicate with one another from terminal sites. This is about being disembodied, distanced, distinct, and that sort of boundary-thing. It is not about being present. It is not about being there. It is not about a shared history, or a shared meal, or a shared story, or any kind of mutuality. It is about contact between virtual strangers. . . . It happens when you feel that you are so alone that you need anybody to talk to—anybody at all—because you believe that your connections have failed you. This kind of connection leaves you cold and dead inside, because it lacks history and a language of belonging."
In this daring, postmodern autobiography, S. Paige Baty recounts her search for love and community on the Internet. Taking Jack Kerouac's On the Road as a point of departure, Baty describes both an actual road trip to meet the object of an e-mail romance and the cyber-search for connection that draws so many people into the matrix of the Internet. Writing in a bold, experimental style that freely mixes e-mails, poems, fragments of quotations, and puns into expository text, she convincingly links e-mail trouble with "female trouble" in the displacement of embodied love and accountable human relationships to opaque screens and alienated identities. Her book stands as a vivid feminist critique of our culture's love affair with technology and its dehumanizing effect on personal relationships.
Women have long needed a book devoted to their unique issues with diabetes. This up-to-date and practical guide advocates simple lifestyle changes that can help women reduce their risk of getting diabetes or, if already diagnosed, prevent the disease’s most serious complications. Every Woman’s Guide to Diabetes translates the latest findings from diabetes research into proven strategies busy women can use to stay healthy and gain control over an often overwhelming disease. The authors discuss the nature of diabetes, helping readers through the complex medical decisions involved in diabetes treatment. They highlight strategies to decrease the emotional stress and social isolation that often accompany diagnosis, and offer everyday techniques for managing blood sugar.
Key features include:
— Unique aspects of diabetes for women throughout the life cycle
— Timetable of recommended tests and check-ups
— Guide to medications with common dosages
— Charts to help organize diabetes-care tasks and supplies
— Time-management tips for better disease regulation
— Guide to contraceptives available to women with diabetes
— Review of issues critical to women before, during, and following pregnancy
— Advice for overcoming barriers to weight loss and exercise
— Plan for intelligent diet trade-offs while still enjoying meals
— Practical tips for planning exercise
— Strategies to avoid diabetes “burn-out”
Written by two physicians (one of whom is a woman living with diabetes) and an experienced medical writer, Every Woman’s Guide to Diabetes recognizes the power that women have in their households to effect lifestyle changes that will benefit themselves and loved ones, including their mothers, daughters, sisters, and partners. This power can reduce the toll of the diabetes epidemic.
Since the 1950s, the death rate from heart attacks has plunged from 35 percent to about 5 percent—and fatalistic attitudes toward this disease and many others have faded into history. Much of the improved survival and change in attitudes can be traced to the work of Eugene Braunwald, MD. In the 1960s, he proved that myocardial infarction was not a “bolt from the blue” but a dynamic process that plays out over hours and thus could be altered by treatment. By redirecting cardiology from passive, risk-averse observation to active intervention, he helped transform not just his own field but the culture of American medicine.
Braunwald’s personal story demonstrates how the forces of history affected the generation of researchers responsible for so many medical advances in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1938 Nazi occupiers forced his family to flee Vienna for Brooklyn. Because of Jewish quotas in medical schools, he was the last person admitted to his class, but went on to graduate number one. When the Doctor Draft threatened to interrupt his medical training during the Korean War, he joined the National Institutes of Health instead of the Navy, and there he began the research that made him the most influential cardiologist of his time.
In Eugene Braunwald and the Rise of Modern Medicine, Thomas H. Lee offers insights that only authoritative firsthand interviews can provide, to bring us closer to this iconic figure in modern medicine.
Expected Miracles explores the world of surgeons from their own perspective—how they perceive themselves, their work, colleagues, and communities. Recognizing that surgery is an art, a craft, a science, and a business, Joan Cassell offers, through poignant, painful, and thrilling descriptions, a vivid portrayal of the culture of surgery.
Cassell has entered a realm where laypersons are usually horizontal, naked, and anesthetized. Using the central metaphor of the surgical "miracle," she illuminates the drama of the operating room, where surgeons and patients alike expect heroic performance. She takes us backstage to overhear conversations about patients, families, and colleagues, observe operations, eavesdrop on gossip about surgeons’ performances, and examine the values, behavior, and misbehavior of surgeons at work.
Said one Chief of Surgery, "You couldn’t have a good surgeon who didn’t believe in the concept of the Hero." Following this lead, Cassell explores the heroic temperament of those who perform surgical "miracles" and finds that the demands and pressures of surgical practice require traits that in other fields, or in personal interactions, are often regarded as undesirable. She observes, "surgeons must tread a fine line between courage and recklessness, confidence and hubris, a positive attitude and a magical one." This delicate balance and frequent imbalance is portrayed through several character sketches. She contrasts the caring attention and technical mastery of The Exemplary Surgeon with the theatrical posturing of The Prima Donna and the slick showiness and questionable morals of The Sleazy Surgeon.
She also identifies the attributes that surgeons admire in each other. They believe that only peers can really evaluate each other, and, while doctors might not speak negatively about colleagues in public, the community of surgeons exerts considerable pressure on its members to perform competently.
Unlike "doctor-bashing" chronicles, Expected Miracles seeks to understand the charismatic authority of surgeons, its instability, and its price-to surgeons and to patients.
For those who undergo it, infertility treatment is costly, time-consuming, invasive, and emotionally and physically arduous, yet technology remains the focus of most public discussion of the topic. Drawing on concepts from medical ethics, feminist theory, and Roman Catholic social teaching, Maura A. Ryan analyzes the economic, ethical, theological, and political dimensions of assisted reproduction.
Taking seriously the experience of infertility as a crisis of the self, the spirit, and the body, Ryan argues for the place of reproductive technologies within a temperate, affordable, sustainable, and just health care system. She contends that only by ceasing to treat assisted reproduction as a consumer product can meaningful questions about medical appropriateness and social responsibility be raised. She places infertility treatments within broader commitments to the common good, thereby understanding reproductive rights as an inherently social, rather than individual, issue. Arguing for some limits on access to reproductive technology, Ryan considers ways to assess the importance of assisted reproduction against other social and medical prerogatives and where to draw the line in promoting fertility. Finally, Ryan articulates the need for a compassionate spirituality within faith communities that will nurture those who are infertile.
In Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, John M. Riddle showed, through extraordinary scholarly sleuthing, that women from ancient Egyptian times to the fifteenth century had relied on an extensive pharmacopoeia of herbal abortifacients and contraceptives to regulate fertility. In Eve’s Herbs, Riddle explores a new question: If women once had access to effective means of birth control, why was this knowledge lost to them in modern times?
Beginning with the testimony of a young woman brought before the Inquisition in France in 1320, Riddle asks what women knew about regulating fertility with herbs and shows how the new intellectual, religious, and legal climate of the early modern period tended to cast suspicion on women who employed “secret knowledge” to terminate or prevent pregnancy. Knowledge of the menstrual-regulating qualities of rue, pennyroyal, and other herbs was widespread through succeeding centuries among herbalists, apothecaries, doctors, and laywomen themselves, even as theologians and legal scholars began advancing the idea that the fetus was fully human from the moment of conception.
Drawing on previously unavailable material, Riddle reaches a startling conclusion: while it did not persist in a form that was available to most women, ancient knowledge about herbs was not lost in modern times but survived in coded form. Persecuted as “witchcraft” in centuries past and prosecuted as a crime in our own time, the control of fertility by “Eve’s herbs” has been practiced by Western women since ancient times.
“Will the future confront us with human GMOs? Greely provocatively declares yes, and, while clearly explaining the science, spells out the ethical, political, and practical ramifications.”—Paul Berg, Nobel Laureate and recipient of the National Medal of Science
Within twenty, maybe forty, years most people in developed countries will stop having sex for the purpose of reproduction. Instead, prospective parents will be told as much as they wish to know about the genetic makeup of dozens of embryos, and they will pick one or two for implantation, gestation, and birth. And it will be safe, lawful, and free. In this work of prophetic scholarship, Henry T. Greely explains the revolutionary biological technologies that make this future a seeming inevitability and sets out the deep ethical and legal challenges humanity faces as a result.
“Readers looking for a more in-depth analysis of human genome modifications and reproductive technologies and their legal and ethical implications should strongly consider picking up Greely’s The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction… [It has] the potential to empower readers to make informed decisions about the implementation of advancements in genetics technologies.”
—Dov Greenbaum, Science
“[Greely] provides an extraordinarily sophisticated analysis of the practical, political, legal, and ethical implications of the new world of human reproduction. His book is a model of highly informed, rigorous, thought-provoking speculation about an immensely important topic.”
—Glenn C. Altschuler, Psychology Today
In 1859 a Hungarian obstetrician named Ignaz Semmelweis, reflecting on his years as resident in the Vienna maternity clinic, wrote a graphic account of his attempt to diagnose and eliminate the then epidemic scourge of childbed fever. The resulting Etiology triggered an immediate and international squall of protest from Semmelweis’s colleagues; today it is recognized as a pioneering classic of medical history. Now, for the first time in many years, Codell Carter makes that classic available to the English-speaking reader in this vivid translation of the 1861 original, augmented by footnotes and an explanatory introduction. For students and scholars of medical history and philosophy, obstetrics and women’s studies, the accessibility of this moving and revolutionary work, important both as an historical document and as a groundbreaking precursor of modern medical theory, is long overdue.
Semmelweis’s exposure to the childbed fever was concurrent with his appointment to the Vienna maternity hospital in 1846. Like many similar hospitals and clinics in the major cities of nineteenth-century Europe and America, where death rates from the illness sometimes climbed as high as 40 percent of admitted patients, the Viennese wards were ravaged by the fever. Intensely troubled by the tragic and baffling loss of so many young mothers, Semmelweis sought answers. The Etiology was testimony to his success. Based on overwhelming personal evidence, it constituted a classic description of a disease, its causes, and its prevention. It also allowed a necessary response to the obstetrician’s already vocal, rabid, and perhaps predictable critics. For Semmelweis’s central thesis was a startling one - the fever, he correctly surmised, was caused not by epidemic or endemic influences but by unsterilized and thus often contaminated hands of the attending physicians themselves.
Carter’s translation of this radical work, judiciously abridged and extensively footnoted, captures all the drama and impassioned conviction of the original. Complementing this translation is a lucid introduction that places Semmelweis’s Etiology in historical perspective and clarifies its contemporary value. That value, Carter argues, is considerable. Important as a model of clinical analysis and as a chronicle of early nineteenth-century obstetrical practices, the Etiology is also a revolutionary polemic in its innovative doctrine of antisepsis and in its unique etiological explanation of disease. As such its recognition and reclamation allows a crucial understanding, one that clarifies the roots and theory of modern medicine and ultimately redeems and important, resolute, pathfinder.
The first medical book published in the American colonies
The English Physician is a humble vest-pocket-sized 94-page medical guide for the common person, by the prolific herbalist and author Nicholas Culpeper. It was a staple in 17th-century England, as it was short, written in accessible prose, and inexpensive; and perhaps as attractive, it took a decidedly skeptical view of "official" medicine, relying instead on popular remedies. Culpeper’s philosophy was to teach the common folk to minister to themselves by providing them with the tools and knowledge for self-help.
Published in Boston in 1708 by Nicholas Boone, the American version of The English Physician was widely cited and used at the time. Today only five copies are known to exist. The rarity of this vade mecum of colonial America is wrapped in mystery: Who really wrote this book and when, where, and how did it originate?
The editor illuminates these mysteries while adding an informative historical introduction on the state of medical knowledge and practice at the time, exploring Culpeper’s position among competing medical writers, and glossing the medical and botanical terms, providing contemporary equivalents. Modern readers will discover the meaning behind the strangely named brews and concoctions of the 17th century and will learn how this Boston printing literally transformed the American landscape with herbs brought from the British colonists’ homeland.
Choy conducted extensive interviews with Filipino nurses in New York City and spoke with leading Filipino nurses across the United States. She combines their perspectives with various others—including those of Philippine and American government and health officials—to demonstrate how the desire of Filipino nurses to migrate abroad cannot be reduced to economic logic, but must instead be understood as a fundamentally transnational process. She argues that the origins of Filipino nurse migrations do not lie in the Philippines' independence in 1946 or the relaxation of U.S. immigration rules in 1965, but rather in the creation of an Americanized hospital training system during the period of early-twentieth-century colonial rule. Choy challenges celebratory narratives regarding professional migrants’ mobility by analyzing the scapegoating of Filipino nurses during difficult political times, the absence of professional solidarity between Filipino and American nurses, and the exploitation of foreign-trained nurses through temporary work visas. She shows how the culture of American imperialism persists today, continuing to shape the reception of Filipino nurses in the United States.
Although food-production systems for the world's rural poor typically have had devastating effects on the planet's wealth of genes, species, and ecosystems, that need not be the case in the future. In Ecoagriculture, two of the world's leading experts on conservation and development examine the idea that agricultural landscapes can be designed more creatively to take the needs of human populations into account while also protecting, or even enhancing, biodiversity. They present a thorough overview of the innovative concept of "ecoagriculture" - the management of landscapes for both the production of food and the conservation of wild biodiversity. The book:
Ecoagriculture explores new approaches to agricultural production that complement natural environments, enhance ecosystem function, and improve rural livelihoods. It features a wealth of real-world case studies that demonstrate the applicability of the ideas discussed and how the principles can be applied, and is an important new work for policymakers, students, researchers, and anyone concerned with conserving biodiversity while sustaining human populations.
Engineering the Farm offers a wide-ranging examination of the social and ethical issues surrounding the production and consumption of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), with leading thinkers and activists taking a broad theoretical approach to the subject. Topics covered include:
Contributors argue that the scope, scale, and size of the present venture in crop modification is so vast and intensive that a thoroughgoing review of agricultural biotechnology must consider its global, moral, cultural, and ecological impacts as well as its effects on individual consumers. Throughout, they argue that more research is needed on genetically modified food and that consumers are entitled to specific information about how food products have been developed.
Despite its increasing role in worldwide food production, little has been written about the broader social and ethical implications of GMOs. Engineering the Farm offers a unique approach to the subject for academics, activists, and policymakers involved with questions of environmental policy, ethics, agriculture, environmental health, and related fields.
When lifelong friends Lucy D. Rosenfeld and Marina Harrison set off on their outings in the region, they are always on the lookout for the gifts that nature offers. Exploring Nature’s Bounty, their ninth collaboration, invites us to share the rich array of agricultural delights they’ve discovered within a two-hour radius of New York City—from beautiful vineyards to the latest in hydroponic greenhouses to peach-filled orchards to community farms and historic sites.
The places chosen all welcome visitors who will see first hand the art of agriculture, pick their own produce, help out on the farm, or simply enjoy being outdoors so close to the city. Many of them are off-the-beaten-track locations where readers and their families can walk among rows of grapes, cornstalks, apple trees, and so much more. The sites range from traditional fruit orchards to greenhouses filled with water-grown tomatoes and basil to neatly ordered herb gardens in historic settings. Local vineyards make wineries fun and glamorous places to visit, whether on the North Fork of Long Island or in the Hudson Valley. Some venues focus on crop preservation—the American chestnut, for example—while others introduce readers to honey making and maple sugaring. Those interested in taking classes or seeing demonstrations will find places to do just that, and many activities are geared toward children, from corn mazes to hayrides to pumpkin picking.
Rosenfeld and Harrison provide a list of festivals featuring local produce and, at the end of the book, a guide to choosing an outing that will best fit readers, their families, and their taste buds. Directions are provided in each write-up as well as information on schedules, guided tours, and walks within many of the sites.
Exploring Nature’s Bounty focuses on the natural, the organic, the sustainable, and the close-at-hand. By avoiding places overrun with commercialism, it helps readers create their own adventures, enjoy time with family and friends, and connect to the farms that nourish us all.
More than forty years after the first signs of a new era in environmental thinking, landscape architects and the public at large continue to engage in ethical, practical, and metaphysical debates on what environmentalism really is and what it should be. This exchange of ideas has been characterized more by passion than by clarity, with definitive and persuasive answers hard to come by.
The papers presented in this volume range from proposals for new design approaches, historical analysis of the relationship between the practice of landscape architecture and environmentalism, to the theories of early practitioners of landscape architecture imbued by an environmentalist outlook.
The issues above are addressed through topics as eclectic as the design of American zoos, the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority, road design and maintenance in Texas, and criticism of relationships between the words and works of select landscape architects. This volume provides a fresh approach to encounters between environmentalism and landscape architecture by reframing the issues through self-reflection instead of strategic debate.
The Essential Ian McHarg brings together a series of short essays that reveal the full range of Ian McHarg's thoughts on design and nature. Adapted from the comprehensive book of his work, To Heal the Earth, these carefully selected essays provide an ideal reader for undergraduate and graduate students in planning and landscape architecture.
Professionals, faculty, and students are aware of the pressing need to integrate ecological principles into environmental design and planning education, but few materials exist to facilitate that development.
Ecology and Design addresses that shortcoming by articulating priorities and approaches for incorporating ecological principles in the teaching of landscape design and planning. The book explains why landscape architecture and design and planning faculty should include ecology as a standard part of their courses and curricula, provides insights on how that can be done, and offers models from successful programs. The book:
In addition to the editors, contributors include Carolyn Adams, Jack Ahern, Richard T. T. Forman, Michael Hough, James Karr, Joan Iverson Nassauer, David Orr, Kathy Poole, H. Ronald Pulliam, Anne Whiston Spirn, Sandra Steingraber, Carl Steinitz, Ken Tamminga, and William Wenk. Ecology and Design represents an important guidepost and source of ideas for faculty, students, and professionals in landscape architecture, urban design, planning and architecture, landscape ecology, conservation biology and restoration ecology, civil and environmental engineering, and related fields.
In Every Root an Anchor, writer and arborist R. Bruce Allison celebrates Wisconsin's most significant, unusual, and historic trees. More than one hundred tales introduce us to trees across the state, some remarkable for their size or age, others for their intriguing histories. From magnificent elms to beloved pines to Frank Lloyd Wright's oaks, these trees are woven into our history, contributing to our sense of place. They are anchors for time-honored customs, manifestations of our ideals, and reminders of our lives' most significant events.
For this updated edition, Allison revisits the trees' histories and tells us which of these unique landmarks are still standing. He sets forth an environmental message as well, reminding us to recognize our connectedness to trees and to manage our tree resources wisely. As early Wisconsin conservationist Increase Lapham said, "Tree histories increase our love of home and improve our hearts. They deserve to be told and remembered."
Eastern Old-Growth Forests is the first book devoted exclusively to old growth throughout the East. Authoritative essays from leading experts examine the ecology and characteristics of eastern old growth, explore its history and value -- both ecological and cultural -- and make recommendations for its preservation.
The book provides a thorough overview of the importance of old growth in the East including its extent, qualities, and role in wildlands restoration. It will serve a vital role in furthering preservation efforts by making eastern old-growth issues better known and understood.
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