Marsupials are nearly synonymous with Australia. Although one of these enigmatic pouched mammals—the opossum—inhabits the United States and another 80 or so thrive in South America, some 220 species are confined to the Australasian region. In Australia, marsupials are the most diverse and dominant indigenous species, from the wallaby and the wombat to the kangaroo and koala.
The extraordinary story of these fascinating animals, A Fragile Balance provides the most up-to-date information on marsupials without losing sight of the unique set of circumstances that led them to prevalence Down Under. Covering all marsupial species in Australia, the book uses an evolutionary framework to interpret the marsupial’s biological traits. Each species account includes a basic biological description, a range map, and a measure of conservation status. The accounts are bounded by general chapters on biology, natural history, cultural history, and conservation. A Fragile Balance is the first book to emphasize interactions between and among marsupials, as well as between humans and marsupials.
Combining the expertise of renowned biologist Christopher Dickman with the artistic talents of illustrator Rosemary Woodford Ganf, A Fragile Balance will be a much celebrated reference for mammalogists worldwide, as well as for readers interested in Australian natural and cultural history.
The woolly spider monkey, or muriqui, is one of the most threatened primate species in the world. Because of deforestation in their natural habitat—the Atlantic coastal forests of southeastern Brazil—the muriquis are confined to less than 3 percent of their original range. As of 1987, there were only a dozen forest fragments known to support a total muriqui population of about 500. As of 1998, at least 20 forests are known to support at least 1,000 muriquis. This book traces the natural history of the muriqui from its scientific discovery in 1806 to its current, highly endangered status.
Karen Strier provides a case study of this scientifically important primate species by balancing field research and ecological issues. Through her accessible presentation, readers gain a broad understanding of primate behavior and tropical conservation.
Vegan, low fat, low carb, slow carb: Every diet seems to promise a one-size-fits-all solution to health. But they ignore the diversity of human genes and how they interact with what we eat.
In Food, Genes, and Culture, renowned ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan shows why the perfect diet for one person could be disastrous for another. If your ancestors were herders in Northern Europe, milk might well provide you with important nutrients, whereas if you’re Native American, you have a higher likelihood of lactose intolerance. If your roots lie in the Greek islands, the acclaimed Mediterranean diet might save your heart; if not, all that olive oil could just give you stomach cramps.
Nabhan traces food traditions around the world, from Bali to Mexico, uncovering the links between ancestry and individual responses to food. The implications go well beyond personal taste. Today’s widespread mismatch between diet and genes is leading to serious health conditions, including a dramatic growth over the last 50 years in auto-immune and inflammatory diseases.
Readers will not only learn why diabetes is running rampant among indigenous peoples and heart disease has risen among those of northern European descent, but may find the path to their own perfect diet.
Drawing extensively on interviews with adults with intersex conditions, parents, and physicians, Karkazis moves beyond the heated rhetoric to reveal the complex reality of how intersexuality is understood, treated, and experienced today. As she unravels the historical, technological, social, and political forces that have culminated in debates surrounding intersexuality, Karkazis exposes the contentious disagreements among theorists, physicians, intersex adults, activists, and parents—and all that those debates imply about gender and the changing landscape of intersex management. She argues that by viewing intersexuality exclusively through a narrow medical lens we avoid much more difficult questions. Do gender atypical bodies require treatment? Should physicians intervene to control the “sex” of the body? As this illuminating book reveals, debates over treatment for intersexuality force reassessment of the seemingly natural connections between gender, biology, and the body.
In a remarkable synthesis of the research of the last two decades, a leading developmental neuroscientist provides psychologists with a sophisticated introduction to the brain—the system that underpins the functions that they study.
In clear terms, with ample illustrations, Joan Stiles explains the complexities of genetic variation and transcription, and the variable paths of neural development, from embryology through early childhood. She describes early developmental processes from gene expression to physiology to behavior. Sections on clinical correlations show the consequences for later physiological, neurological, or psychological disturbances in neural development.
As Stiles shows, brain development is far more complex and dynamic than is often assumed in debates about nature vs. nurture, nativism vs. cultural learning. Inherited and experienced factors interact constantly in an ever-changing organism. The key question is, what developmental processes give rise to particular structures or mechanisms?
A landmark of synthesis and interdisciplinary illumination, The Fundamentals of Brain Development will enrich discussion of developmental processes and more rigorously define the terms that are central to psychological debates.
Here is a brief but comprehensive tour of the physiology of vision, guided by one of the grand masters of the discipline. Offering first a solid grounding in structure and function, the book emphasizes those areas that the author considers to be of most significance in current research. Much attention is given to the role of vision in circadian timekeeping, the development of the visual system, the effect of aging on the eye, and the provocative questions of perception and illusion.
An eminently readable text, Focus on Vision will more than satisfy the needs of students in ophthalmology, optometry, physiological optics, biology, psychology, and art. It is fully illustrated and contains lists of references and further reading. The questions at the end of each chapter may be used to test understanding or simply to excite discussion.
In 1645 the Japanese samurai Musashi Miamoto wrote A Book of Five Rings, which described the attitudes necessary for individual success. Though he was a swordsman, his book was not limited to combat but addressed the much broader question of how to achieve excellence in life through study, discipline, and planning. It is still avidly read in Japan today. Arthur Kornberg’s book is a modern-day Book of Five Rings that replaces the medium of swordsmanship with that of biochemistry, particularly enzymology. As Kornberg describes his successive research problems, the challenges they presented, and the ultimate accomplishments that resulted, he provides us with a primer in the strategies needed to do scientific work of great significance. Moreover, these strategies are played out in the context of solving some of the great biochemical problems of the twentieth century.
The ability to manipulate and alter DNA fired a revolution that forever changed the nature of biology. Arthur Kornberg is a primary architect of that revolution, arguably one of the two or three most important biologists of this time. Prior to Kornberg, genetic information and later DNA were imbued by biologists with an almost vitalistic aura. Kornberg demonstrated that DNA is a molecule synthesized by enzymes, like all other chemical constituents of the cell. More important, he trained a school of scientists who focused on and discovered many of the enzymatic activities that act on DNA. It is these enzymes in particular that allow modern “genetic engineering.”
For the Love of Enzymes does not describe a single lucky or hard-won accomplishment. Rather, it is the story of thirty years of decisive campaigns, nearly all of which led to insights of major significance. In relating his story, Kornberg never avoids the difficult question of “why”: why he felt classical nutritional studies had reached a plateau, why he turned to enzymology as a discipline in which the important answers would be found, and why he believes the study of enzymes will grow ever more important as we face the new scientific frontier of brain function.
This book will challenge students of biology and chemistry at all levels who want to do important work rather than simply follow popular trends. It will also delight and inform readers who wish to understand how “real” science is done, and to learn of the values that guide one of our greatest researchers.
The Fats of Life delineates the importance of essential fatty acids, with a focus on distinctions between omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acid variants. The chemical and biochemical characteristics of these fatty acids and their metabolism to a vast array of potent bioactive messengers are described in the context of their potential effects on general health and impact on various diseases and neurological disorders. Glen D. Lawrence addresses in detail the capacity for polyunsaturated fatty acids to influence asthma, atherosclerosis, heart disease, inflammation, cancer, and immunity. Lawrence makes clear that our understanding of the biochemical and physiological effects of dietary fats has advanced tremendously as a result of careful research, but he also stresses that this knowledge has not easily translated into sound dietary recommendations.
Winner of the Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize
A new history uncovers the crucial role women played in the great transformations of medical science and health care that accompanied the Italian Renaissance.
In Renaissance Italy women played a more central role in providing health care than historians have thus far acknowledged. Women from all walks of life—from household caregivers and nurses to nuns working as apothecaries—drove the Italian medical economy. In convent pharmacies, pox hospitals, girls’ shelters, and homes, women were practitioners and purveyors of knowledge about health and healing, making significant contributions to early modern medicine.
Sharon Strocchia offers a wealth of new evidence about how illness was diagnosed and treated, whether by noblewomen living at court or poor nurses living in hospitals. She finds that women expanded on their roles as health care providers by participating in empirical work and the development of scientific knowledge. Nuns, in particular, were among the most prominent manufacturers and vendors of pharmaceutical products. Their experiments with materials and techniques added greatly to the era’s understanding of medical care. Thanks to their excellence in medicine urban Italian women had greater access to commerce than perhaps any other women in Europe.
Forgotten Healers provides a more accurate picture of the pursuit of health in Renaissance Italy. More broadly, by emphasizing that the frontlines of medical care are often found in the household and other spaces thought of as female, Strocchia encourages us to rethink the history of medicine.
First, Do No Harm shows how health care professionals, with the best intentions of providing excellent, holistic health care, can nonetheless perpetuate violence against vulnerable patients. The essays investigate the need to rethink contemporary healthcare practices in ways that can bring the art and science of medicine back into sorely needed balance.
These ground-breaking studies by noted scholars question commonly held assumptions in contemporary healthcare that underlie oppressive power dynamics and even violence for patients and their families. The contributors discuss such topics as women and violence, life-support technologies, and healthcare professionals’ own experiences as patients. First, Do No Harm opens the discourse for reaching new understandings, from reassessing the meaning of "quality of life" to questioning the appropriateness of the very language used by healthcare professionals. It will be welcomed by healthcare workers and by scholars in nursing, medicine, and the allied health sciences.
Why would a successful physician who has undergone seven years of rigorous medical training take the trouble to seek out and learn to practice alternative methods of healing such as homeopathy and Chinese medicine? From Doctor to Healer answers this question as it traces the transformational journeys of physicians who move across the philosophical spectrum of American medicine from doctor to healer. Robbie Davis-Floyd and Gloria St. John conducted extensive interviews to discover how and why physicians make the move to alternative medicine, what sparks this shift, and what beliefs they abandon or embrace in the process.
After outlining the basic models of American health care-the technocratic, humanistic, and holistic-the authors follow the thoughts and experiences of forty physicians as they expand their horizons in order to offer effective patient care. The book focuses on the radical shift from one end of the spectrum to the other-from the technocratic approach to holism-made by most of the interviewees. Because many American physicians find such a drastic change too threatening, the authors also address the less radical transition to humanism-a movement toward compassionate care arising from within the medical system.Flatlined lifts the veil of secrecy on twenty-first century health care and delves into the realities of good people caught in a bad medical system. Dr. Guy L. Clifton, a practitioner as well as a policy advocate, reveals first-hand accounts of needless tragedy, such as the young man who died after a car wreck for lack of a bed in a qualified hospital and the surgeon who was dejected by the scarcity of resources needed to enable him to perform heart surgery on an uninsured man.
Arguing that a lack of coordinated care and quality medical practice benchmarks result in high levels of redundancy and ineffectiveness, Clifton proposes that the key to reducing health care costs, improving quality, and financially protecting the uninsured, is to reduce wastefulness, and offers a solution for achieving success.
Flatlined sounds the warning call: By 2018 Medicare and Medicaid will consume about one-third of the federal budget. American businesses now pay three times as much of their payroll for health care as global competitors, expected to worsen as health care grows at twice the rate of the U.S. economy. Based on his years of experience in policy and medicine, Clifton offers an attainable solution through the development of an American Medical Quality System.
Americans are understandably concerned about the runaway costs of medical care and the fact that one citizen out of seven is without health insurance coverage. Solving these problems is a top priority for the Clinton administration, but as Victor Fuchs shows, the task is enormously complex. In this book Fuchs, America's foremost health economist, provides the reader with the necessary concepts, facts, and analyses to comprehend the complicated issues of health policy. He shows why health care reform that benefits society as a whole will unavoidably burden certain individuals and groups.
Fuchs addresses such central questions as cost containment, managed competition, technology assessment, poverty and health, children's health, and national health insurance. The future of U.S. health policy, he argues, is tightly linked to three basic questions; First, how can we disengage health insurance from employment? Second, how can we tame technological change in health care? And finally how can we cope with the runaway medical costs of an aging society?
Medical care prices in the United States are not only the most expensive in the world, but there are wide variations in what physicians are paid. Doctors at the frontlines of medical care who manage complex conditions argue that they receive disproportionately lower fees than physicians performing services such as minor surgeries and endoscopies. Fixing Medical Prices goes to the heart of the U.S. medical pricing process: to a largely unknown yet influential committee of medical organizations affiliated with the American Medical Association that advises Medicare. Medicare’s ready acceptance of this committee’s recommendations typically sets off a chain reaction across the entire American health care system.
For decades, the U.S. policymaking structure for pricing has reflected the influence of physician organizations. What Miriam Laugesen’s rich analysis shows is how these organizations navigate the arcane and complex work of this advisory committee. Contradicting the story of a profession in political decline, Fixing Medical Prices demonstrates that the power of physician organizations has simply become more subtle.
Laugesen’s investigation into the exorbitant cost of American medical care will be of interest to those who follow the politics of health care policy, the influence of interest groups on rate setting, and the medical profession’s past and future role in our health care system.
Conventional wisdom holds that programs for the poor are vulnerable to instability and retrenchment. Medicaid, however, has grown into the nation’s largest intergovernmental grant program, accounting for nearly half of all federal funding to state and local governments. Medicaid’s generous open-ended federal matching grants have given governors a powerful incentive to mobilize on behalf of its maintenance and expansion, using methods ranging from lobbying and negotiation to creative financing mechanisms and waivers to maximize federal financial assistance. Perceiving federal retrenchment efforts as a threat to states’ finances, governors, through the powerful National Governors’ Association, have repeatedly worked together in bipartisan fashion to defend the program against cutbacks.
Financing Medicaidengagingly intertwines theory, historical narrative, and case studies, drawing on sources including archival materials from the National Governors’ Association and gubernatorial and presidential libraries, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services data, the Congressional Record, and interviews.
"In some ways disease does not exist until we have agreed that it does, by perceiving, naming, and responding to it, " writes Charles E. Rosenberg in his introduction to this stimulating set of essays. Disease is both a biological event and a social phenomenon. Patient, doctor, family, and social institutions—including employers, government, and insurance companies—all find ways to frame the biological event in terms that make sense to them and serve their own ends.
Many diseases discussed here—endstage renal disease, rheumatic fever, parasitic infectious diseases, coronary thrombosis—came to be defined, redefined, and renamed over the course of several centuries. As these essays show, the concept of disease has also been used to frame culturally resonant behaviors: suicide, homosexuality, anorexia nervosa, chronic fatigue syndrome. Disease is also framed by public policy, as the cases of industrial disability and of forensic psychiatry demonstrate. Medical institutions, as managers of people with disease, come to have vested interests in diagnoses, as the histories of facilities to treat tuberculosis or epilepsy reveal. Ultimately, the existence and conquest of disease serves to frame a society's sense of its own "healthiness" and to give direction to social reforms.
The contributors include Steven J. Peitzman, Peter C. English, John Farley, Christopher Lawrence, Michael MacDonald, Bert Hansen, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Robert A. Aronowitz, Gerald Markowitz, David Rosner, Janet A. Tighe, Barbara Bates, Ellen Dwyer, John M. Eyler, and Elizabeth Fee. For any student of disease and society, this book is essential, compelling reading.
After an interview in Newsweek about his book Spirituality in Patient Care and his research in religion and health, Dr. Harold Koenig became the international voice on spirituality, health, and aging. In this book, Faith in the Future, he is joined by two other experts on aging and human development. They present a compelling look at one of the most severe issues in today’s society: health care in America.
How will we provide quality healthcare to older adults needing it during the next thirty to fifty years? Who will provide this care? How will it be funded? How can we establish systems of care now to be in place as demographic and health-related economic pressures mount?
Alongside the sobering reality of our country’s challenges, there are reasons for optimism. Innovative programs created and maintained by volunteers and religious congregations are emerging as pivotal factors in meeting healthcare needs. Summarizing decades of scientific research and providing numerous inspirational examples and role models, the authors present practical steps that individuals and institutions may emulate for putting faith into action.
<Fighting Toxics is a step-by-step guide illustrating how to investigate the toxic hazards that may exist in your community, how to determine the risks they pose to your health, and how to launch an effective campaign to eliminate them.
In the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, New York City was struck like no other. By the early nineties, it was struggling with more known cases than the next forty most infected cities, including San Francisco, combined.
Fighting for Our Lives is the first comprehensive social history of New York's AIDS community-a diverse array of people that included not only gay men, but also African Americans, Haitians, Latinos, intravenous drug users, substance abuse professionals, elite supporters, and researchers. Looking back over twenty-five years, Susan Chambré focuses on the ways that these disparate groups formed networks of people and organizations that-both together and separately-supported persons with AIDS, reduced transmission, funded research, and in the process, gave a face to an epidemic that for many years, whether because of indifference, homophobia, or inefficiency, received little attention from government or health care professionals.
Beyond the limits of New York City, and even AIDS, this case study also shows how any epidemic provides a context for observing how societies respond to events that expose the inadequacies of their existing social and institutional arrangements. By drawing attention to the major faults of New York's (and America's) response to a major social and health crisis at the end of the twentieth century, the book urges more effective and sensitive actions-both governmental and civil-in the future.
So many women who do everything right to stay healthy still wind up with breast cancer, heart disease, or osteoporosis. In The Fragile Wisdom, Grazyna Jasienska provides an evolutionary perspective on the puzzle of why disease prevention among women is so frustratingly difficult. Modern women, she shows, are the unlucky victims of their own bodies’ conflict of interest between reproductive fitness and life-long health.
The crux of the problem is that women’s physiology has evolved to facilitate reproduction, not to reduce disease risk. Any trait—no matter how detrimental to health in the post-reproductive period—is more likely to be preserved in the next generation if it increases the chance of giving birth to offspring who will themselves survive to reproductive age. To take just one example, genes that produce high levels of estrogen are a boon to fertility, even as they raise the risk of breast cancer in mothers and their daughters.
Jasienska argues that a mismatch between modern lifestyles and the Stone Age physiology that evolution has bequeathed to every woman exacerbates health problems. She looks at women’s mechanisms for coping with genetic inheritance and at the impact of environment on health. Warning against the false hope gene therapy inspires, Jasienska makes a compelling case that our only avenue to a healthy life is prevention programs informed by evolutionary understanding and custom-fitted to each woman’s developmental and reproductive history.
The forensic entomologist turns a dispassionate, analytic eye on scenes from which most people would recoil--human corpses in various stages of decay, usually the remains of people who have met a premature end through accident or mayhem. To Lee Goff and his fellow forensic entomologists, each body recovered at a crime scene is an ecosystem, a unique microenvironment colonized in succession by a diverse array of flies, beetles, mites, spiders, and other arthropods: some using the body to provision their young, some feeding directly on the tissues and by-products of decay, and still others preying on the scavengers.
Using actual cases on which he has consulted, Goff shows how knowledge of these insects and their habits allows forensic entomologists to furnish investigators with crucial evidence about crimes. Even when a body has been reduced to a skeleton, insect evidence can often provide the only available estimate of the postmortem interval, or time elapsed since death, as well as clues to whether the body has been moved from the original crime scene, and whether drugs have contributed to the death.
An experienced forensic investigator who regularly advises law enforcement agencies in the United States and abroad, Goff is uniquely qualified to tell the fascinating if unsettling story of the development and practice of forensic entomology.
Sana Loue explores the concepts of legal and epidemiological causation, the use of epidemiological data based on populations to determine causation in an individual case, and the use of epidemiological evidence in litigation, including the reliance on experts and expert witnesses.
Loue provides a guide for the attorney with little or no background in epidemiological theory and for the epidemiologist contemplating a new role as an expert witness. She assumes of her readers a working knowledge of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the Federal Rules of Evidence.
Discussing the epidemiologist as expert witness, Loue covers the nature of that testimony, the purpose of the testimony, and the qualifications necessary to be regarded as an expert witness. She examines various legal theories of causation, primarily in the context of product liability and toxic tort, and addresses epidemiological principles and methods used in the process of causal inference.
Loue also focuses on legal mechanisms used to assess causation. Her concern here is with depositions and testimony and the preparation of epidemiology experts. She concludes her study by comparing the legal and epidemiological concepts of causation, using actual legal cases as examples.
Throughout the text, Loue incorporates excerpts from depositions, interrogatories, and trial testimony to provide concrete examples. She also sets up an appendix to provide nonattorney readers with an overview of the legal system. Ultimately, her goal is to foster a greater understanding between law and epidemiology.
After the great pandemic of 1348, the plague became endemic in Europe, affecting life at every level for more than three hundred years. In attempting to fight the dread enemy, the North Italian states had developed, by the early sixteenth century, a highly sophisticated system of public health. Special permanent magistracies combining legislative and executive powers were established to administer all public health matters.
In this volume, Carlo M. Cipolla throws new light on the subject, utilizing newly uncovered and significant archival material.
In the first essay, the author analyzes the complex set of interrelationships that existed between theory and practice in Renaissance epidemiology. The significance of this essay goes beyond the history of public health and extends to the larger history of science.
In the second essay, Cipolla studies a case in which health matters became the object of intense diplomatic activity. In that instance, fully sovereign states envisaged interstate controls and relinquished discretionary powers for the sake of the “common health.” Although the concerted effort was short-lived, it does represent an attempt at international health cooperation that was unmatched for another two centuries, until the first International Sanitary Conference, held in Paris in 1851.
In the third essay, unusually detailed statistical documentation allows the author to analyze in detail the demographic, economic, and social aspects of the fight against the plague in a Tuscan city—Pistoia—during the epidemic of 1630–31.
A richly documented appendix, forming an essay in itself, illustrates present knowledge of the clinical, pathological, and epidemiological features of the plague in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe.
Fitter, Happier: The Eugenic Strain in Twentieth-Century Cancer Rhetoric is a thought-provoking exploration of the relationship between cancer rhetoric, American ideals, and eugenic influences in the twentieth century. This groundbreaking work delves into the paradoxical interplay between acknowledging the genuine threat of cancer and the ingrained American ethos of confidence and control.
Agnew’s meticulous research traces the topic’s historical context, unveiling how cancer discourses evolved from a hushed personal concern to a public issue thanks to the rise of cancer research centers and advocacy organizations. However, she unearths a troubling dimension to these discussions—subtle yet persistent eugenic ideologies that taint cancer arguments and advocacy groups. By dissecting prevailing cancer narratives, Agnew brings into focus how ideals rooted in eliminating imperfections and embracing progress converge with concerns for safeguarding societal fitness.
Fitter, Happier scrutinizes the military origins and metaphors that permeate government policies and medical research, the transformation of cancer’s association with melancholy into a rallying cry for a positive outlook, and the nuanced implications of prevention-focused dialogues. Reflecting on the varied experiences of actual cancer patients, Agnew resists the neat assimilation of these stories into a eugenic framework. Agnew’s insights prompt readers to contemplate the societal meanings of disease and disability as well as how language constructs our shared reality.
Challenging the broader cultural milieu of pink ribbon symbolism and breast cancer "awareness" campaigns, this movement has grown from a handful of community-based organizations into a national entity, shaping the cultural, political, and public health landscape. Much of the activists' everyday work revolves around describing how the so called "cancer industry" downplays possible environmental links to protect their political and economic interests and they demand that the public play a role in scientific, policy, and public health decision-making to build a new framework of breast cancer prevention.
From Pink to Green successfully explores the intersection between breast cancer activism and the environmental health sciences, incorporating public and scientific debates as well as policy implications to public health and environmental agendas.
Consider two polar images of the same medical condition: the pale and fragile Camille ensconced on a chaise in a Victorian parlor, daintily coughing a small spot of blood onto her white lace pillow, and a wretched poor man in a Bowery flophouse spreading a dread and deadly infection. Now Katherine Ott chronicles how in one century a romantic, ambiguous affliction of the spirit was transformed into a disease that threatened public health and civic order. She persuasively argues that there was no constant identity to the disease over time, no “core” tuberculosis.
What we understand today as pulmonary tuberculosis would have been largely unintelligible to a physician or patient in the late nineteenth century. Although medically the two terms described the same disease of the lungs, Ott shows that “tuberculosis” and “consumption” were diagnosed, defined, and treated distinctively by both lay and professional health workers. Ott traces the shift from the pre-industrial world of 1870, in which consumption was conceived of primarily as a middle-class malaise that conferred virtue, heightened spirituality, and gentility on the sufferer, to the post-industrial world of today, in which tuberculosis is viewed as a microscopic enemy, fought on an urban battleground and attacking primarily the outcast poor and AIDS patients.
Ott’s focus is the changing definition of the disease in different historical eras and environments. She explores its external trappings, from the symptoms doctors chose to notice (whether a pale complexion or a tubercle in a dish) to the significance of the economic and social circumstances of the patient. Emphasizing the material culture of disease—medical supplies, advertisements for faraway rest cures, outdoor sick porches, and invalid hammocks—Ott provides insight into people’s understanding of illness and how to combat it. Fevered Lives underscores the shifting meanings of consumption/tuberculosis in an extraordinarily readable cultural history.
Barbara Stafford is a pioneering art historian whose research has long helped to bridge the divide between the humanities and cognitive sciences. In A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field, she marshals a distinguished group of thinkers to forge a ground-breaking dialogue between the emerging brain sciences, the liberal arts, and social sciences.
Stafford’s book examines meaning and mental function from this dual experimental perspective. The wide-ranging essays included here—from Frank Echenhofer’s foray into shamanist hallucinogenic visions to David Bashwiner’s analysis of emotion and danceability—develop a common language for implementing programmatic and institutional change. Demonstrating how formerly divided fields are converging around shared issues, A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field maps a high-level, crossdisciplinary adventure from one of our leading figures in visual studies.
Greg Eghigian has compiled a unique anthology of readings, from ancient times to the present, that includes Hippocrates; Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love, penned in the 1390s; Dorothea Dix; Aaron T. Beck; Carl Rogers; and others, culled from religious texts, clinical case studies, memoirs, academic lectures, hospital and government records, legal and medical treatises, and art collections. Incorporating historical experiences of medical practitioners and those deemed mentally ill, From Madness to Mental Health also includes an updated bibliography of first-person narratives on mental illness compiled by Gail A. Hornstein.
The functional dialectic system approach to therapy has been widely embraced and is now used internationally, with individuals and couples as well as with families. It differs substantially from the common psychotherapeutic models that have prevailed in the West for more than a century. According to the system model, an individual who is in treatment is not considered to be the primary focus of interest but is seen instead as part of a social context, the network of relationships that play significant roles in his or her life.
In this book, Moshe Almagor offers a comprehensive view of the contemporary system approach—from theory to practice—and shows how it can be applied to a variety of psychological problems and in a variety of therapeutic modes. The system approach to therapy concentrates on the present situation of a client, aware that people are always in transition yet seeking order, safety, belonging, and identity. Their behavior is thus goal oriented and functional. The principles of dialectics assert that everything includes its opposite, that there is an ongoing conflict between the poles, and that this inevitable conflict creates pressure that leads to a continuous alteration.
These principles, thoroughly explained in the book and practically illustrated by case examples drawn from the author’s own practice, show how the system approach is optimistic in its orientation and is designed to help clients change their lives by broadening their understanding of themselves, their situations, and their options.
No other book in the field so fully combines vivid clinical examples, specific details of technique, and mature perspectives on both effectively functioning families and those seeking therapy. The views and strategies of a master clinician are presented here in such clear and precise form that readers can proceed directly from the book with comparisons and modifications to suit their own styles and working situations.
Salvador Minuchin presents six chapter-length transcripts of actual family sessions—two devoted to ordinary families who are meeting their problems with relative success; four concerned with families seeking help. Accompanying each transcript is the author’s running interpretation of what is taking place, laying particular stress on the therapist’s tactics and maneuvers.
These lively sessions are interpreted in a brilliant theoretical analysis of why families develop problems and what it takes to set them right. The author constructs a model of an effectively functioning family and defines the boundaries around its different subsystems, whether parental, spouse, or sibling. He discusses ways in which families adapt to stress from within and without, as they seek to survive and grow.
Dr. Minuchin describes methods of diagnosing or “mapping” problems of the troubled family and determining appropriate therapeutic goals and strategies. Different situations, such as the extended family, the family with a parental child, and the family in transition through death or divorce, are examined. Finally, the author explores the dynamics of change, examining the variety of restructuring operations that can be employed to challenge a family and to change its basic patterns.
Dr. Harold Koenig opens a window on mental health, providing an unprecedented source of practical information about the relationship between religion and mental health. He examines how Christianity and other world religions deliver mental health services today, and he makes recommendations, based on research, expertise, and experience, for new programs to meet local needs.
Meticulously researched and documented, Faith and Mental Health includes
Presenting a combination of the history and current research of mental health and religion along with a thorough examination of faith-based organizations operating in the field, this book is a one-of-a-kind resource for the healthcare community; its valuable research and insights will benefit medical and religious professionals, and anyone concerned with the future of mental health care.
Feeding Anorexia is based on fourteen months of ethnographic research in a small inpatient unit located in a major teaching and research hospital in the western United States. Gremillion attended group, family, and individual therapy sessions and medical staff meetings; ate meals with patients; and took part in outings and recreational activities. She also conducted over one hundred interviews-with patients, parents, staff, and clinicians. Among the issues she explores are the relationship between calorie-counting and the management of consumer desire; why the "typical" anorexic patient is middle-class and white; the extent to which power differentials among clinicians, staff, and patients model "anorexic families"; and the potential of narrative therapy to constructively reframe some of the problematic assumptions underlying more mainstream treatments.
A detailed exploration of parents’ fight for a safe environment for their kids, interrogating how race, class, and gender shape health advocacy
The success of food allergy activism in highlighting the dangers of foodborne allergens shows how illness communities can effectively advocate for the needs of their members. In Food Allergy Advocacy, Danya Glabau follows parents and activists as they fight for allergen-free environments, accurate labeling, the fair application of disability law, and access to life-saving medications for food-allergic children in the United States. At the same time, she shows how this activism also reproduces the culturally dominant politics of personhood and responsibility, based on an idealized version of the American family, centered around white, middle-class, and heteronormative motherhood.
By holding up the threat of food allergens to the white nuclear family to galvanize political and scientific action, Glabau shows, the movement excludes many, including Black women and disabled adults, whose families and health have too often been marginalized from public health and social safety net programs. Further, its strategies are founded on the assumption that market-based solutions will address issues of social exclusion and equal access to healthcare.
Sharing the personal experiences of a wide spectrum of people, including parents, support group leaders, physicians, entrepreneurs, and scientists, Food Allergy Advocacy raises important questions about who controls illness activism. Using critical, intersectional feminism to interrogate how race, class, and gender shape activist priorities and platforms, it shows the way to new, justice-focused models of advocacy.
When Carolyn Ellis, a graduate student, and Gene Weinstein, her Professor, fell in love, he was experiencing the first stages of emphysema. As he became increasingly disabled and immobile, these two intensely connected partners fought to maintain their love and to live a meaningful life. They learned to negotiate their daily lives in a way that enabled each of them to feel sufficiently autonomous—him not always like a patient and her not always like a caretaker. Writing as a sociologist, Ellis protrays their life together as a way to understand the complexities of romance, of living with a progressive illness, and, in the final negotiation and reversal of positions, of coping with the loss of a loved one.
This rare memoir full of often raw details and emotions becomes an intimate conversation about the intricacies of feeling and relating in a relationship. What Ellis calls experimental ethnography is a finely crafted, forthright, and daring story framed by the author's reflections on writing about and analyzing one's own life. Casting off the safe distance of most social science inquiry, she surrenders the private shroud of a complex relationship to bring sociology closer to literature.
In Frontier Doctor, Reginald Horsman provides the first modern, scholarly biography of a colorful backwoods doctor whose pioneering research on human digestion gained him international renown as a physiologist. Before William Beaumont's work, there was still considerable controversy as to the nature of human digestion; his research established beyond a doubt that digestion is a chemical process.
Beaumont received his medical training as an apprentice in a small town in Vermont and served as a surgeon's mate in the War of 1812. After the war, he practiced in Plattsburgh, New York, before making his career as an army surgeon. His chance for fame came in 1822, when he was serving at the lonely post of Fort Mackinac in Michigan Territory. A Canadian voyageur--Alexis St. Martin--was accidentally shot in the stomach at close range, and his wound healed in such a way as to leave a permanent opening. This enabled Beaumont to insert food directly into the stomach, to siphon gastric juice, and to experiment on the process of digestion both inside and outside the stomach.
Because Beaumont had considerable difficulty in persuading St. Martin to stay with him so he could continue his research, his study was carried out sporadically over a number of years. In the early 1830s, with the support of Joseph Lovell, the surgeon general of the army, Beaumont and St. Martin went to the East Coast, where additional experiments were carried out. In 1833, Beaumont published Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion, a book based upon his research on St. Martin and the work upon which his reputation primarily rests. His observations revealed more about digestion in the human stomach than had ever before been known, and his work was immediately praised in both the United States and Europe.
After he left the army, Beaumont established a successful private practice in St. Louis, Missouri, where he spent the latter part of his life. Beaumont, a fascinating, argumentative character, was often engaged in public controversy. He was also good friends with several notable men, including the young Robert E. Lee.
Frontier Doctor sheds welcome new light on the state of medicine both inside and outside the army in the early nineteenth century and provides absorbing information on the early experi-ments that set the research into human digestion irrevocably on the right course.
Much has changed in the lives of children, and in the health care provided to them, over the past century. Formative Years explores how children's lives have become increasingly medicalized, traces the emergence of the fields of pediatrics and child health, and offers fascinating case studies of important and timely issues.
With contributions from historians and physicians, this collection illuminates some of the most important transformations in children's health in the United States since the 1880s. Opening with a history of pediatrics as a medical specialty, the book addresses such topics as the formulation of normal growth curves, Better Babies contests at county fairs, the "discovery" of the sexual abuse of children, and the political radicalism of the founder of pediatrics, Dr. Abraham Jacobi.
One of the first long-term historical and analytical overviews of pediatrics and child health in the twentieth century, Formative Years will be a welcome addition to several fields, including the history of medicine and technology, the history of childhood, modern U.S. history, women's history, and American studies. It also has ramifications for policymakers concerned with child welfare and development and poses important questions about the direction of children's health in the twenty-first century.
Here is a brief and authoritative account of human physical growth, beautifully written by one of the world's foremost experts. In Fetus into Man Professor Tanner tells the story of growth in language that is both accessible to the nonbiologist and acceptable to the biologist.
The book begins with the basics of growth: cell division, hormonal control and differential growth of body tissues. It then builds on these basics to provide a picture of individual growth--from the fetus in utero to the development of sex differences at puberty. Tanner pays special attention along the way to the psychological and social problems faced by children who mature either too soon or too late, and he concludes with a full description of the major growth disorders and current methods of treatment.
Fetus into Man will be an important reference for parents, educators, students of development, and indeed anyone who must deal with the growing child.
Teen-aged girls hate their bodies and diet obsessively, or so we hear. News stories and reports of survey research often claim that as many as three girls in five are on a diet at any given time, and they grimly suggest that many are “at risk” for eating disorders. But how much can we believe these frightening stories? What do teenagers mean when they say they are dieting?
Anthropologist Mimi Nichter spent three years interviewing middle school and high school girls—lower-middle to middle class, white, black, and Latina—about their feelings concerning appearance, their eating habits, and dieting. In Fat Talk, she tells us what the girls told her, and explores the influence of peers, family, and the media on girls’ sense of self. Letting girls speak for themselves, she gives us the human side of survey statistics.
Most of the white girls in her study disliked something about their bodies and knew all too well that they did not look like the envied, hated “perfect girl.” But they did not diet so much as talk about dieting. Nichter wryly argues—in fact some of the girls as much as tell her—that “fat talk” is a kind of social ritual among friends, a way of being, or creating solidarity. It allows the girls to show that they are concerned about their weight, but it lessens the urgency to do anything about it, other than diet from breakfast to lunch. Nichter concludes that if anything, girls are watching their weight and what they eat, as well as trying to get some exercise and eat “healthfully” in a way that sounds much less disturbing than stories about the epidemic of eating disorders among American girls.
Black girls, Nichter learned, escape the weight obsession and the “fat talk” that is so pervasive among white girls. The African-American girls she talked with were much more satisfied with their bodies than were the white girls. For them, beauty was a matter of projecting attitude (“’tude”) and moving with confidence and style.
Fat Talk takes the reader into the lives of girls as daughters, providing insights into how parents talk to their teenagers about their changing bodies. The black girls admired their mothers’ strength; the white girls described their mothers’ own “fat talk,” their fathers’ uncomfortable teasing, and the way they and their mothers sometimes dieted together to escape the family “curse”—flabby thighs, ample hips. Moving beyond negative stereotypes of mother–daughter relationships, Nichter sensitively examines the issues and struggles that mothers face in bringing up their daughters, particularly in relation to body image, and considers how they can help their daughters move beyond rigid and stereotyped images of ideal beauty.
At the most prestigious preparatory schools in the United States, the children of educators are referred to as “faculty brats.” Though generally lacking the privilege of the institution’s wealthy students, faculty brats enjoy access to the school’s extensive grounds and facilities and are part of everyday campus life.
Dominic Bucca’s art teacher mother married his music teacher stepfather twice, and the young boy wondered if the union might be twice as strong as a result. Instead, this faculty brat quickly discovered that the marriage was twice as flawed. When Dominic was nine years old, his stepfather began sexually abusing him in the faculty housing attached to the boys’ dorm his parents oversaw. Years later, he found escape by reaching out to his biological father, and learned to split his life between two realities.
For nearly twenty-five years, Bucca hid the secret of his stepfather’s abuse from his mother and sisters. When he decided to tell, hoping to prevent his stepfather from continuing to teach young boys, Bucca discovered the limits of both his family and the legal system.
The largest unmet health need in this country—and potentially the most costly—is for dental care; meeting this need would strain existing personnel and facilities beyond capacity. This book reports an experiment in delivering dental care by means that are not traditional but preserve the high standards that have been achieved by American dentistry.
At the Forsyth Dental Center in Boston, Massachusetts, graduate dental hygienists received additional training in the administration of local anesthesia, drilling decayed teeth, and filling them. The program was designed to prepare dental auxiliaries to undertake restorative treatment under the direct supervision of a dentist who assumes ultimate responsibility for planning treatment, assessing the quality of performance, and assuring the patient's well-being.
The Forsyth experiment yielded information on the competence of auxiliaries trained in this fashion, on patient acceptance, on the efficiency of various patterns of practice, and on the potential economic effects of delivering care in this way. The results of the study are bound to stir controversy, but they cannot be ignored by anyone who cares about a major problem in health care.
Drawing from her many years of experience as a hospice nurse and her training as a theologian, Patricia Kobielus Thompson offers in The Dark Night of the Soul instruction to those providing care for terminally ill patients. Thompson finds in the poetry and other writings of Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross a wisdom that she argues will assist caregivers in comforting their patients through the trying times just before death. Though much has been written on Saint John of the Cross, Thompson’s application of these works is wholly new and rooted in deep empathy.
After years of subjecting the editors of St. Louis newspapers to eloquent letters on subjects as diverse as floods, tariffs, and mules, Thad Snow published his memoir From Missouri in his mid-seventies in 1954. He was barely retired from farming for more than half a century, mostly in the Missouri Bootheel, or “Swampeast Missouri,” as he called it. Now back in print with a new introduction by historian Bonnie Stepenoff, these sketches of a life, a region, and an era will delight readers new to this distinctive American voice as well as readers already familiar with this masterpiece of the American Midwest.
Snow purchased a thousand acres of southeast Missouri swampland in 1910, cleared it, drained it, and eventually planted it in cotton. Although he employed sharecroppers, he grew to become a bitter critic of the labor system after a massive flood and the Great Depression worsened conditions for these already-burdened workers. Shocking his fellow landowners, Snow invited the Southern Tenant Farmers Union to organize the workers on his land. He was even once accused of fomenting a strike and publicly threatened with horsewhipping.
Snow’s admiration for Owen Whitfield, the African American leader of the Sharecroppers’ Roadside Demonstration, convinced him that nonviolent resistance could defeat injustice. Snow embraced pacifism wholeheartedly and denounced all war as evil even as America mobilized for World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he became involved with creating Missouri’s conservation movement. Near the end of his life, he found a retreat in the Missouri Ozarks, where he wrote this recollection of his life.
This unique and honest series of personal essays expresses the thoughts of a farmer, a hunter, a husband, a father and grandfather, a man with a soft spot for mules and dogs and all kinds of people. Snow’s prose reveals much about a way of life in the region during the first half of the twentieth century, as well as the social and political events that affected the entire nation. Whether arguing that a good stock dog should be left alone to do its work, explaining the process of making swampland suitable for agriculture, or putting forth his case for world peace, Snow’s ideas have a special authenticity because they did not come from an ivory tower or a think tank—they came From Missouri.
˜Farming in Nature's Image provides, for the first time, a detailed look into the pioneering work of The Land Institute, the leading educational and research organization for sustainable agriculture.
The authors draw on case studies, hands-on experience, and research results to explain the applications of a new system of agriculture based on one unifying concept: that farms should mimic the ecosystems in which they exist. They present both theoretical and practical information, including:
Written in clear, non-technical language, this book will be of great interest to soil and agricultural scientists, academics, policymakers, environmentalists, and other concerned with finding long-range solutions to agricultural problems.
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