front cover of Cinematic Prophylaxis
Cinematic Prophylaxis
Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health
Kirsten Ostherr
Duke University Press, 2005
A timely contribution to the fields of film history, visual cultures, and globalization studies, Cinematic Prophylaxis provides essential historical information about how the representation of biological contagion has affected understandings of the origins and vectors of disease. Kirsten Ostherr tracks visual representations of the contamination of bodies across a range of media, including 1940s public health films; entertainment films such as 1950s alien invasion movies and the 1995 blockbuster Outbreak; television programs in the 1980s, during the early years of the aids epidemic; and the cyber-virus plagued Internet. In so doing, she charts the changes—and the alarming continuities—in popular understandings of the connection between pathologized bodies and the global spread of disease.

Ostherr presents the first in-depth analysis of the public health films produced between World War II and the 1960s that popularized the ideals of world health and taught viewers to imagine the presence of invisible contaminants all around them. She considers not only the content of specific films but also their techniques for making invisible contaminants visible. By identifying the central aesthetic strategies in films produced by the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, and other institutions, she reveals how ideas about racial impurity and sexual degeneracy underlay messages ostensibly about world health. Situating these films in relation to those that preceded and followed them, Ostherr shows how, during the postwar era, ideas about contagion were explicitly connected to the global circulation of bodies. While postwar public health films embraced the ideals of world health, they invoked a distinct and deeply anxious mode of representing the spread of disease across national borders.

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Ethnography and Human Development
Context and Meaning in Social Inquiry
Edited by Richard Jessor, Anne Colby, and Richard A. Shweder
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Studies of human development have taken an ethnographic turn in the 1990s. In this volume, leading anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists discuss how qualitative methodologies have strengthened our understanding of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral development, and of the difficulties of growing up in contemporary society.

Part 1, informed by a post-positivist philosophy of science, argues for the validity of ethnographic knowledge. Part 2 examines a range of qualitative methods, from participant observation to the hermeneutic elaboration of texts. In Part 3, ethnographic methods are applied to issues of human development across the life span and to social problems including poverty, racial and ethnic marginality, and crime.

Restoring ethnographic methods to a central place in social inquiry, these twenty-two lively essays will interest everyone concerned with the epistemological problems of context, meaning, and subjectivity in the behavioral sciences.
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Genes in Development
Re-reading the Molecular Paradigm
Eva M. Neumann-Held and Christoph Rehmann-Sutter, eds.
Duke University Press, 2006
In light of scientific advances such as genomics, predictive diagnostics, genetically engineered agriculture, nuclear transfer cloning, and the manipulation of stem cells, the idea that genes carry predetermined molecular programs or blueprints is pervasive. Yet new scientific discoveries—such as rna transcripts of single genes that can lead to the production of different compounds from the same pieces of dna—challenge the concept of the gene alone as the dominant factor in biological development. Increasingly aware of the tension between certain empirical results and interpretations of those results based on the orthodox view of genetic determinism, a growing number of scientists urge a rethinking of what a gene is and how it works. In this collection, a group of internationally renowned scientists present some prominent alternative approaches to understanding the role of dna in the construction and function of biological organisms.

Contributors discuss alternatives to the programmatic view of dna, including the developmental systems approach, methodical culturalism, the molecular process concept of the gene, the hermeneutic theory of description, and process structuralist biology. None of the approaches cast doubt on the notion that dna is tremendously important to biological life on earth; rather, contributors examine different ideas of how dna should be represented, evaluated, and explained. Just as ideas about genetic codes have reached far beyond the realm of science, the reconceptualizations of genetic theory in this volume have broad implications for ethics, philosophy, and the social sciences.

Contributors. Thomas Bürglin, Brian C. Goodwin, James Griesemer, Paul Griffiths, Jesper Hoffmeyer, Evelyn Fox Keller, Gerd B. Müller, Eva M. Neumann-Held, Stuart A. Newman, Susan Oyama, Christoph Rehmann-Sutter, Sahotra Sarkar, Jackie Leach Scully, Gerry Webster, Ulrich Wolf

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Inclusion
The Politics of Difference in Medical Research
Steven Epstein
University of Chicago Press, 2007

With Inclusion, Steven Epstein argues that strategies to achieve diversity in medical research mask deeper problems, ones that might require a different approach and different solutions.

Formal concern with this issue, Epstein shows, is a fairly recent phenomenon. Until the mid-1980s, scientists often studied groups of white, middle-aged men—and assumed that conclusions drawn from studying them would apply to the rest of the population. But struggles involving advocacy groups, experts, and Congress led to reforms that forced researchers to diversify the population from which they drew for clinical research. While the prominence of these inclusive practices has offered hope to traditionally underserved groups, Epstein argues that it has drawn attention away from the tremendous inequalities in health that are rooted not in biology but in society.

“Epstein’s use of theory to demonstrate how public policies in the health profession are shaped makes this book relevant for many academic disciplines. . . . Highly recommended.”—Choice

“A masterful comprehensive overview of a wide terrain.”—Troy Duster, Biosocieties

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front cover of Meaning in Suffering
Meaning in Suffering
Caring Practices in the Health Professions
Edited by Nancy Johnston and Alwilda Scholler-Jaquish
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007
     Compelling, timely, and essential reading for healthcare providers, Meaning in Suffering addresses the multiplicity of meanings suffering brings to all it touches: patients, families, health workers, and human science professionals. Examining suffering in writing that is both methodologically rigorous and accessible, the contributors preserve first-hand experiences using narrative ethnography, existential hermeneutics, hermeneutic phenomenology, and traditional ethnography. They offer nuanced insights into suffering as a human condition experienced by persons deserving of dignity, empathy, and understanding. Collectively, these essays demonstrate that understanding the suffering of the "other" reveals something vital about the moral courage required to heal—and stay humane—in the face of suffering.
 
 
Winner, Nursing Research Category, American Journal of Nursing
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front cover of Power System Protection
Power System Protection
Systems and methods, Volume 2
The Electricity Training Association Electricity Training Association
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1995
The worldwide growth in demand for electricity has forced the pace of developments in electrical power system design to meet consumer needs for reliable, secure and cheap supplies. Power system protection, as a technology essential to high quality supply, is widely recognised as a specialism of growing and often critical importance, in which power system needs and technological progress have combined to result in rapid developments in policy and practice in recent years. In the United Kingdom, the need for appropriate training in power system protection was recognised in the early 1960s with the launch of a correspondence course from which these books emerged and have since developed designed to meet the needs of protection staff throughout the world.
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The Radiology Handbook
A Pocket Guide to Medical Imaging
J. S. Benseler
Ohio University Press, 2006

Designed for busy medical students, The Radiology Handbook is a quick and easy reference for any practitioner who needs information on ordering or interpreting images.

The book is divided into three parts:

- Part I presents a table, organized from head to toe, with recommended imaging tests for common clinical conditions.

- Part II is organized in a question and answer format that covers the following topics: how each major imaging modality works to create an image; what the basic precepts of image interpretation in each body system are; and where to find information and resources for continued learning.

- Part III is an imaging quiz beginning at the head and ending at the foot. Sixty images are provided to self-test knowledge about normal imaging anatomy and common imaging pathology.

Published in collaboration with the Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine, The Radiology Handbook is a convenient pocket-sized resource designed for medical students and non radiologists.

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front cover of Shaping Science with Rhetoric
Shaping Science with Rhetoric
The Cases of Dobzhansky, Schrodinger, and Wilson
Leah Ceccarelli
University of Chicago Press, 2001
How do scientists persuade colleagues from diverse fields to cross the disciplinary divide, risking their careers in new interdisciplinary research programs? Why do some attempts to inspire such research win widespread acclaim and support, while others do not?

In Shaping Science with Rhetoric, Leah Ceccarelli addresses such questions through close readings of three scientific monographs in their historical contexts—Theodosius Dobzhansky's Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937), which inspired the "modern synthesis" of evolutionary biology; Erwin Schrödinger's What Is Life? (1944), which catalyzed the field of molecular biology; and Edward O. Wilson's Consilience (1998), a so far not entirely successful attempt to unite the social and biological sciences. She examines the rhetorical strategies used in each book and evaluates which worked best, based on the reviews and scientific papers that followed in their wake.

Ceccarelli's work will be important for anyone interested in how interdisciplinary fields are formed, from historians and rhetoricians of science to scientists themselves.
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front cover of Teaching the Practitioners of Care
Teaching the Practitioners of Care
New Pedagogies for the Health Professions
Edited by Nancy L. Diekelmann
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003
Contributors
Nancy L. Diekelmann
Karin Dahlberg
Margaretha Ekebergh
Pamela M. Ironside
Kathryn Hopkins Kavanagh
Melinda M. Swenson
Sharon L. Sims
Rosemary A. McEldowney
Jan D. Sinnott
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front cover of Total Cure
Total Cure
The Antidote to the Health Care Crisis
Harold S. Luft
Harvard University Press, 2008

Proposals to reform the health care system typically focus on either increasing private insurance or expanding government-sponsored plans. Guaranteeing that everyone is insured, however, does not create a system with the quality of care patients want, the flexibility clinicians need, and the internal dynamics to continually improve the value of health care.

In Total Cure, Hal Luft presents a comprehensive new proposal, SecureChoice, which does all that while providing affordable health insurance for every American. SecureChoice is a plan that restructures payment for medical care, harnessing the flexibility and responsiveness of the market by aligning the incentives of clinicians, hospitals, and insurers with those of the patient. It uses the accountability of government to ensure transparency, competition, and equity.

SecureChoice has two major components. A universal pool covers the major risks of hospitalization and chronic illness, which account for almost two-thirds of all costs. Everyone would be in the pool, irrespective of employment, income, or health status. The second component emphasizes choice, flexibility, and responsibility. People will be able to choose any physician to serve as their “medical home,” to keep track of their health records, provide much of their care, and suggest referrals. Clinicians will have the information and incentives to continually enhance quality. SecureChoice also facilitates improvements in areas ranging from malpractice to pharmaceuticals and establishes new roles for key stakeholders such as health insurers.

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front cover of Try to Remember
Try to Remember
Psychiatry's Clash over Meaning, Memory, and Mind
Paul R. McHugh
Dana Press, 2008
In the 1990s a disturbing trend emerged in psychotherapy: patients began accusing their parents and other close relatives of sexual abuse, as a result of false “recovered memories” urged onto them by therapists practicing new methods of treatment. The subsequent loss of public confidence in psychotherapy was devastating to psychiatrist Paul R. McHugh, and with Try to Remember, he looks at what went wrong and describes what must be done to restore psychotherapy to a more honored and useful place in therapeutic treatment.

In this thought-provoking account, McHugh explains why trendy diagnoses and misguided treatments have repeatedly taken over psychotherapy. He recounts his participation in court battles that erupted over diagnoses of recovered memories and the frequent companion diagnoses of multiple-personality disorders. He also warns that diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorder today may be perpetuating a similar misdirection, thus exacerbating the patients’ suffering. He argues that both the public and psychiatric professionals must raise their standards for psychotherapy, in order to ensure that the incorrect designation of memory as the root cause of disorders does not occur again. Psychotherapy, McHugh ultimately shows, is a valuable healing method—and at the very least an important adjunct treatment—to the numerous psychopharmaceuticals that flood the drug market today.

An urgent call to arms for patients and therapists alike, Try to Remember delineates the difference between good and bad psychiatry and challenges us to reconsider psychotherapy as the most effective way to heal troubled minds.
 
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