A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Twenty essays—half by eminent American poets writing about their literary engagement with H.D. and half by critics writing about H.D. in relation to these same poets—provide a fruitful exchange of perceptions and interpretations. The dialogue between these two perspectives—the first autobiographical testimony and the second critical analysis by scholars attuned to both modern and contemporary poetries and poetics—calls into question both traditional notions of literary criticism and earlier theories of literary influence.
The volume includes a range of contemporary responses to H.D.'s work—from Alicia Ostriker's radical eroticism to Brenda Hillman's epistemological restlessness to Carolyn Forché's response to moral disasters of the century. H.D. and Poets After demonstrates key aspects of the poet's continuing importance as a "poet's poet" in the best sense.
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886–1961), best known for her imagist poetry, was one of the first writers of free verse in English. For over forty years, H.D. wrote poetry about forgotten ancient goddesses and autobiographical prose about her own traumas and desires. Dubbed the “perfect bi –” by Sigmund Freud, she was also a scholar of religion, mythology, and history, a translator of ancient Greek, and an avant-garde filmmaker. This new biography explores the fascinating life and work of this important but often overlooked modernist figure.
Renowned German social historian Heide Wunder refers to the cosmic image contained in the 1578 Book of Marital Discipline that characterizes the relationship between husband and wife. Today, "He is the sun, she is the moon" might be interpreted as a hierarchy of dominance and subordination. At the time it was used, however, sun and moon reflected the different but equal status of husband and wife.
Wunder shows how the history of women and the history of gender relations can provide crucial insights into how societies organize themselves and provide resources for political action. She observes actual circumstances as well as the normative rules that were supposed to guide women's lives. We learn what skills were necessary to take charge of households, what people ate, how they furnished their homes, what birth control measures were available, what role women played in peasant protest. Wunder finds that, in addition to the history of losses and setbacks for women observed by so many current interpreters, there is a history of gains as well. The regency of noble women was normal, as was the shared responsibility of wife and husband in a peasant household, an artisan's workshop, or a merchant's business.
Using sources as diverse as memoirs, wedding and funeral sermons, novels, and chronicles, and including a wealth of demographic information, Wunder reveals a surprising new image of early modern women and provides a richer interpretation of early modern Europe.
Trollope’s mother, wife, and a friend he loved platonically most of his life provided him three very different views of the Victorian woman. And, according to Jane Nardin, they were responsible for the dramatic shift in his treatment of women in his novels.
This is the first book in Sandra Gilbert’s Ad Feminam series to examine a male author. Nardin initially analyzes the novels Trollope wrote from 1855 to 1861, in which male concerns are central to the plot and women are angelic heroines, submissive and self-sacrificing. Even the titles of his novels written during this period are totally male oriented. The Three Clerks, Doctor Thorne, and The Bertrams all refer to men. Shortly after meeting Kate Field, Trollope wrote Orley Farm, which refers to the estate an angry woman steals from her husband and which marks a change in the attitudes toward women evident in his novels.
His next four books, The Small House at Allington, Rachel Ray, Can You Forgive Her?, and Miss Mackenzie, prove that women’s concerns had become central in his writing. Nardin examines specific novels written from 1861 to 1865 in which Trollope, with increasing vigor, subverts the conventional notions of gender that his earlier novels had endorsed.
Nardin argues that his novels written after 1865 and often recognized as feminist are not really departures but merely refinements of attitudes Trollope exhibited in earlier works.
He, Leo investigates Welch’s life and work in a chronological fashion, structured around Welch’s own notion of how three main aspects of his life—The Man, The Mountain, and The City—were interdependent. From his birth until his disappearance and presumed death, Welch’s life was often defined by problems, including a complex relationship with his mother, a long struggle with alcohol, and a fluctuating mental state. Yet he was open and candid about everything, a fact that is evident in all aspects of his work.
Each of the three main sections of He, Leo includes key poems, essays, and events—both personal and cultural—to help establish Welch’s importance as a prominent poet and figure during the San Francisco Renaissance. Despite his crushing self-criticism and his reputation as a “friend of,” he was bona fide poet with a strong voice and message of his own. With this first full-length biography, Ewan Clark restores Lew Welch to his rightful place as an important member of a significant American literary and cultural movement.
The seventeenth-century Hindi classic treasured for its subtle and beautiful portrayal of divine and erotic love’s pleasures and sorrows.
The seven hundred poems of the Hindi poet Biharilal’s Satsai weave amorous narratives of the god Krishna and the goddess Radha with archetypal hero and heroine motifs that bridge divine and worldly love. He Spoke of Love brims with romantic rivalries, clandestine trysts, and the bittersweet sorrow of separated lovers. This new translation presents four hundred couplets from the enduring seventeenth-century classic, showcasing the poet’s ingenuity and virtuosity.
The fact that this distinction has been so persistent makes it an important area of study. Head and Heart: Perspectives from Religion and Psychology takes an inter-disciplinary approach, linking the thinking of theologians and philosophers with theory and research in present-day psychology. The tradition of using framing questions that have been developed in theology and philosophy can now be brought into dialogue with scientific approaches developed within cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Though these scientific approaches have not generally used the terms “head” and “heart,” they have arrived at a similar distinction in other ways. There is a notable convergence upon the realization that humans have two modes of cognition at their disposal that correspond to “head” and “heart.” The time is therefore ripe to bring the approaches of theology and science in to dialogue—an important dialogue that has been heretofore neglected.
---Jazzwise Magazine
---Travis Jackson, Associate Professor of American Music, University of Chicago
When the alluring, eleventh-century Cambodian stone head of Radha, consort to Krishna, shows up at the Searles Museum, young curator Jenna Murphy doesn’t suspect that it will lead her to a murder. Asian art is her bailiwick, not criminal investigation, and her immediate concern is simply figuring out whether the head is one famously stolen from its body, or a fake.
When a second decapitation happens—this time of an art collector, not a statue—Jenna finds herself drawn into a different kind of mystery, and the stakes are life or death. It turns out that the same talents for research and for unraveling puzzles—the bread and butter of an art historian—have perfectly equipped her to solve crimes. She’s certain the sculpture provides clues to help her solve the case, which takes her to Thailand and Cambodia. But the collectors, dealers, and con artists of the Bangkok art world only compound her questions.
A Head in Cambodia is the fiction debut of noted Asian art expert Nancy Tingley. Readers will delight in the rarified world of collecting, as well as getting to know Jenna, an intrepid and shrewd observer who will easily find her place among V.I. Warshawski, Kinsey Milhone, and other great female sleuths.
Head Masters challenges the assumption that phrenology—the study of the conformation of the skull as it relates to mental faculties and character—played only a minor and somewhat anecdotal role in the development of education. Stephen Tomlinson asserts instead that phrenology was a scientifically respectable theory of human nature, perhaps the first solid physiological psychology. He shows that the first phrenologists were among the most prominent scientists and intellectuals of their day, and that the concept was eagerly embraced by leading members of the New England medical community.
Following its progression from European theorists Franz-Joseph Gall, Johan Gasper Spurzheim, and George Combe to Americans Horace Mann and Samuel Gridley Howe, Tomlinson traces the origins of phrenological theory and examines how its basic principles of human classification, inheritance, and development provided a foundation for the progressive practices advocated by middle-class reformers such as Combe and Mann. He also elucidates the ways in which class, race, and gender stereotypes permeated 19th century thought and how popular views of nature, mind, and society supported a secular curriculum favoring the use of disciplinary practices based on physiology.
This study ultimately offers a reconsideration of the ideas and theories that motivated education reformers such as Mann and Howe, and a reassessment of Combe, who, though hardly known by contemporary scholars, emerges as one of the most important and influential educators of the 19th century.
Winner, 2011 National Book Award for Poetry
Winner, 2012 GCLS Award for Poetry
Winner, 2012 SIBA Book Award for Poetry
Nominee, 2012 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry
The poems in Nikky Finney's breathtaking new collection Head Off & Split sustain a sensitive and intense dialogue with emblematic figures and events in African American life: from civil rights matriarch Rosa Parks to former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, from a brazen girl strung out on lightning to a terrified woman abandoned on a rooftop during Hurricane Katrina. Finney's poetic voice is defined by an intimacy that holds a soft yet exacting eye on the erotic, on uncanny political and family events, like her mother's wedding waltz with South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, and then again on the heartbreaking hilarity of an American president's final State of the Union address.
Artful and intense, Finney's poems ask us to be mindful of what we fraction, fragment, cut off, dice, dishonor, or throw away, powerfully evoking both the lawless and the sublime.
This self-contained volume demonstrates the applicability of the HPSG approach to a wide range of empirical problems, including a number which have occupied center-stage within syntactic theory for well over twenty years: the control of "understood" subjects, long-distance dependencies conventionally treated in terms of wh-movement, and syntactic constraints on the relationship between various kinds of pronouns and their antecedents. The authors make clear how their approach compares with and improves upon approaches undertaken in other frameworks, including in particular the government-binding theory of Noam Chomsky.
In C. T. Salazar’s striking debut poetry collection, the speaker is situated in the tradition of Southern literature but reimagines its terrain with an eye on the South’s historic and ongoing violence. His restless relationship with religion (“a child told me there was a god / and because he was smiling, I believed him”) eventually includes a reclamation of the language of belief in the name of desire. “I felt myself become gospel in your hands,” the speaker tells his beloved. And, as the title poem asserts, a headless body “leaves more room for salvation.”
Though Salazar’s South is not a tender place, the book is a petition for tenderness, revealing in both place and people the possibilities for mercy, vulnerability, and wonder. The lyric I, as it creates an archive of experience, is not distanced from the poems’ subjects or settings, but deeply enmeshed in a tangled world. In poems with lush diction, ranging from a sonnet crown to those that explore the full field of the page, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking seeks—and finds—where the divine resides: “Praise our hollow-bell bodies still ringing.”
Headless Males Make Great Lovers and Other Unusual Natural Histories celebrates the extraordinary world of animals with essays on curious creatures and their amazing behaviors. In five thematic chapters, Marty Crump—a tropical field biologist well known for her work with the reproductive behavior of amphibians—examines the bizarre conduct of animals as they mate, parent, feed, defend themselves, and communicate. Crump's enthusiasm for the unusual behaviors she describes-from sex change and free love in sponges to aphrodisiac concoctions in bats-is visible on every page, thanks to her skilled storytelling, which makes even sea slugs, dung beetles, ticks, and tapeworms fascinating and appealing. Steeped in biology, Headless Males Make Great Lovers points out that diverse and unrelated animals often share seemingly bizarre behaviors—evidence, Crump argues, that these natural histories, though outwardly weird, are successful ways of living.
Illustrated throughout, and filled with vignettes of personal and scientific interest, Headless Males Make Great Lovers will enchant the general reader with its tales of blood-squirting horned lizards and intestine-ejecting sea cucumbers—all in the service of a greater appreciation of the diversity of the natural histories of animals.
From their primal seepages in the Appalachian highlands or along the broad Chunnenuggee Hills, Alabama’s rivers carve through the rocky uplands and down the Fall Line rapids, then ease across the coastal plain to their eventual confluence with the Gulf of Mexico.
The stories comprising The Healer, Marek Vadas’s first collection, which was originally published in 2006, are steeped in the culture, rituals, and traditions of Africa, blurring the boundaries between dream and reality and peopled with characters whose gender, shape, skin color or even memories may change at a stroke. Nevertheless, Vadas refuses to exoticize this world, and many of the stories, told in pared-down language, blend mythical elements with realistic depictions of harsh living conditions, economic deprivation, and colonial oppression. The narratives unfold from the perspective of their protagonists—children (often orphaned), and men struggling to make ends meet and trying in vain to resist the allure of strong women endowed with magic powers. As a Slovak writer focusing on the African continent, Vadas is a rare voice that helps to build bridges between very different cultures, and now his writing is introduced to the global anglophone readership.
Originally composed in Latin by Gilbertus Anglicus (Gilbert the Englishman), his Compendium of Medicine was a primary text of the medical revolution in thirteenth-century Europe. Composed mainly of medicinal recipes, it offered advice on diagnosis, medicinal preparation, and prognosis. In the fifteenth-century it was translated into Middle English to accommodate a widening audience for learning and medical “secrets.”
Faye Marie Getz provides a critical edition of the Middle English text, with an extensive introduction to the learned, practical, and social components of medieval medicine and a summary of the text in modern English. Getz also draws on both the Latin and Middle English texts to create an extensive glossary of little-known Middle English pharmaceutical and medical vocabulary.
Contributors. Florian Besch, Calum Blaikie, Sienna R. Craig, Barbara Gerke, Isabelle Guérin, Kim Gutschow, Pascale Hancart Petitet, Stephan Kloos, Fernanda Pirie, Laurent Pordié
As we grapple with the impacts of an aging population, the millions who struggle with chronic pain and illness, and the unknown number of COVID survivors dealing with long-term impairment, our individual and collective trust in our bodies is shaken. How to adapt? And how to live well, even when medical cure is unavailable? In The Healing Body: Creative Responses to Illness, Aging, and Affliction, philosopher and medical doctor Drew Leder shows how the phenomenology of lived embodiment makes available a variety of existential healing responses to bodily breakdown. Leder also turns to socially marginalized groups—people who have been incarcerated and those deemed “elderly”—to explore how individuals creatively cope with societal as well as physical challenges.
This book forwards current phenomenological research on the body, pain and suffering, disability, and aging. It deeply engages with the legacies of continental philosophy while also drawing insights from the traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. The Healing Body is a uniquely creative and refreshingly innovative contribution to contemporary philosophy, demonstrating the importance of the philosophical method to the wider culture.
"It is inspiring to see a physician who is unafraid to stand up for his religious beliefs and who understands how those beliefs can resonate with good science." —Larry Dossey, MD, author of Reinventing Medicine and Healing Words
The name Harold G. Koenig is well known in the fast-growing field of spirituality and health. Founder and director of the widely respected Duke University Center for Theology, Spirituality, and Health, Dr. Koenig is recognized worldwide for his groundbreaking work in medical science and religious faith. In this book—now available in paperback—he shares his remarkable personal story and shows how personal trials became the catalyst for his pioneering research.
In part one, he describes his turbulent youth: growing up on a California vineyard, college days of experimentation during the 1970s, adventures as a student researcher in Africa with Jane Goodall, an emotional breakdown, expulsion from medical school for disruptive behavior, battling mental illness as a street person in San Francisco. He refers to his ongoing battle with a chronic and debilitating physical disease in terms of the insights it gives him for his work, and he recounts the striking realization of God's call, the people and events that helped him refine a vision into a mission, and the subsequent professional opposition that resided alongside his success.
Part two draws on the real-life examples of former patients and summarizes Koenig's most important findings concerning the impact of Christian faith on mental and physical health, encapsulated by the statement: religious faith and practice are connected to mental and physical health.
In part three he challenges individuals and the American church to consider the implications of the research and to develop constructive ways of implementing the healing connection that can be found in faith.
In this intimate ethnography, Raquel Romberg seeks to illuminate the performative significance of healing rituals and magic works, their embodied nature, and their effectiveness in transforming the states of participants by focusing on the visible, albeit mostly obscure, ways in which healing and magic rituals proceed. The questions posed by Romberg emerge directly from the particular pragmatics of Puerto Rican brujería (witch-healing), shaped by the eclecticism of its rituals, the heterogeneous character of its participants, and the heterodoxy of its moral economy.
What, if any, is the role of belief in magic and healing rituals? How do past discourses on possession enter into the performative experience of ritual in the here and now? Where does belief stop, and where do memories of the flesh begin? While these are questions that philosophers and anthropologists of religion ponder, they acquire a different meaning when asked from an ethnographic perspective.
Written in an evocative, empathetic style, with theoretical ruminations about performance, the senses, and imagination woven into stories that highlight the drama and humanity of consultations, this book is an important contribution to the cross-cultural understanding of our capacity to experience the transcendental in corporeal ways.
In Healing Grounds, Liz Carlisle tells the stories of Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian American farmers who are reviving their ancestors’ methods of growing food—techniques long suppressed by the industrial food system. These farmers are restoring native prairies, nurturing beneficial fungi, and enriching soil health. While feeding their communities and revitalizing cultural ties to land, they are steadily stitching ecosystems back together and repairing the natural carbon cycle. This, Carlisle shows, is the true regenerative agriculture – not merely a set of technical tricks for storing CO2 in the ground, but a holistic approach that values diversity in both plants and people.
Cultivating this kind of regenerative farming will require reckoning with our nation’s agricultural history—a history marked by discrimination and displacement. And it will ultimately require dismantling power structures that have blocked many farmers of color from owning land or building wealth.
The task is great, but so is its promise. By coming together to restore these farmlands, we can not only heal our planet, we can heal our communities and ourselves.
This journey to the beginnings of the physician’s art brings to life the civilizations of the ancient world—Egypt of the Pharaohs, Greece at the time of Hippocrates, Rome under the Caesars, the India of Ashoka, and China as Mencius knew it. Probing the documents and artifacts of the ancient world with a scientist’s mind and a detective’s eye, Guido Majno pieces together the difficulties people faced in the effort to survive their injuries, as well as the odd, chilling, or inspiring ways in which they rose to the challenge. In asking whether the early healers might have benefited their patients, or only hastened their trip to the grave, Dr. Majno uncovered surprising answers by testing ancient prescriptions in a modern laboratory.
Illustrated with hundreds of photographs, many in full color, and climaxing ten years of work, The Healing Hand is a spectacular recreation of man’s attempts to conquer pain and disease.
The story of the garden unfolds through photographs and the words of survivors, first responders, family members, medical professionals, counselors, and members of the community. In only a matter of days, volunteers and local businesses transformed a vacant downtown lot into a serene urban oasis. Families and friends of those lost in the tragedy soon adopted each of the fifty-eight trees planted in honor of their loved ones, and visitors left behind colorful mementos, including painted rocks, photographs, and ornaments, as well as words of encouragement, love, loss, and strength.
In the aftermath of 1 October, an often misunderstood city revealed its soul under the most heartbreaking of circumstances. The inspirational voices and stories from a community touched by tragedy provide comfort and encouragement. And the organic response to the unthinkable is a testament to how one community came together at its darkest hour, chose hope over despair, unity over hate.
Early colonial Spanish settlers defined, assessed, and admonished Nahua titiçih (healing specialists) and tiçiyotl (healing knowledge) in the process of building a society in Mexico that mirrored Iberia. Nevertheless, Nahua survivance (intergenerational knowledge transfer) has allowed communities to heal like their ancestors through changes and adaptations. Edward Anthony Polanco draws from diverse colonial primary sources, largely in Spanish and Nahuatl (the Nahua ancestral language), to explore how Spanish settlers framed titiçih, their knowledge, and their practices within a Western complex. Polanco argues for the usage of Indigenous terms when discussing Indigenous concepts and arms the reader with the Nahuatl words to discuss central Mexican Nahua healing. In particular, this book emphasizes the importance of women as titiçih and highlights their work as creators and keepers of knowledge. These vital Nahua perspectives of healing—and how they differed from the settler narrative—will guide community members as well as scholars and students of the history of science, Latin America, and Indigenous studies.
Scholars in folklore and anthropology are more directly involved in various aspects of medicine—such as medical education, clinical pastoral care, and negotiation of transcultural issues—than ever before. Old models of investigation that artificially isolated "folk medicine," "complementary and alternative medicine," and "biomedicine" as mutually exclusive have proven too limited in exploring the real-life complexities of health belief systems as they observably exist and are applied by contemporary Americans. Recent research strongly suggests that individuals construct their health belief systmes from diverse sources of authority, including community and ethnic tradition, education, spiritual beliefs, personal experience, the influence of popular media, and perception of the goals and means of formal medicine. Healing Logics explores the diversity of these belief systems and how they interact—in competing, conflicting, and sometimes remarkably congruent ways. This book contains essays by leading scholars in the field and a comprehensive bibliography of folklore and medicine.
In 1968, the Kerner Commission concluded that America was heading toward “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” Today, America’s communities are experiencing increasing racial tensions and inequality, working-class resentment over the unfulfilled American Dream, white supremacy violence, toxic inaction in Washington, and the decline of the nation’s example around the world.
In Healing Our Divided Society, Fred Harris, the last surviving member of the Kerner Commission, along with Eisenhower Foundation CEO Alan Curtis, re-examine fifty years later the work still necessary towards the goals set forth in The Kerner Report. This timely volume unites the interests of minorities and white working- and middle-class Americans to propose a strategy to reduce poverty, inequality, and racial injustice. Reflecting on America’s urban climate today, this new report sets forth evidence-based policies concerning employment, education, housing, neighborhood development, and criminal justice based on what has been proven to work—and not work.
Contributors include: Oscar Perry Abello, Elijah Anderson, Anil N.F. Aranha, Jared Bernstein, Henry G. Cisneros, Elliott Currie, Linda Darling-Hammond, Martha F. Davis, E. J. Dionne, Jr., Marian Wright Edelman, Delbert S. Elliott, Carol Emig, Jeff Faux, Ron Grzywinski, Michael P. Jeffries, Lamar K. Johnson, Celinda Lake, Marilyn Melkonian, Gary Orfield, Diane Ravitch, Laurie Robinson, Herbert C. Smitherman, Jr., Joseph Stiglitz, Dorothy Stoneman, Kevin Washburn, Valerie Wilson, Gary Younge, Julian E. Zelizer, and the editors
"Frohock goes beyond the often irreconcilable differences between scientific biomedicine and alternative care by clarifying the social and legal dilemmas they present. . . . A noteworthy contribution forcing us to rethink what medical care is all about."—Jeffrey Michael Clare, Journal of the American Medical Association
"The book does more and better than simply provide a social-scientific proposal. It also gives not only a hearing but a voice to those who follow alternative therapies. . . . Frohock's accounts of their stories—along with the stories of the medical professionals—are eloquent and fascinating."—Allen Verhey, Medical Humanities Review
"Contains a storehouse of valuable information about the historical, philosophical, and psychological bases of alternative approaches to healing."—Marshall B. Kapp, New England Journal of Medicine
"Frohock introduces us to the scientific naturopaths and to physicians who believe in the mind's power to heal, to charismatics who believe in but cannot explain their powers, to those who test God and those who merely accept. He writes so well that I felt I had met these people."—Arthur W. Frank, Christian Century
Until recently, that is. Over the past few decades there has been a resurgence of interest in healing music. In the midst of this nascent revival, Ted Gioia, a musician, composer, and widely praised author, offers the first detailed exploration of the uses of music for curative purposes from ancient times to the present. Gioia’s inquiry into the restorative powers of sound moves effortlessly from the history of shamanism to the role of Orpheus as a mythical figure linking Eastern and Western ideas about therapeutic music, and from Native American healing ceremonies to what clinical studies can reveal about the efficacy of contemporary methods of sonic healing.
Gioia considers a broad range of therapies, providing a thoughtful, impartial guide to their histories and claims, their successes and failures. He examines a host of New Age practices, including toning, Cymatics, drumming circles, and the Tomatis method. And he explores how the medical establishment has begun to recognize and incorporate the therapeutic power of song. Acknowledging that the drumming circle will not—and should not—replace the emergency room, nor the shaman the cardiologist, Gioia suggests that the most promising path is one in which both the latest medical science and music—with its capacity to transform attitudes and bring people together—are brought to bear on the multifaceted healing process.
In Healing Songs, as in its companion volume Work Songs, Gioia moves beyond studies of music centered on specific performers, time periods, or genres to illuminate how music enters into and transforms the experiences of everyday life.
The psychological professions pervasive in twentieth-century American society were viewed as dangerous by some religious communities. Healing Souls describes the LDS community's mixed feelings about science and modernity: while valuing knowledge, Mormons feared a challenge to faith. Nonetheless, psychology courses were introduced at Brigham Young University, and LDS psychotherapists began to introduce new ideas and practices to the community.
Swedin portrays the rise of professional organizations such as the Association of Mormon Counselors and Psychotherapists, as well as the importance of Allen E. Bergin, first director of the BYU Institute for Studies in Values and Human Behavior. Bergin and others paved the way for the LDS adoption of professional psychotherapy as an essential element of their "cure of souls."
Important chapters take up LDS psychopathology, feminist dissent, LDS philosophies of sexuality, and the LDS rejection of mainstream psychotherapy's selfist psychology on the basis of theological doctrines of family salvation, eternalism, and the natural man.
Healing Souls contributes to a more complete historical picture of the mental health professions in North America and a better understanding of how religious traditions and psychology have influenced each other.
“Esther Sternberg is a rare writer—a physician who healed herself…With her scientific expertise and crystal clear prose, she illuminates how intimately the brain and the immune system talk to each other, and how we can use place and space, sunlight and music, to reboot our brains and move from illness to health.”—Gail Sheehy, author of Passages
Does the world make you sick? If the distractions and distortions around you, the jarring colors and sounds, could shake up the healing chemistry of your mind, might your surroundings also have the power to heal you? This is the question Esther Sternberg explores in Healing Spaces, a look at the marvelously rich nexus of mind and body, perception and place.
Sternberg immerses us in the discoveries that have revealed a complicated working relationship between the senses, the emotions, and the immune system. First among these is the story of the researcher who, in the 1980s, found that hospital patients with a view of nature healed faster than those without. How could a pleasant view speed healing? The author pursues this question through a series of places and situations that explore the neurobiology of the senses. The book shows how a Disney theme park or a Frank Gehry concert hall, a labyrinth or a garden can trigger or reduce stress, induce anxiety or instill peace.
If our senses can lead us to a “place of healing,” it is no surprise that our place in nature is of critical importance in Sternberg’s account. The health of the environment is closely linked to personal health. The discoveries this book describes point to possibilities for designing hospitals, communities, and neighborhoods that promote healing and health for all.
Over the last five decades, Black women have been one of the fastest-growing segments of the global prison population, thanks to changes in policies that mandate incarceration for nonviolent offenses and criminalize what women do to survive interpersonal and state violence. In The Healing Stage, Lisa Biggs reveals how four ensembles of currently and formerly incarcerated women and their collaborating artists use theater and performance to challenge harmful policies and popular discourses that justify locking up “bad” women. Focusing on prison-based arts programs in the US and South Africa, Biggs illustrates how Black feminist cultural traditions—theater, dance, storytelling, poetry, humor, and protest—enable women to investigate the root causes of crime and refute dominant narratives about incarcerated women. In doing so, the arts initiatives that she writes about encourage individual and collective healing, a process of repair that exceeds state definitions of rehabilitation. These case studies offer powerful examples of how the labor of incarcerated Black women artists—some of the most marginalized and vulnerable people in our society—radically extends our knowledge of prison arts programs and our understanding of what is required to resolve human conflicts and protect women’s lives.
This timely book explores the troubled intertwining of religion, medicine, empire, and race relations in the early nineteenth century. John Rankin analyzes the British use of medicine in West Africa as a tool to usher in a “softer” form of imperialism, considers how British colonial officials, missionaries, and doctors regarded Africans, and explores the impact of race classification on colonial constructs.
Rankin goes beyond contemporary medical theory, examining the practice of medicine in colonial Africa as Britons dealt with the challenges of providing health care to their civilian employees, African soldiers, and the increasing numbers of freed slaves in the general population, even while the imperialists themselves were threatened by a lack of British doctors and western medicines. As Rankin writes, “The medical system sought to not only heal Africans but to ‘uplift’ them and make them more amenable to colonial control . . . Colonialism starts in the mind and can be pushed on the other solely through ideological pressure.”
During the early 1990s, the ability of dangerous diseases to pass between animals and humans was brought once more to the public consciousness. These concerns continue to raise questions about how livestock diseases have been managed over time and in different social, economic, and political circumstances. Healing the Herds: Disease, Livestock Economies, and the Globalization of Veterinary Medicine brings together case studies from the Americas, western Europe, and the European and Japanese colonies to illustrate how the rapid growth of the international trade in animals through the nineteenth century engendered the spread of infectious diseases, sometimes with devastating consequences for indigenous pastoral societies. At different times and across much of the globe, livestock epidemics have challenged social order and provoked state interventions, often opposed by farmers and herders. The intensification of agriculture has transformed environments, with consequences for animal and human health.
But the last two centuries have also witnessed major changes in the way societies have conceptualized diseases and sought to control them. From the late nineteenth century, advances in veterinary technologies afforded veterinary scientists a new professional status and allowed them to wield greater political influence. While older methods have remained important to strategies of control and prevention, as demonstrated during the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain in 2001, the rise of germ theories and the discovery of vaccines against some infections made it possible to move beyond the blunt tools of animal culls and restrictive quarantines of the past. Healing the Herds: Disease, Livestock Economies, and the Globalization of Veterinary Medicine offers a new and exciting comparative approach to the complex interrelationships of microbes, markets, and medicine in the global economy.
Taking its title from a Jewish public health mantra, Healing the Land and the Nation situates antimalarial medicine and politics within larger colonial histories. By analyzing the science alongside the politics of Jewish settlement, Sufian addresses contested questions of social organization and the effects of land reclamation upon the indigenous Palestinian population in a decidedly innovative way. The book will be of great interest to scholars of the Middle East, Jewish studies, and environmental history, as well as to those studying colonialism, nationalism, and public health and medicine.
In August 2004, South Africa officially sought to legally recognize the practice of traditional healers. Largely in response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and limited both by the number of practitioners and by patients’ access to treatment, biomedical practitioners looked toward the country’s traditional healers as important agents in the development of medical education and treatment. This collaboration has not been easy. The two medical cultures embrace different ideas about the body and the origin of illness, but they do share a history of commercial and ideological competition and different relations to state power. Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820–1948 provides a long-overdue historical perspective to these interactions and an understanding that is vital for the development of medical strategies to effectively deal with South Africa’s healthcare challenges.
Between 1820 and 1948 traditional healers in Natal, South Africa, transformed themselves from politically powerful men and women who challenged colonial rule and law into successful entrepreneurs who competed for turf and patients with white biomedical doctors and pharmacists. To understand what is “traditional” about traditional medicine, Flint argues that we must consider the cultural actors and processes not commonly associated with African therapeutics: white biomedical practitioners, Indian healers, and the implementing of white rule.
Carefully crafted, well written, and powerfully argued, Flint’s analysis of the ways that indigenous medical knowledge and therapeutic practices were forged, contested, and transformed over two centuries is highly illuminating, as is her demonstration that many “traditional” practices changed over time. Her discussion of African and Indian medical encounters opens up a whole new way of thinking about the social basis of health and healing in South Africa. This important book will be core reading for classes and future scholarship on health and healing in Africa.
By visiting the sites, gathering local historical accounts, interviewing local citizens, and photographing remaining artifacts, Bullard has done a masterful job in providing the answers to why these vibrant social centers came to be and why they faded.
Acacia (Cassie, Acacia)
Achillea (Yarrow)
Agastache (Giant Hyssop)
Agave (Century Plant)
Allium (Garlic, Onion)
Aloe (Aloe)
Ambrosia (Ragweed)
Anemopsis (Yerba Mansa)
Arctostaphylos (Bearberry, Uva Ursi)
Argemone (Prickly Poppy)
Aristolochia (Bithwort, Snakeroot)
Arracacia (Arracacha)
Artemisia (Wormwood, Mugwort, Western Mugwort, Sagebrush)
Asclepias (Milkweed)
Baccharis (Desert Broom, Seep Willow)
Bocconia (Tree Celandine)
Buddleia (Butterfly Bush)
Bursera (Elephant Tree)
Caesalpinia (Mexican Bird-of-Paradise)
Cannabis (Marijuana)
Capsicum (Chili)
Carnegiea (Saguaro)
Casimiroa (Zapote)
Cassia (Senna)
Cereus (Cactus)
Chenopodium (Goosefoot, Wormseed)
Citrus (Lemon, Lime, Orange)
Datura (Jimson Weed)
Ephedra (Mormon Tea)
Equisetum (Horsetail)
Eryngium (Eryngo, Button Snakeroot)
Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus)
Euphorbia (Spurge)
Eysenhardtia (Kidneywood)
Gnaphalium (Everlasting, Cudweed)
Guaiacum (Lignum Vitae)
Guazuma (Guazuma)
Gutierrezia (Turpentine Bush)
Haematoxylon (Logwood)
Haplopappus (Jimmyweed)
Heterotheca (Telegraph Plant, Falso Arnica)
Hintonia (Copalqu¡n)
Ibervillea (Coyote Melon)
Jacquinia (Jacquinia)
Jatropha (Limberbush)
Juniperus (Juniper)
Karwinskia (Coffeeberry)
Kohleria (Tree Gloxinia)
Krameria (Ratany)
Lantana (Lantana)
Larrea (Creosote Bush, Greasewood)
Ligusticum (Lovage)
Lippia (Oregano)
Lysiloma (Featherbush)
Malva (Mallow)
Mammillaria (Pincushion Cactus)
Mascagnia (Mascagnia)
Matricaria (Chamomile)
Mentha (Mint)
Nicotiana (Tobacco)
Ocimum (Basil)
Opuntia (Cholla, Prickly Pear)
Perezia (Perezia)
Persea (Avocado)
Phaseolus (Bean)
Phoradendron, Stru
Health and Community Design is a comprehensive examination of how the built environment encourages or discourages physical activity, drawing together insights from a range of research on the relationships between urban form and public health. It provides important information about the factors that influence decisions about physical activity and modes of travel, and about how land use patterns can be changed to help overcome barriers to physical activity. Chapters examine:
• why urban and suburban development should be designed to promote moderate types of physical activity
• the divergent needs and requirements of different groups of people and the role of those needs in setting policy
• how different settings make it easier or more difficult to incorporate walking and bicycling into everyday activities
A new model of health emerged in Britain between 1870 and 1939. Centered on the working body, organized around the concept of efficiency, and grounded in scientific understandings of human labor, scientists, politicians, and capitalists of the era believed that national economic productivity could be maximized by transforming the body of the worker into a machine. At the core of this approach was the conviction that worker productivity was intimately connected to worker health.
Under this new “science of work,” fatigue was seen as the ultimate pathology of the working-class body, reducing workers’ capacity to perform continued physical or mental labor. As Steffan Blayney shows, the equation between health and efficiency did not go unchallenged. While biomedical and psychological experts sought to render the body measurable, governable, and intelligible, ordinary men and women found ways to resist the logics of productivity and efficiency imposed on them, and to articulate alternative perspectives on work, health, and the body.
In this seminal collection of articles on health care in the Third World, sociological perspectives are applied to medical issues in revealing ways. Fourteen essays (all but two of which are original to this volume) examine the social production of health, disease, and systems of care throughout the developing world. The volume covers a range of areas—central Africa, Nigeria, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, Nepal, China, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Mexico—and a broad scope of topics, from emergency care, the AIDS epidemic, and women's health care, to public health programs and national health care policies.
Contributors address the central question of whether health systems in developing areas should emphasize the role of clinical medicine and individual physicians or community and preventive medical resources. The major health problems faced by these societies—inadequate sanitation, infectious disease, high infant-child mortality, and a lack of family planning—indicate the greater need for health educators and public health workers despite many poor nations' desire for Western doctors. Other topics that are examined include the process of seeking medical aid; the relationship between traditional and modern medicines; medical education, hospital care, and communication between doctors and patients in developing countries; and the relevance and application of sociology in Third World settings.
This volume seeks to draw attention to the significance of medical sociology for understanding Third World health problems and to show how examining developing societies may necessitate reframing or modifying some Western sociological notions. In addition, these essays stretch the boundaries of medical sociology to include Third World issues.
What, exactly, does it mean to be human? It is an age-old question, one for which theology, philosophy, science, and medicine have all provided different answers. But though a unified response to the question can no longer be taken for granted, how we answer it frames the wide range of different norms, principles, values, and intuitions that characterize today's bioethical discussions. If we don't know what it means to be human, how can we judge whether biomedical sciences threaten or enhance our humanity?
This fundamental question, however, receives little attention in the study of bioethics. In a field consumed with the promises and perils of new medical discoveries, emerging technologies, and unprecedented social change, current conversations about bioethics focus primarily on questions of harm and benefit, patient autonomy, and equality of health care distribution. Prevailing models of medical ethics emphasize human capacity for self-control and self-determination, rarely considering such inescapable dimensions of the human condition as disability, loss, and suffering, community and dignity, all of which make it difficult for us to be truly independent.
In Health and Human Flourishing, contributors from a wide range of disciplines mine the intersection of the secular and the religious, the medical and the moral, to unearth the ethical and clinical implications of these facets of human existence. Their aim is a richer bioethics, one that takes into account the roles of vulnerability, dignity, integrity, and relationality in human affliction as well as human thriving. Including an examination of how a theological anthropology—a theological understanding of what it means to be a human being—can help us better understand health care, social policy, and science, this thought-provoking anthology will inspire much-needed conversation among philosophers, theologians, and health care professionals.
Contributors. Warwick Anderson, Charlotte Furth, Marta E. Hanson, Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, Angela Ki Che Leung, Shang-Jen Li, Yushang Li, Yi-Ping Lin, Shiyung Liu, Ruth Rogaski, Yen-Fen Tseng, Chia-ling Wu, Xinzhong Yu
"Gilman tells an excellent tale."—Jewish Chronicle
To that end, this book draws on new data-an extensive longitudinal survey of Union Army veterans born between 1820 and 1850-to examine the factors that affected health and labor force participation in nineteenth-century America. Contributors consider the impacts of a variety of conditions-including social class, wealth, occupation, family, and community-on the morbidity and mortality of the group. The papers investigate and address a number of special topics, including the influence of previous exposure to infectious disease, migration, and community factors such as lead in water mains. They also analyze the roles of income, health, and social class in retirement decisions, paying particular attention to the social context of disability.
Economists and historians who specialize in demography or labor, as well as those who study public health, will welcome the unique contributions offered by this book, which offers a clearer view than ever before of the workings and complexities of life, death, and labor during the nineteenth century.
Health and Social Change in International Perspective brings together an unprecedented interdisciplinary series of approaches to understanding the social dimensions of health change around the world. The seventeen contributors—demographers, epidemiologists, economists, anthropologists, public health scientists—are among the intellectual leaders of efforts to respond to the world’s health challenges.
Moving beyond the limits of established theories about demographic and epidemiologic transition, this book offers broad explorations of the social causes and consequences of health change. Consensus is reached on some matters, but critical debate and controversy predominate in others. The authors address several critical questions: What are the forms and structures of health transitions? Do these changes assume universally consistent patterns, or are health transitions particularistic, reflecting space, time, and community? What are the methodological issues in definition and measurement? And how can understanding improve health policy, interventions, and the research agenda?
Exploring new frontiers of a vital topic, Health and Social Change in International Perspective is an invaluable resource for social and health scientists working to understand world health change.
Assessing rhetorical principles of contemporary health issues
Hypochondriacs are vulnerable to media hype, anorexics are susceptible to public scrutiny, and migraine sufferers are tainted with the history of the “migraine personality,” maintains rhetorical theorist Judy Z. Segal. All are influenced by the power of persuasion.
Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine explores persistent health conditions that resist conventional medical solutions. Using a range of rhetorical principles, Segal analyzes how patients and their illnesses are formed within the physician/patient relationship. The intractable problem of a patient’s rejection of a doctor’s advice, says Segal, can be considered a rhetorical failure—a failure of persuasion.
Examining the discourse of medicine through case studies, applications, and analyses, Segal illustrates how illnesses are described in ways that limit
patients’ choices and satisfaction. She also illuminates psychiatric conditions, infectious diseases, genetic testing, and cosmetic surgeries through the lens of rhetorical theory.
Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine bridges critical analysis for scholarly, professional, and lay audiences. Segal highlights the persuasive element in diagnosis, health policy, illness experience, and illness narratives. She also addresses questions of direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs, the role of health information in creating the “worried well” and problems of trust and expertise in physician/patient relationships. A useful resource for critical common sense in everyday life, the text provides an effective examination of a society increasingly influenced by the rhetoric of health and medicine.
The essays incorporate several indicators of quality of life, especially real per capita income and health, but also real wages, education, and inequality. And while the authors use traditional measures of health such as life expectancy and mortality rates, this volume stands alone in its extensive use of new "anthropometric" data—information about height, weight and body mass index that indicates changes in nations' well-being. Consequently, Health and Welfare during Industrialization signals a new direction in economic history, a broader and more thorough understanding of what constitutes standard of living.
Health and Work Productivity presents state-of-the-art health and productivity research that suggests interventions aimed at prevention, early detection, and best-practice treatment of workers along with an informed allocation strategy can produce significant cost-benefits for employers. Contributors cover all the major aspects of this new area of research: approaches to studying the effects of health on productivity, ways for employers to estimate the costs of productivity loss, concrete suggestions for future research developments in the area, and the implications of this research for public policy.
This breakthrough volume argues that educational attainment, high socioeconomic status, an older retirement age, and accessible medical care have improved the health and quality of life of seniors. Along the way, it outlines the economic benefits of disability decline, such as an increased rate of seniors in the workplace, relief for the healthcare system and care-giving families, and reduced medical expenses for the elderly themselves. Health at Older Ages will be an essential contribution to the debate about meeting the medical needs of an aging nation.
David M. Craig traveled across the United States to assess health care access, delivery and finance in this country. He interviewed religious hospital administrators and interfaith activists, learning how they balance the values of economic efficiency and community accountability. He met with conservatives, liberals, and moderates, reviewing their ideas for market reform or support for the Affordable Care Act. He discovered that health care in the US is not a private good or a public good. Decades of public policy and philanthropic service have made health care a shared social good.
Health Care as a Social Good: Religious Values and the American Democracy argues that as escalating health costs absorb more and more of family income and government budgets, we need to take stock of the full range of health care values to create a different and more affordable community-based health care system. Transformation of that system is a national priority but Americans have failed to find a way to work together that bypasses our differences. Craig insists that community engagement around the common religious conviction that healing is a shared responsibility can help us achieve this transformation—one that will not only help us realize a new and better system, but one that reflects the ideals of American democracy and the common good.
In this concise, straightforward analysis, Jost challenges the historical and theoretical assumptions on which the consumer-driven health care movement is based and reexamines the empirical evidence that it claims as support. He traces the histories of both private health insurance in the United States and the CDHC movement. The idea animating the drive for consumer-driven health care is that the fundamental problem with the American health care system is what economists call “moral hazard,” the risk that consumers overuse services for which they do not bear the cost. Jost reveals moral hazard as an inadequate explanation of the complex problems plaguing the American health care system, and he points to troubling legal and ethical issues raised by CDHC. He describes how other countries have achieved universal access to high-quality health care at lower cost, without relying extensively on cost sharing, and he concludes with a proposal for how the United States might do the same, incorporating aspects of CDHC while recognizing its limitations.
Health Care Ethics is a comprehensive study of significant issues affecting health care and the ethics of health care from the perspective of Catholic theology. It aims to help Christian, and especially Catholic, health care professionals solve concrete problems in terms of principles rooted in scripture and tested by individual experience; however, its basis in real medical experience makes this book a valuable resource for anyone with a general interest in health care ethics.
This fifth edition, which includes important contributions by Jean deBlois, C.S.J., considers everyday ethical questions and dilemmas in clinical care and deals more deeply with issues of women's health, mental health, sexual orientation, artificial reproduction, and the new social issues in health care. The authors devote special attention to the various ethical theories currently in use in the United States while clearly presenting a method of ethical decision making based in the Catholic tradition. They discuss the needs of the human person, outlining what it means to be human, both as an individual and as part of a community.
This volume has been significantly updated to include new discussions of recent clinical innovations and theoretical issues that have arisen in the field:
• the Human Genome Project• efforts to control sexual selection of infants• efforts to genetically modify the human genotype and phenotype• the development of palliative care as a medical specialty• the acceptance of non-heart beating persons as organ donors• embryo development and stem cell research• reconstructive and cosmetic surgery• nutrition and obesity• medical mistakes• the negative effects of managed care on the patient-physician relationship• recent papal allocution regarding care of patients in a persistent vegetative state and palliative care for dying patients
This fourth edition of Health Care Ethics provides a contemporary study of broad and major issues affecting health care and the ethics of health care from the perspective of Catholic teachings and theological investigation.
It aims to help Christian, and especially Catholic, health care professionals solve concrete problems in terms of principles rooted in Scripture and tested by individual experience.
Since the last edition of Health Care Ethics, there have been many changes in the fields of health care medicine and theology that have necessitated a fourth edition. Ashley and O'Rourke have revised their seminal work to address the publication of significant documents by the Church and the restructuring of the health care system.
Features of the revised fourth edition:
• Discusses significant Church documents issued since the third edition includes "The Splendor of Truth" (Veritatis Splendor), and the "Gospel of Life" (Evangelium Vitae); the "Instruction on the Vocation of Theologians"; the Catechism of the Catholic Church; and the Revised Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Services.
• Examines the implications of managed care techniques.
• Probes such changes in the practice of medicine as the new emphasis on preventive care, the involvement of individuals in their own care, greater use of pharmaceuticals in psychiatry, and the greater role of genetics in diagnosis and prognosis.
• Explores the quest for more compassionate care of the dying.
• Updates the bibliography.
Recent data show wide disparity between Japan and the United States in the effectiveness of their health care systems. Japan spends close to the lowest percentage of its gross domestic product on health care among OECD countries, the United States spends the highest, yet life expectancies in Japan are among the world’s longest. Clearly, a great deal can be learned from a comprehensive comparative analysis of health care issues in these two countries.
In Health Care Issues in the United States and Japan, contributors explore the structural characteristics of the health care systems in both nations, the economic incentives underlying the systems, and how they operate in practice. Japan’s system, they show, is characterized by generous insurance schemes, a lack of gatekeepers, and fee-for-service mechanisms. The United States’ structure, on the other hand, is distinguished by for-profit hospitals, privatized health insurance, and managed care. But despite its relative success, an aging population and a general shift from infectious diseases to more chronic maladies are forcing the Japanese to consider a model more closely resembling that of the United States.
In an age when rising health care costs and aging populations are motivating reforms throughout the world, this timely study will prove invaluable.
If we can decode the human genome and fashion working machines out of atoms, why can't we navigate the quagmire that is our health care system? In this important new book, Julius Richmond and Rashi Fein recount the fraught history of health care in America since the 1960s. After the advent of Medicare and Medicaid and with the progressive goal to make advances in medical care available to all, medical costs began their upward spiral. Cost control measures failed and led to the HMO revolution, turning patients into consumers and doctors into providers. The swelling ranks of Americans without any insurance at all dragged the United States to the bottom of the list of industrialized nations.
Over the last century medical education was also profoundly transformed into today's powerful triumvirate of academic medical centers, schools of medicine and public health, and research programs, all of which have shaped medical practice and medical care. The authors show how the promises of medical advances have not been matched either by financing or by delivery of care.
As a new crisis looms, and the existing patchwork of insurance is poised to unravel, American leaders must again take up the question of health care. This book brings the voice of reason and the promise of compromise to that debate.
This book illuminates issues in medical ethics revolving around the complex bond between healer and patient, focusing on friendship and other important values in the healing relationship. Embracing medicine, philosophy, theology, and bioethics, it considers whether bioethical issues in medicine, nursing, and dentistry can be examined from the perspective of the healing relationship rather than external moral principles.
Distinguished contributors explore the role of the health professional, the moral basis of health care, greater emphasis on the humanities in medical education, and some of the current challenges facing healers today.
Arguing that health care should be a human right rather than a commodity, the distinguished contributors to this volume call for a new social covenant establishing a right to a standard of health care consistent with society's level of resources. By linking rights with limits, they offer a framework for seeking national consensus on a cost-conscious standard of universal medical care. The authors identify the policy implications of recognizing and implementing such a right and develop specific criteria to measure the success of health care reform from a human rights perspective.
Health Care Reform also offers specific and timely criticism of managed competition and its offspring, the Clinton plan for health care reform. Because health care reform will inevitably be an ongoing process of assessment and revision—especially since managed competition has not been implemented elsewhere—this book will last beyond the moment by providing vital standards to guide the future evolution of the health care system.
The Health Care Safety Net in a Post-Reform World examines how national health care reform will impact safety net programs that serve low-income and uninsured patients. The “safety net” refers to the collection of hospitals, clinics, and doctors who treat disadvantaged people, including those without insurance, regardless of their ability to pay. Despite comprehensive national health care reform, over twenty million people will remain uninsured. And many of those who obtain insurance from reform will continue to face shortages of providers in their communities willing or able to serve them. As the demand for care grows with expanded insurance, so will the pressure on an overstretched safety net.
This book, with contributions from leading health care scholars, is the first comprehensive assessment of the safety net in over a decade. Rather than view health insurance and the health care safety net as alternatives to each other, it examines their potential to be complementary aspects of a broader effort to achieve equity and quality in health care access. It also considers whether the safety net can be improved and strengthened to a level that can provide truly universal access, both through expanded insurance and the creation of a well-integrated and reasonably supported network of direct health care access for the uninsured.
Seeing safety net institutions as key components of post-health care reform in the United States—as opposed to stop-gap measures or as part of the problem—is a bold idea. And as presented in this volume, it is an idea whose time has come.
The role of American hospital expansions in health disparities and medical apartheid
Health Colonialism considers how U.S. urban development policies contribute to the uneven and unjust distribution of health care in this country. Here, Shiloh Krupar investigates the racially inequitable effects of elite U.S. hospitals on their surrounding neighborhoods and their role in consolidating frontiers of land primed for redevelopment.
Naming this frontier “medical brownfields,” Krupar shows how hospitals leverage their domestic real estate empires to underwrite international prospecting for patients and overseas services and specialty clinics. Her pointed analysis reveals that decolonizing health care efforts must scrutinize the land practices of nonprofit medical institutions and the liberal foundations of medical apartheid perpetuated by globalizing American health care.
From the health risks of sexual activity to those of pregnancy, abortion, and childbirth, reproduction constitutes enormous risks to a woman’s health. Ill-health conditions related to sex and reproduction account for 25 percent of the global disease burden in adult women. In sub-Saharan Africa, they account for over 40 percent. The catastrophic effects of reproductive ill-health, however, are not limited to women; for infants and adult men, they inflict 25 percent and 1 percent respectively of the global burden.
This volume offers comprehensive data and detailed discussions of the epidemiologies of three sexually transmitted diseases, HIV, and five specific maternal conditions, as well as those of congenital anomalies and perinatal conditions. Projections of the HIV epidemic are provided: by 2020 HIV is projected to double to 2.5 percent of the global disease burden.
Health Dimensions of Sex and Reproduction will serve as a comprehensive reference for epidemiologists, public health specialists, practitioners and advocates of STD and HIV prevention, and reproductive and neonatal health.
In the 1850s, "Drapetomania" was the medical term for a disease found among black slaves in the United States. The main symptom was a strange desire to run away from their masters. In earlier centuries gout was understood as a metabolic disease of the affluent, so much so that it became a badge of uppercrust honor—and a medical excuse to avoid hard work. Today, is there such a thing as mental illness, or is mental illness just a myth? Is Alzheimer's really a disease? What is menopause—a biological or a social construction?
Historically one can see that health, disease, and illness are concepts that have been ever fluid. Modern science, sociology, philosophy, even society—among other factors—constantly have these issues under microscopes, learning more, defining and redefining ever more exactly. Yet often that scrutiny, instead of leading toward hard answers, only leads to more questions. Health, Disease, and Illness brings together a sterling list of classic and contemporary thinkers to examine the history, state, and future of ever-changing "concepts" in medicine.
Divided into four parts—Historical Discussions; Characterizing Health, Disease, and Illness; Clinical Applications of Health and Disease; and Normalcy, Genetic Disease, and Enhancement: The Future of the Concepts of Health and Disease—the reader can see the evolutionary arc of medical concepts from the Greek physician Galen of Pergamum (ca. 150 ce) who proposed that "the best doctor is also a philosopher," to contemporary discussions of the genome and morality. The editors have recognized a crucial need for a deeper integration of medicine and philosophy with each other, particularly in an age of dynamically changing medical science—and what it means, medically, philosophically, to be human.
In Health Humanities Reader, editors Therese Jones, Delese Wear, and Lester D. Friedman have assembled fifty-four leading scholars, educators, artists, and clinicians to survey the rich body of work that has already emerged from the field—and to imagine fresh approaches to the health humanities in these original essays. The collection’s contributors reflect the extraordinary diversity of the field, including scholars from the disciplines of disability studies, history, literature, nursing, religion, narrative medicine, philosophy, bioethics, medicine, and the social sciences.
With warmth and humor, critical acumen and ethical insight, Health Humanities Reader truly humanizes the field of medicine. Its accessible language and broad scope offers something for everyone from the experienced medical professional to a reader interested in health and illness.
Janzen explores the manner in which power and information, including science, are legitimized in the preservation and improvement of health. Institutional validity and knowledge empower citizens and health practitioners to gain the upper hand over the region's principal diseases, including malaria, tuberculosis, typhoid, and HIV/AIDS.
The female inmate population in the United States has exploded in the past two decades, increasing nearly six-fold. The U.S. correctional system, however, has not expanded its health care to provide for this growing population of women. This comprehensive reader addresses the physical and mental needs of women inmates and suggests that they cannot be properly treated unless their lifestyles before, during, and after incarceration are considered.
This book abounds with statistics that outline the unique needs of the female inmate population. For instance, a significant proportion of female inmates suffer physical and sexual violence before serving time. Incarcerated teenagers are more likely than others from their age group to have engaged in behaviors that increased their risk for contracting sexually transmitted diseases like HIV. Because African American women are more likely than their counterparts to encounter prison time, their needs warrant specific attention.
Bringing together twenty original essays, this volume will be invaluable for lobbyists and policy makers as well as for graduate students and faculty in the fields of criminal justice and public health.
Unfortunately, most hospitals that have formed alliances with a previous competitor or nearby teaching facility have found that they are not yet achieving the savings originally forecast. Weil finds that these shortcomings often have been caused by the difficulties in achieving a strategic fit between two partners, in finding a middle ground when differences in culture and values surface, and in implementing operational efficiencies. The book concludes with a discussion of a number of ways in which networks might cut costs in the future.
Health Networks will be of interest to medical practitioners and administrators, as well as to students in health services management programs.
Thomas P. Weil is President, Bedford Health Associates, Inc., management consultants for health and hospital services.
“The history of medicine in Pennsylvania is no less vital to understanding the state’s past than is its political or industrial history,” writes James Higgins in The Health of the Commonwealth, his overview of medicine and public health in the state. Covering the outbreak of yellow fever in 1793 through the 1976 Legionnaire’s Disease epidemic, and the challenges of the present day, he shows how Pennsylvania has played a central role in humanity’s understanding of—and progress against—disease.
Higgins provides close readings of specific medical advances—for instance, scientists at the University of Pittsburgh discovered the polio vaccine—and of disease outbreaks, like AIDS. He examines sanitation and water purification efforts, allopathic medicine and alternative therapies, and the building of the state’s tuberculosis sanitaria. Higgins also describes Native American and pre-modern European folk medicine, the rise of public health in the state, and women’s roles in both folk and scientific medicine.
The Health of the Commonwealth places Pennsylvania’s unique contribution to the history of public health and medicine in a larger narrative of health and disease throughout the United States and the world.
Focusing on the particular needs of disadvantaged groups—the elderly, children, people with AIDS, the mentally ill, the chemically dependent, the homeless, the hungry, the medically uninsured—these essays develop strong policy statements. The authors describe the growth in U.S. health care programs, from Kerr-Mills to Medicare, Medicaid, and subsequent revisions, and stress the serious omissions resulting from incremental policy expansion, both in identifying disadvantaged groups and in implementing programs. They report the weakness of the U.S. health care system compared to systems of other technologically developed countries.
Contributors. Deborah A. Stone and Theodore R. Marmor, Judith Feder, Alice Sardell, Bruce C. Vladeck, Michael Lipsky and Marc A. Thibodeau, Daniel M. Fox, William E. McAuliffe, M. Gregg Bloche and Francine Cournos, Lawrence D. Brown, James A. Morrone
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