A thirteenth-century treatise on the theory and practice of ophthalmology, this unique work provides a window on what passed for medical knowledge of the eye during the late Middle Ages. Although little is known of the author, Benevenutus Grassus, he seems to have roamed Italy in the early thirteenth century as a medical practitioner specializing in diseases of the eye.

One out of every eight people between the ages of 18 and 67 in the United States has a hearing loss, estimated as 12 percent of the working-age population. Sound Sense: Living and Learning with Hearing Loss addresses the acute need of these people to function at the highest level in these income-earning years, the longest phase in their lives. In nine pointed chapters, author Sara Laufer Batinovich, who also has lost her hearing, shares her experience and knowledge in turning every challenge into an opportunity to become one’s best self-advocate.

Batinovich begins in the workplace, advising on winning a job, keeping it, and developing a long-term career, plus how to reduce stress and establish fulfilling professional relationships with colleagues. She offers tips on communication ranging from having sales people face you for easier speechreading to parsing boarding announcements at airports and play-by-play at ballparks. Her practical handbook also provides step-by-step guidance for getting a hearing aid or a cochlear implant and finding one’s way through prickly insurance claim mazes.

Sound Sense features information on finding a service dog, securing legally mandated accommodations for continuing education, tips on exercise and health, and even sensitive suggestions on strengthening personal relationships. Batinovich’s vivacious style and her own anecdotes add an upbeat, genuine sensibility to her book’s value as a positive guide to living with hearing loss.

People who are hard of hearing and their friends and relatives now can learn all they need to know about hearing loss in this easy to read guide. Newly updated and revised, Living with Hearing Loss takes the reader from A to Z on the kinds and causes of hearing loss and its common early signs. Written by Marcia B. Dugan, past president of Self Help for Hard of Hearing People (SHHH), this straightforward book provides thorough information on seeking professional evaluations and complete descriptions of hearing aids and other assistive technologies. Enhanced sections on the potential of cochlear implants and dealing with tinnitus distinguishes this very useful handbook. Readers also can take advantage of updated information on relevant Internet sites and a new list of resources on dealing with hearing loss.

Living with Hearing Loss also suggests strategies for everyday situations and times of emergency. Chapters on speechreading, oral interpreters, assertive communication, and other tips for improving communication can enable people with hearing loss to make changes at work, home, and while traveling to cope with most situations. It can raise significantly the quality of the lives of hard of hearing people while also helping them to avoid dependency upon others.

"Why doesn't she just open up her ears and listen?" Few physical problems are as poorly understood as hearing loss. In Missed Connections, a new kind of  self-help book that combines sociological reporting with personal reflection, sociologist Barbara Stenross examines what hearing loss feels like to those who have it and which technologies and strategies can improve communication at home and in public.

Based on seven  years of research, Stenross's book tells of how -- as she sought information and solutions to help her hard-of-hearing father -- she came  to join a community group called Village Self Help for Hard of Hearing People. Taking us along to group meetings and into the homes of members, Stenross shows us -- through the personal accounts of these individuals -- the exhaustion that comes from constantly straining to listen, the frustration of missing critical comments or the or the punchlines of jokes, and the pain that hard-of-hearing family members experience when loved ones accuse them of hearing "when they want to." Full of scenes, dialogues, and conversations, Missed Connections also discusses such practical issues as how people with impaired hearing can continues to use the phone, how assistive technologies can help in public and private, why hearing aids can't always do enough, and how bluffing and silence can hurt more than help. Understanding that when one family member is hard of hearing, the whole family can suffer from "missed connections," Stenross offers in this book a useful family resource with a broad range of practical guidance.

With chapters on belonging and acceptance, do's and don'ts in public, lip-reading, hearing aids, and television, Missed Connections will interest a range of readers including deaf and hard-of-hearing people -- as well as their families, teachers, friends, employers, and counselors -- healthcare professionals, scholars, and others interested in the experience of and solutions for disability and hearing loss.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Menand begins this wide-ranging volume with an essay that extols diversity and warns of the dangers of modifying the human genome. Nora Groce reviews the ways that societies have defined disability and creates an interpretive framework for discussing the relationship between culture and disability.

     In essays devoted to historical perspective, Brian H. Greenwald comments upon the real “toll” taken by A. G. Bell’s insistence upon oralism, while Joseph J. Murray weighs the nineteenth-century debate over whether deaf-deaf marriages should be encouraged. John S. Schuchman’s chilling account of deafness and eugenics in the Nazi era adds wrenching reinforcement to the impetus to include disabled people in genetics debates.

     Mark Willis offers an intensely personal reflection on the complexities of genetic alteration, addressing both his heart condition and his blindness in surprisingly different ways. Anna Middleton extends Willis’s concepts in her discussion of couples currently considering the use of genetic knowledge and technology to select for or against a gene that causes deafness.

     In the part on the science of genetics, Orit Dagan, Karen B. Avraham, Kathleen S. Arnos, and Arti Pandya clarify the choices presented by genetic engineering, and geneticist Walter E. Nance emphasizes the importance of science in offering individuals knowledge from which they can fashion their own decisions. In the concluding section, Christopher Krentz raises moral questions about the ever-continuing search for human perfection, and Michael Bérubé argues that disability should be considered democratically to ensure full participation of disabled people in all decisions that might affect them.

In graduating from Gallaudet University, finding a job in Washington, D.C., and starting a family with her college sweetheart, Kitty Fischer tacitly abandoned the Louisiana Cajun culture that had exposed her to little more than prejudice and misery as a child. Upon discovering that she suffered from Usher syndrome (a genetic condition that causes both deafness and blindness), however, Fischer began an unlikely journey toward reclaiming her heritage. She and Cathryn Carroll tell the story of her heroic struggle and cultural odyssey in Orchid of the Bayou: A Deaf Woman Faces Blindness.

“By this time Mama knew I was ‘not right,’” Fischer says of her early childhood. “She knew the real words for ‘not right,’ too, though she never said those words. I was deaf and dumb.” Initially Fischer’s parents turned to folk healers to try and “cure” their daughter’s deafness, but an aunt’s fortunate discovery of the Louisiana School for the Deaf would rescue Fischer from misunderstanding and introduce her to sign language and Deaf culture. She weathered the school’'s experiments with oralism and soon rose to the top of her class, ultimately leaving Louisiana for the academic promise of Gallaudet.

While in college, Fischer met and married her future husband, Lance, a Jewish Deaf man from Brooklyn, New York, and each landed jobs close to their alma mater. After the birth of their first child, however, Fischer could no longer ignore her increasing tunnel vision. Doctors quickly confirmed that Fischer had Usher syndrome.

While Fischer struggled to come to terms with her condition, the high incidence of Usher syndrome among Cajun people led her to re-examine her cultural roots. “Could I still be me, Catherine Hoffpauir Fischer, had I not been born of a mix that codes for Usher syndrome?” she asks. “To some extent, the history of my people explains the constitution of my genes and the way my life has unfolded.” Today Fischer prospers, enjoying her time with family and friends and celebrating the Deaf, Cajun, Blind, and Jewish cultures that populate her life. Her lively story will resonate with anyone who recognizes the arduous journey toward claiming an identity.

Deafened at the age of six, Claire Blatchford was educated orally with speech lessons, speechreading, and hearing aids. Though successful both professionally and domestically, at the age of 67 Blatchford decided to undergo a cochlear implantation. In this memoir, she describes in prose and verse living with a cochlear implant for the past three years.

 

     At first, Blatchford feared losing the last of her hearing through the surgical process. Her audiologist explained that her hearing was worsening and that soon she would move from profound deafness into a state called “cosmic deafness.” Blatchford decided upon the surgery in hope of meeting her hearing family on their turf, and of again hearing the wind, rain, rivers, and crickets. After being implanted, however, she realized that amplification and comprehension were two different things: at first, all she heard was a soup of sound, a condition known as being brain deaf.

The cochlear implant debate has changed, as evidenced in this cogent collection that presents 13 chapters by 20 experts, including several who communicate through sign language but also utilize cochlear implants. The impetus for this change stems from recognition that both visual and aural input can enhance the education of deaf children.

Divided into four sections, Cochlear Implants: Evolving Perspectives first focuses on the impact of implants in the Deaf community. Chapters in this section examine the issues driving the cochlear implant debate, the ethics of genetic engineering, experiences of implanted adult deaf signers, reflections of deaf mothers who have had their children implanted, and the effects of implants on deaf identity. The second section delves into the mechanics of bimodal processing, including listening strategies that can benefit signing children with cochlear implants. The third section surveys combined aural/visual educational approaches, such as teaching implanted children in an ASL/English bilingual classroom, and applying auditory rehabilitation to a signed communication context.

The final section challenges readers to reframe the debate first by exploring sensory politics, then by envisioning an emerging world that requires the Deaf community to connect with it to secure its future. With this information, readers will reach their own conclusions about cochlear implants and auditory and visual approaches to the mastery of both spoken and signed languages.

With the rate of cochlear implantation reaching 80% to 90% of all deaf children, some as young as five months old, Surgical Consent: Bioethics and Cochlear Implantation arrives at a critical juncture. This comprehensive collection features essays by Priscilla Alderson, Inger Lise Skog Hansen, Hilde Haualand, volume editor Linda Komesaroff, Paddy Ladd, Harlan Lane, Karen Lloyd, Eithne Mills, Paal Richard Peterson, Gunilla Preisler, Kristina Svartholm, and Michael Uniacke. These worldwide renowned ethicists, educators, and Deaf leaders express their diverse perspectives on the bioethics of childhood cochlear implantation according to their discipline and a number of themes of inquiry: human rights, medical and social ethics, psychology, education, globalization, identity, life pathways, democracy, media, law, and biotechnology.

Drawing on current research, this volume presents the varying reactions around the globe to the high rate of implantation. These views contrast sharply with the medical perspective of deafness overwhelmingly promoted through the media and by the cochlear implantation industry. At the same time, the contributors aim to disrupt the binaries that have long dominated the field of deafness — speech versus sign, instruction through speech and sign systems versus bilingual education, and medical intervention versus cultural membership in the Deaf community.

Surgical Consent begins and ends with the voices of Deaf people. Their articulate and, at times, raw insights clearly delineate the issues of power, positioning, and minority-majority group relations that are inherent in the dominant hearing culture’s understanding of diversity and globalization.

Dr. James Burt believed women’s bodies were broken, and only he could fix them. In the 1950s, this Ohio OB-GYN developed what he called “love surgery,” a unique procedure he maintained enhanced the sexual responses of a new mother, transforming her into “a horny little house mouse.” Burt did so without first getting the consent of his patients. Yet he was allowed to practice for over thirty years, mutilating hundreds of women in the process.

It would be easy to dismiss Dr. Burt as a monstrous aberration, a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein. Yet as medical historian Sarah Rodriguez reveals, that’s not the whole story. The Love Surgeon asks tough questions about Burt’s heinous acts and what they reveal about the failures of the medical establishment: How was he able to perform an untested surgical procedure? Why wasn’t he obliged to get informed consent from his patients? And why did it take his peers so long to take action?

The Love Surgeon is both a medical horror story and a cautionary tale about the limits of professional self-regulation.

Diverse Observations is a groundbreaking book available for the first time in English. Written by a midwife committed to improving the care of women and newborns, it records the evolution of Bourgeois’s practice and beliefs, comments on changing attitudes related to reproductive health, and critiques the gendered elitism of the early modern medical hierarchy

In Public Privates, a book about looking and being looked at, about speculums, spectacles, and spectators, about display, illumination, and reflection, Terri Kapsalis makes visible the practices and representations of gynecology. The quintessential examination of women, gynecology is not simply the study of women’s bodies, but also serves to define and constitute them. Any critical analysis of gynecology is therefore, as Kapsalis affirms, an investigation of what it means to be female. In this respect she considers the public exposure of female "privates" in the performance of the pelvic exam.
From J. Marion Sims’s surgical experiments on unanesthetized slave women in the mid-nineteenth century, to the use of cadavers and prostitutes to teach medical students gynecological techniques, Kapsalis focuses on the ways in which women and their bodies have been treated by the medical establishment. Removing gynecology from its private cover within clinic walls and medical textbook pages, she decodes the gynecological exam, seizing on its performative dimension. She considers traditional medical practices and the dynamics of "proper" patient performance; non-traditional practices such as cervical self-exam; and incarnations of the pelvic examination outside the bounds of medicine, including its appearance in David Cronenberg’s film Dead Ringers and Annie Sprinkle’s performance piece "Public Cervix Announcement."
Confounding the boundaries that separate medicine, art, and pornography, revealing the potent cultural attitudes and anxieties about women, female bodies, and female sexuality that permeate the practice of gynecology, Public Privates concludes by locating a venue from which challenging, alternative performances may be staged.

Forms of embodied labor, such as surrogacy and participation in clinical trials, are central to biomedical innovation, but they are rarely considered as labor. Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby take on that project, analyzing what they call "clinical labor," and asking what such an analysis might indicate about the organization of the bioeconomy and the broader organization of labor and value today. At the same time, they reflect on the challenges that clinical labor might pose to some of the founding assumptions of classical, Marxist, and post-Fordist theories of labor.

Cooper and Waldby examine the rapidly expanding transnational labor markets surrounding assisted reproduction and experimental drug trials. As they discuss, the pharmaceutical industry demands ever greater numbers of trial subjects to meet its innovation imperatives. The assisted reproductive market grows as more and more households look to third-party providers for fertility services and sectors of the biomedical industry seek reproductive tissues rich in stem cells. Cooper and Waldby trace the historical conditions, political economy, and contemporary trajectory of clinical labor. Ultimately, they reveal clinical labor to be emblematic of labor in twenty-first-century neoliberal economies.

Developments in new reproductive technologies have confounded public policy and created legal and ethical quandaries for professionals and ordinary citizens alike. Drawing from the most current medical, psychiatric, legal, and bioethical literature, Ruth Macklin, noted author and philosopher, presents the arguments surrounding these advances through the voices of fictional characters. The episodes she narrates are based on real-life situations, both from her personal experience as a hospital ethicist and from the public arena, where such controversial court cases as that of Baby M have sparked a multitude of disparate opinions on surrogacy, in vitro fertilization, and egg and sperm donor program.

Macklin's hypoethical tale centers on Bonnie and Larry, an infertile couple longing for a child. As the couple's quest to become parents begins, they discover that Bonnie is physically incapable of carrying a pregnancy to term. Desperate to explore their options, Bonnie and Larry attempt adoption but are rejected by the agency without explanation. Finally, they contemplate surrogacy as their last chance to have a child. Seeking advice and answers, they consult health professionals, lawyers, pastoral counselors, and a bioethicist. In the course of this complicated and often painful decision-making process, they attend meetings of a government task force on reproduction where they hear both radical and liberal feminist positions.

Their experiences with friends, family members, two surrogates, hospital ethics committees, and special interest groups underscore the difficulty of coming to a consensus on such issues as AIDS, the right to privacy, premenstrual syndrome, the violation of surrogate contracts, and the responsibilities of therapists and physicians to their patients and to the community at large.

In the thirty years since the first “test-tube baby,” in-vitro fertilization and other methods of reproductive assistance have become a common aspect of family life and medicine in developed nations—and, increasingly, throughout the world. This collection brings together ethnographic studies of how these reproductive technologies are deployed across a wide variety of nations and cultures, taking special account of how they are linked to aspirations towards modernity—and how they contribute to an ongoing reconfiguration of the boundaries of knowledge and human agency. The resulting volume offers both a current snapshot of the cultural state of reproductive technologies and a plethora of provocative questions for the future.