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Damaged Goods?
Women Living With Incurable Sexually Transmitted Diseases
Adina Nack
Temple University Press, 2008

How do women living with genital herpes and/or HPV (human papilloma virus) infections see themselves as sexual beings, and what choices do they make about sexual health issues? Adina Nack, a medical sociologist who specializes in sexual health and social psychology, conducted in-depth interviews with 43 women about their identities and sexuality in regards to chronic illness. The result is a fascinating book about an issue that affects over 15 million Americans, but is all too little discussed.

Damaged Goods adds to our knowledge of how women are affected by living with chronic STDs and reveals the stages of their sexual- self transformation. From the anxiety of being diagnosed with an STD to issues of blame and shame, Nack-herself diagnosed with a cervical HPV infection-shows why these women feeling that they are "damaged goods," question future relationships, marriage, and their ability to have healthy children.

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The Dana Guide to Brain Health
A Practical Family Reference from Medical Experts
Edited by Floyd E. Bloom, M.D.; M. Flint Beal, M.D.; and, David J. Kupfer, M.D.
Dana Press, 2006

A child crashes to the ground from the monkey bars head-first. A high school student prepares for months to take the SAT. A grandmother slowly slips away from her family through the deadly progression of Alzheimer’s Disease. Whether we realize it or not, the importance of brain health to our daily lives goes far beyond just being able to walk and talk. The Dana Guide to Brain Health offers the first comprehensive home medical reference book on the brain, providing an unparalleled, authoritative guide to improving the fitness of our brains and, ultimately, enriching our lives.


With contributions from over one hundred of the most prominent scientists and clinicians in the United States, The Dana Guide to Brain Health is an extensive and wholly accessible manual on the workings of the human brain. This richly illustrated volume contains a wealth of facts and advice, on simple yet effective ways to take care of our brains; the intimate connection between brain health and body health; brain development from the prenatal period through adulthood; and how we learn, remember, and imagine.

The brain is far too important to be excluded any longer from our daily health concerns. The Dana Guide to Brain Health remedies this oversight with a clearly written, definitive map to our brains that reveals how we can take care of them in order to sustain a long and rich life.

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The Deadly Truth
A History of Disease in America
Gerald N. Grob
Harvard University Press, 2005

The Deadly Truth chronicles the complex interactions between disease and the peoples of America from the pre-Columbian world to the present.

Grob's ultimate lesson is stark but valuable: there can be no final victory over disease. The world in which we live undergoes constant change, which in turn creates novel risks to human health and life. We conquer particular diseases, but others always arise in their stead. In a powerful challenge to our tendency to see disease as unnatural and its virtual elimination as a real possibility, Grob asserts the undeniable biological persistence of disease.

Diseases ranging from malaria to cancer have shaped the social landscape--sometimes through brief, furious outbreaks, and at other times through gradual occurrence, control, and recurrence. Grob integrates statistical data with particular peoples and places while giving us the larger patterns of the ebb and flow of disease over centuries. Throughout, we see how much of our history, culture, and nation-building was determined--in ways we often don't realize--by the environment and the diseases it fostered.

The way in which we live has shaped, and will continue to shape, the diseases from which we get sick and die. By accepting the presence of disease and understanding the way in which it has physically interacted with people and places in past eras, Grob illuminates the extraordinarily complex forces that shape our morbidity and mortality patterns and provides a realistic appreciation of the individual, social, environmental, and biological determinants of human health.

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Death Stalks the Yakama
Epidemiological Transitions and Mortality on the Yakama Indian Reservation, 1888-1964
Clifford E. Trafzer
Michigan State University Press, 1997

Clifford Trafzer's disturbing new work, Death Stalks the Yakama, examines life, death, and the shockingly high mortality rates that have persisted among the fourteen tribes and bands living on the Yakama Reservation in the state of Washington. The work contains a valuable discussion of Indian beliefs about spirits, traditional causes of death, mourning ceremonies, and memorials. More significant, however, is Trafzer's research into heretofore unused parturition and death records from 1888-1964. In these documents, he discovers critical evidence to demonstrate how and why many reservation people died in "epidemics" of pneumonia, tuberculosis, and heart disease. 
     Death Stalks the Yakama, takes into account many variables, including age, gender, listed causes of death, residence, and blood quantum. In addition, analyses of fetal and infant mortality rates as well as crude death rates arising from tuberculosis, pneumonia, heart disease, accidents, and other causes are presented. Trafzer argues that Native Americans living on the Yakama Reservation were, in fact, in jeopardy as a result of the "reservation system" itself. Not only did this alien and artificial culture radically alter traditional ways of life, but sanitation methods, housing, hospitals, public education, medicine, and medical personnel affiliated with the reservation system all proved inadequate, and each in its own way contributed significantly to high Yakama death rates.

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Diabetes among the Pima
Stories of Survival
Carolyn Smith-Morris
University of Arizona Press, 2006
For the past forty years, the Pima Indians living in the Gila River Indian Community have been among the most consistently studied diabetic populations in the world. But despite many medical advances, the epidemic is continuing and prevalence rates are increasing. Diabetes among the Pima is the first in-depth ethnographic volume to delve into the entire spectrum of causes, perspectives, and conditions that underlie the occurrence of diabetes in this community. Drawing on the narratives of pregnant Pima women and nearly ten years’ work in this community, this book reveals the Pimas’ perceptions and understanding of type 2 and gestational diabetes, and their experience as they live in the midst of a health crisis. Arguing that the prenatal period could offer the best hope for curbing this epidemic, Smith-Morris investigates many core values informing the Pimas’ experience of diabetes: motherhood, foodways, ethnic identity, exercise, attitude toward health care, and a willingness to seek care. Smith-Morris contrasts gripping first-person narratives with analyses of several political, economic, and biomedical factors that influence diabetes among the Pimas. She also integrates major theoretical explanations for the disease and illuminates the strengths and weaknesses of intervention strategies and treatment. An important contribution to the ongoing struggle to understand and prevent diabetes, this volume will be of special interest to experts in the fields of epidemiology, genetics, public health, and anthropology.

Click here for a Facilitator’s Guide to Diabetes among the Pima
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Diagnosing the Legacy
The Discovery, Research, and Treatment of Type 2 Diabetes in Indigenous Youth
Larry Krotz
University of Manitoba Press, 2018

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Digestion, Diet, and Disease
Irritable Bowel Syndrome and Gastrointestinal Function
Joneja, Janice Vickerstaff
Rutgers University Press, 2004

Malfunction in the digestive tract can arise from a variety of causes, and it requires the sciences of immunology, physiology, biochemistry, microbiology, and nutrition to fully explain the basis of the dysfunction as well as effective treatment options. Now Dr. Janice Vickerstaff Joneja has written the first book that:

  • Applies current research data in all of the relevant sciences into a practical resource for the management of gastrointestinal disease, in particular irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).
  • Supplies complete scientific references for the research scientist, the clinician, and the student.
  • Provides specific dietary management strategies for IBS and related dysfunction in the gastrointestinal tract, based on scientific data.
  • Includes meal plans, recipes, and dietary advice for balanced nutrition, while avoiding the foods most likely to trigger or exacerbate IBS.

These unique qualities make Digestion, Diet, and Disease the ideal choice for practitioners, educators, and researchers in the field of nutritional medicine, as well as nurses, alternative medicine professionals, and the educated general public suffering from IBS.

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Digestive Diseases
Albert I. Mendeloff and James P. Dunn
Harvard University Press, 1971

Such chronic gastrointestinal diseases as peptic ulcer, cirrhosis, and cholelithiasis are becoming increasingly recognized as health problems. This is the first book to deal specifically with mortality data, broken down by geographic, socioeconomic, and other demographic parameters, from digestive diseases in the United States from 1959 to 1961.

Digestive Diseases interprets theses data in relation to clinical material regarding cause and clinical course of the disease and indicates their significance for understanding trends in incidence and prevalence as well as possible future trends. World literature on incidence and prevalence as well as mortality has also been utilized.

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Disease in the History of Modern Latin America
From Malaria to AIDS
Diego Armus, ed.
Duke University Press, 2003
Challenging traditional approaches to medical history, Disease in the History of Modern Latin America advances understandings of disease as a social and cultural construction in Latin America. This innovative collection provides a vivid look at the latest research in the cultural history of medicine through insightful essays about how disease—whether it be cholera or aids, leprosy or mental illness—was experienced and managed in different Latin American countries and regions, at different times from the late nineteenth century to the present.

Based on the idea that the meanings of sickness—and health—are contestable and subject to controversy, Disease in the History of Modern Latin America displays the richness of an interdisciplinary approach to social and cultural history. Examining diseases in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, the contributors explore the production of scientific knowledge, literary metaphors for illness, domestic public health efforts, and initiatives shaped by the agendas of international agencies. They also analyze the connections between ideas of sexuality, disease, nation, and modernity; the instrumental role of certain illnesses in state-building processes; welfare efforts sponsored by the state and led by the medical professions; and the boundaries between individual and state responsibilities regarding sickness and health. Diego Armus’s introduction contextualizes the essays within the history of medicine, the history of public health, and the sociocultural history of disease.

Contributors.
Diego Armus, Anne-Emanuelle Birn, Kathleen Elaine Bliss, Ann S. Blum, Marilia Coutinho, Marcus Cueto, Patrick Larvie, Gabriela Nouzeilles, Diana Obregón, Nancy Lays Stepan, Ann Zulawski

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Disease, War, and the Imperial State
The Welfare of the British Armed Forces during the Seven Years' War
Erica Charters
University of Chicago Press, 2014
The Seven Years’ War, often called the first global war, spanned North America, the West Indies, Europe, and India.  In these locations diseases such as scurvy, smallpox, and yellow fever killed far more than combat did, stretching the resources of European states.

In Disease, War, and the Imperial State, Erica Charters demonstrates how disease played a vital role in shaping strategy and campaigning, British state policy, and imperial relations during the Seven Years’ War. Military medicine was a crucial component of the British war effort; it was central to both eighteenth-century scientific innovation and the moral authority of the British state. Looking beyond the traditional focus of the British state as a fiscal war-making machine, Charters uncovers an imperial state conspicuously attending to the welfare of its armed forces, investing in medical research, and responding to local public opinion.  Charters shows military medicine to be a credible scientific endeavor that was similarly responsive to local conditions and demands.

Disease, War, and the Imperial State is an engaging study of early modern warfare and statecraft, one focused on the endless and laborious task of managing manpower in the face of virulent disease in the field, political opposition at home, and the clamor of public opinion in both Britain and its colonies.
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Diseases of Poverty
Epidemiology, Infectious Diseases, and Modern Plagues
Lisa V. Adams and John R. Butterly
Dartmouth College Press, 2015
Only a few decades ago, we were ready to declare victory over infectious diseases. Today, infectious diseases are responsible for significant morbidity and mortality throughout the world. This book examines the epidemiology and social impact of past and present infectious disease epidemics in the developing and developed world. In the introduction, the authors define global health as a discipline, justify its critical importance in the modern era, and introduce the Millennium Development Goals, which have become critical targets for most of the developing world. The first half of the volume provides an epidemiological overview, exploring early and contemporary perspectives on disease and disease control. An analysis of nutrition, water, and sanitation anchors the discussion of basic human needs. Specific diseases representing both “loud” and “silent” emergencies are investigated within broader structures of ecological and biological health such as economics, education, state infrastructure, culture, and personal liberty. The authors also examine antibiotic resistance, AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and pandemic influenza, and offer an epilogue on diseases of affluence, which now threaten citizens of countries both rich and poor. A readable guide to specific diseases, richly contextualized in environment and geography, this book will be used by health professionals in all disciplines interested in global health and its history and as a textbook in university courses on global health.
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The Dying President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1944-1945
Robert H. Ferrell
University of Missouri Press, 1998

In this authoritative account, Robert H. Ferrell shows how the treatment of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's illness in 1944- 1945 was managed by none other than the president himself. Although this powerful American president knew that he suffered from cardiovascular disease, he went to great lengths to hide that fact—both from his physician and from the public. Why Roosevelt disguised the nature of his illness may be impossible to discern fully. He was a secretive man who liked to assign only parts of tasks to his assistants so that he, the president, would be the only one who knew the whole story. The presidency was his life, and he did not wish to give it up.

The president's duplicity, though not easily measurable, had a critical effect on his performance. Placed on a four-hour-a-day schedule by his physicians, Roosevelt could apply very little time to his presidential duties. He took long vacations in South Carolina, Warm Springs, the Catoctin Mountains, and Hyde Park, as well as lengthy journeys to Hawaii, Canada, and Yalta. Important decisions were delayed or poorly made. America's policy toward Germany was temporarily abandoned in favor of the so-called Morgenthau Plan, which proposed the "pastoralization" of Germany, turning the industrial heart of Europe into farmland. Roosevelt nearly ruined the choice of Senator Harry S. Truman as his running mate in 1944 by wavering in the days prior to the party's national convention. He negotiated an agreement with Winston Churchill on sharing postwar development of nuclear weapons but failed to let the State Department know. And, in perhaps the most profoundly unwise decision, Roosevelt accepted a fourth term when he could not possibly survive it.

In his final year, a year in which he faced crucial responsibility regarding World War II and American foreign policy, Franklin D. Roosevelt failed to serve the nation as a healthy president would have. Reading like a mystery story, The Dying President clears up many of the myths and misunderstandings that have surrounded Roosevelt's last year, finally revealing the truth about this missing chapter in FDR's life.

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