BiblioVault - Books about Doctors

Bodies Politic

Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650-1900

Roy Porter

Reaktion Books, 2001

Bodies Politic takes a critical look at representations of the body in death, disease, and health, as well as at images of the healing arts in Britain from the mid-seventeenth to the twentieth century. Arguing that great symbolic weight was attached to contrasting conceptions of the healthy and diseased body, Roy Porter shows that such ideas were mapped onto antithetical notions of the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. With these images in mind, he explores aspects of being ill alongside the practice of medicine, paying special attention to self-presentations by physicians, surgeons, and quacks and the changes in practitioners’ public identities over time. Packed with amusing anecdotes and unusual illustrations, this book is a magisterial account of the meanings of disease, doctoring, and the “body politic.”

“A wonderful book. . . . There are 137 illustrations . . . and every one is an exultation in the fleshly horrors of the era.”—Guardian (UK)

“Roy Porter is one of the world’s best historical writers: his prose is pithy, witty, vivid, engaging, and perfectly paced. He has a keen eye for evidence and can wrest conclusions with analytical rigour and imaginative subtlety. He masters fact and theory with equal ease and wields both lightly and powerfully.”—Independent

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The Business of Private Medical Practice

Doctors, Specialization, and Urban Change in Philadelphia, 1900-1940

James A. Schafer Jr.

Rutgers University Press, 2013

Unevenly distributed resources and rising costs have become enduring problems in the American health care system. Health care is more expensive in the United States than in other wealthy nations, and access varies significantly across space and social classes. James A. Schafer Jr. shows that these problems are not inevitable features of modern medicine, but instead reflect the informal organization of health care in a free market system in which profit and demand, rather than social welfare and public health needs, direct the distribution and cost of crucial resources.

The Business of Private Medical Practice is a case study of how market forces influenced the office locations and career paths of doctors in one early twentieth-century city, Philadelphia, the birthplace of American medicine. Without financial incentives to locate in poor neighborhoods, Philadelphia doctors instead clustered in central business districts and wealthy suburbs. In order to differentiate their services in a competitive marketplace, they also began to limit their practices to particular specialties, thereby further restricting access to primary care. Such trends worsened with ongoing urbanization.

Illustrated with numerous maps of the Philadelphia neighborhoods he studies, Schafer’s work helps underscore the role of economic self-interest in shaping the geography of private medical practice and the growth of medical specialization in the United States.

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Demanding Medical Excellence

Doctors and Accountability in the Information Age

Michael L. Millenson

University of Chicago Press, 1997

Demanding Medical Excellence is a groundbreaking and accessible work that reveals how the information revolution is changing the way doctors make decisions. Michael Millenson, a three-time Pulitzer Prize nominee as a health-care reporter for the Chicago Tribune, illustrates serious flaws in contemporary medical practice and shows ways to improve care and save tens of thousands of lives.

"If you read only one book this year, read Demanding Medical Excellence. It's that good, and the revolution it describes is that important."—Health Affairs

"Millenson has done yeoman's work in amassing and understanding that avalanche of data that lies beneath most of the managed-care headlines. . . . What he finds is both important and well-explained: inconsistency, overlap, and inattention to quality measures in medical treatment cost more and are more dangerous than most cost-cutting measures. . . . [This book] elevates the healthcare debate to a new level and deserves a wide readership."—Library Journal

"An involving, human narrative explaining how we got to where we are today and what lies ahead."—Mark Taylor, Philadelphia Inquirer

"Read this book. It will entertain you, challenge, and strengthen you in your quest for better accountability in health care."—Alex R. Rodriguez, M.D., American Journal of Medical Quality

"Finally, a health-care book that doesn't wring its hands over the decline of medicine at the hands of money-grubbing corporations. . . . This is a readable account of what Millenson calls a 'quiet revolution' in health care, and his optimism makes for a refreshing change."—Publishers Weekly

"With meticulous detail, historical accuracy, and an uncommon understanding of the clinical field, Millenson documents our struggle to reach accountability."—Saty Satya-Murti, M.D., Journal of the American Medical Association

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Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries

Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy

Douglas Biow

University of Chicago Press, 2002

In this book, Douglas Biow traces the role that humanists played in the development of professions and professionalism in Renaissance Italy, and vice versa. For instance, humanists were initially quite hostile to medicine, viewing it as poorly adapted to their program of study. They much preferred the secretarial profession, which they made their own throughout the Renaissance and eventually defined in treatises in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Examining a wide range of treatises, poems, and other works that humanists wrote both as and about doctors, ambassadors, and secretaries, Biow shows how interactions with these professions forced humanists to make their studies relevant to their own times, uniting theory and practice in a way that strengthened humanism. His detailed analyses of writings by familiar and lesser-known figures, from Petrarch, Machiavelli, and Tasso to Maggi, Fracastoro, and Barbaro, will especially interest students of Renaissance Italy, but also anyone concerned with the rise of professionalism during the early modern period.

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Doctors and Demonstrators

How Political Institutions Shape Abortion Law in the United States, Britain, and Canada

Drew Halfmann

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Since Roe v. Wade, abortion has continued to be a divisive political issue in the United States. In contrast, it has remained primarily a medical issue in Britain and Canada despite the countries’ shared heritage. Doctors and Demonstrators looks beyond simplistic cultural or religious explanations to find out why abortion politics and policies differ so dramatically in these otherwise similar countries.

Drew Halfmann argues that political institutions are the key. In the United States, federalism, judicial review, and a private health care system contributed to the public definition of abortion as an individual right rather than a medical necessity. Meanwhile, Halfmann explains, the porous structure of American political parties gave pro-choice and pro-life groups the opportunity to move the issue onto the political agenda. A groundbreaking study of the complex legal and political factors behind the evolution of abortion policy, Doctors and Demonstrators will be vital for anyone trying to understand this contentious issue.

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Doctors and the State

The Politics of Health Care in France and the United States

David Wilsford

Duke University Press, 1991

All advanced health care systems face severe difficulties in financing the delivery of today’s sophisticated medical care. In this study David Wilsford compares the health systems in France and the United States to demonstrate that some political systems are considerably more effective at controlling the cost of care than others. He argues that two variables—the autonomy of the state and the strength and cohesiveness of organized medicine—explain this variance.
In France, Wilsford shows, the state is strong in the health policy domain, while organized medicine is weak and divided. Consequently, physicians exercise little influence over health care policymaking. By contrast, in the United States the state is weak, the employers and insurers who pay for health care are fragmented, and organized medicine is strong and well financed. As a result, medical professionals are able to exert a greater influence on policymaking, thus making cost control more difficult.
Wilsford extends his comparison to health care systems in the United Kingdom, West Germany, Italy, Canada, and Japan. Whether the private or public sector finances health care, he discovers, there is now an important trend in all of the advanced industrial countries toward controlling escalating costs by curbing both the medical profession’s clinical autonomy and physicians’ incomes.

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Doctors and the State

The Politics of Health Care in France and the United States

David Wilsford

Duke University Press

All advanced health care systems face severe difficulties in financing the delivery of today’s sophisticated medical care. In this study David Wilsford compares the health systems in France and the United States to demonstrate that some political systems are considerably more effective at controlling the cost of care than others. He argues that two variables—the autonomy of the state and the strength and cohesiveness of organized medicine—explain this variance.
In France, Wilsford shows, the state is strong in the health policy domain, while organized medicine is weak and divided. Consequently, physicians exercise little influence over health care policymaking. By contrast, in the United States the state is weak, the employers and insurers who pay for health care are fragmented, and organized medicine is strong and well financed. As a result, medical professionals are able to exert a greater influence on policymaking, thus making cost control more difficult.
Wilsford extends his comparison to health care systems in the United Kingdom, West Germany, Italy, Canada, and Japan. Whether the private or public sector finances health care, he discovers, there is now an important trend in all of the advanced industrial countries toward controlling escalating costs by curbing both the medical profession’s clinical autonomy and physicians’ incomes.

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Doctors and Their Workshops

Economic Models of Physician Behavior

Mark V. Pauly

University of Chicago Press, 1980

Doctors are obviously influential in determining the costs of their services. But even more important, many believe, is the influence physicians have over the use and cost of nonphysician health-care resources and services. Doctors and Their Workshops is the first comprehensive attempt to use economic analysis to understand some of the physician effects on nonphysician aspects of health care.

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Doctors in the Making

Memoirs and Medical Education

Suzanne Poirier

University of Iowa Press, 2009

Recent surveys of medical students reveal stark conditions: more than a quarter have experienced episodes of depression during their medical school and residency careers, a figure much higher than that of the general population. Compounded by long hours of intellectually challenging, physically taxing, and emotionally exhausting work, medical school has been called one of the most harrowing experiences a student can encounter. Plumbing the diaries, memoirs, and blogs of physicians-in-training, Suzanne Poirier’s Doctors in the Making illuminates not just the process by which students become doctors but also the physical, emotional, and spiritual consequences of the process.

Through close readings of these accounts, Poirier draws attention to the complex nature of power in medicine, the rewards and hazards of professional and interpersonal relationships in all aspects of physicians’ lives, and the benefits to and threats from the vulnerability that medical students and residents experience.

Although most students emerge from medical education as well-trained, well-prepared professionals, few of them will claim that they survived the process unscathed. The authors of these accounts document—for better or for worse—the ways in which they have been changed. Based on their stories, Poirier recommends that medical education should make room for the central importance of personal relationships, the profound sense of isolation and powerlessness that can threaten the wellbeing of patients and physicians alike, and the physical and moral vulnerability that are part of every physician’s life.

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Doctors of Deception

What They Don't Want You to Know about Shock Treatment

Andre, Linda

Rutgers University Press, 2009

Mechanisms and standards exist to safeguard the health and welfare of the patient, but for electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)—used to treat depression and other mental illnesses—such approval methods have failed. Prescribed to thousands over the years, public relations as opposed to medical trials have paved the way for this popular yet dangerous and controversial treatment option.

Doctors of Deception is a revealing history of ECT (or shock therapy) in the United States, told here for the first time. Through the examination of court records, medical data, FDA reports, industry claims, her own experience as a patient of shock therapy, and the stories of others, Andre exposes tactics used by the industry to promote ECT as a responsible treatment when all the scientific evidence suggested otherwise.

As early as the 1940s, scientific literature began reporting incidences of human and animal brain damage resulting from ECT. Despite practitioner modifications, deleterious effects on memory and cognition persisted. Rather than discontinue use of ECT, the $5-billion-per-year shock industry crafted a public relations campaign to improve ECT’s image. During the 1970s and 1980s, psychiatry’s PR efforts misled the government, the public, and the media into believing that ECT had made a comeback and was safe.

Andre carefully intertwines stories of ECT survivors and activists with legal, ethical, and scientific arguments to address issues of patient rights and psychiatric treatment. Echoing current debates about the use of psychopharmaceutical interventions shown to have debilitating side-effects, she candidly presents ECT as a problematic therapy demanding greater scrutiny, tighter control, and full disclosure about its long-term cognitive effects.

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From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism

Doctors, Healers, and Public Power in Costa Rica, 1800–1940

Steven Palmer

Duke University Press, 2003

From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism presents the history of medical practice in Costa Rica from the late colonial era—when none of the fifty thousand inhabitants had access to a titled physician, pharmacist, or midwife—to the 1940s, when the figure of the qualified medical doctor was part of everyday life for many of Costa Rica’s nearly one million citizens. It is the first book to chronicle the history of all healers, both professional and popular, in a Latin American country during the national period.
Steven Palmer breaks with the view of popular and professional medicine as polar opposites—where popular medicine is seen as representative of the authentic local community and as synonymous with oral tradition and religious and magical beliefs and professional medicine as advancing neocolonial interests through the work of secular, trained academicians. Arguing that there was significant and formative overlap between these two forms of medicine, Palmer shows that the relationship between practitioners of each was marked by coexistence, complementarity, and dialogue as often as it was by rivalry. Palmer explains that while the professionalization of medical practice was intricately connected to the nation-building process, the Costa Rican state never consistently displayed an interest in suppressing the practice of popular medicine. In fact, it persistently found both tacit and explicit ways to allow untitled healers to practice. Using empirical and archival research to bring people (such as the famous healer or curandero Professor Carlos Carbell), events, and institutions (including the Rockefeller Foundation) to life, From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism demonstrates that it was through everyday acts of negotiation among agents of the state, medical professionals, and popular practitioners that the contours of Costa Rica’s modern, heterogeneous health care system were established.

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Lessons in Mortality

Doctors and Patients Struggling Together

Allen B. Weisse, M.D.

University of Missouri Press, 2006

It doesn’t take a trip to the doctor to know that the bond between physicians and patients isn’t what it used to be. Specialization, rising costs, managed care, the insurance industry, the shadow of litigation—so many factors have changed what was once a traditional relationship grounded in respect and caring.

In light of the altered climate in health care, this thoughtful book deals with the way that today’s doctors and patients view themselves and one another. Allen Weisse has observed the changing medical scene during half a century of treating patients and training future physicians, and he writes frankly here about how doctors and patients have come to deal with illness in the twenty-first century.

Weisse first recalls his own brush with death as a young man diagnosed with testicular cancer—a time when one thinks of God and Death and little else. He then shares true stories of how different people have dealt with cancer, heart disease, stroke, infectious disease, AIDS, and other dire diagnoses—narratives enhanced by professional savvy and enriched by the kind of empathy that the survivor of such a calamity can provide.

Drawing from a storehouse of experiences shared by colleagues, patients, and friends, Weisse writes with passion, conviction, and clarity to encourage a renewal of the openness and trust that seem to be lacking in today’s doctor-patient relationships. These are accounts both uplifting and disturbing—some sad, others tinged with humor—intended to make doctors and patients alike come to a fuller realization that we are all together in this delicate but crucial business of staying alive.

While not quite foreseeing a return to the Norman Rockwell image of the family physician, Weisse urges the kind of care and compassion that patients often feel is lacking from their doctors, and he reassures victims of seemingly hopeless conditions that, despite the obstacles they often face, there are still health care professionals who truly have their patients’ welfare foremost in mind. Lessons in Mortality is just what the doctor ordered for a health care system in crisis: an honest look at the medical profession that encourages greater understanding on the part of both physicians and patients, reminding us that what we most need is one another.

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Shamans, Mystics and Doctors

A Psychological Inquiry into India and its Healing Traditions

Sudhir Kakar

University of Chicago Press, 1990

Sudhir Kakar, a psychoanalyst and scholar, brilliantly illuminates the ancient healing traditions of India embodied in the rituals of shamans, the teachings of gurus, and the precepts of the school of medicine known as Ayurveda.

"With extraordinary sympathy, open-mindedness, and insight Sudhir Kakar has drawn from both his Eastern and Western backgrounds to show how the gulf that divides native healer from Western psychiatrist can be spanned."—Rosemary Dinnage, New York Review of Books

"Each chapter describes the geographical and cultural context within which the healers work, their unique approach to healing mental illness, and . . . the philosophical and religious underpinnings of their theories compared with psychoanalytical theory."—Choice

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Sister Kenny

The Woman Who Challenged the Doctors

Victor Cohn

University of Minnesota Press, 1976

Sister Kenny was first published in 1976. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Sister Elizabeth Kenny, the Australian-born nurse, is remembered by thousands of grateful parents and grandparents of young polio patients, as well as others who were less personally affected, as the woman who successfully fought the medical profession to win acceptance of her techniques to combat the crippling effects of this disease.

In this biography Victor Cohn, a prize-winning science writer, details the life of Sister Kenny and her significant role in the history of medicine. It is an inspiring story and one which will be of particular interest to those of the present generation who are engaged in the movement for women's equality. Sister Kenny's struggle against the bitter opposition of many doctors to her concepts for the treatment of polio dramatized the then common attitude of male chauvinism on the part of the medical profession toward nurses.

The biography traces Sister Kenny's life from her birth in Australia, through her early nursing career in the bush, to her rise to prominence in America. Much of the narrative focuses on her confrontation with the medical establishment. Throughout, the author writes from an objective viewpoint, and in conclusion he assesses Sister Kenny's accomplishments.

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Surviving Modern Medicine

How to Get the Best From Doctors, Family, and Friends

Clarke, Peter

Rutgers University Press, 1998

"Surviving Modern Medicine" gives consumers the practical steps they can take to navigate today's confusing medical world to improve the quality of care they receive. The authors dig through leading research for down-to-earth tips that any patient can apply to: open lines of communication with doctors; weigh the risks and benefits among treatment options; mobilize understanding and effective support from family and friends; overcome the fatigue and guilt of long-term cargiving; and control life-support situations to balance high-technology against an acceptable quality of life. Readers learn how to battle with a stubborn HMO and to select the right coverage in the first place. Patients discover how to make better use of their office visits, communicating effectively with doctors by asking the right questions and remembering crucial facts. The book features the authors' nationally-tested guide to decision making about critical care and to completing a Living Will or Healthcare Power of Attorney. Throughout, the book provides simple exercises that readers can practice. These exercises allow patients to replace frustating and perplexing encounters with the health and medical bureaucracy with successful ones.

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