front cover of Saturday Is for Funerals
Saturday Is for Funerals
Unity Dow and Max Essex
Harvard University Press, 2011

In the year 2000 the World Health Organization estimated that 85 percent of fifteen-year-olds in Botswana would eventually die of AIDS. In Saturday Is for Funerals we learn why that won’t happen.

Unity Dow and Max Essex tell the true story of lives ravaged by AIDS—of orphans, bereaved parents, and widows; of families who devote most Saturdays to the burial of relatives and friends. We witness the actions of community leaders, medical professionals, research scientists, and educators of all types to see how an unprecedented epidemic of death and destruction is being stopped in its tracks.

This book describes how a country responded in a time of crisis. In the true-life stories of loss and quiet heroism, activism and scientific initiatives, we learn of new techniques that dramatically reduce rates of transmission from mother to child, new therapies that can save lives of many infected with AIDS, and intricate knowledge about the spread of HIV, as well as issues of confidentiality, distributive justice, and human rights. The experiences of Botswana offer practical lessons along with the critical element of hope.

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A Second Voice
A Century of Osteopathic Medicine in Ohio
Carol Poh Miller
Ohio University Press, 2004

Doctors of osteopathy today practice side by side with medical doctors, employing the same diagnostic and curative tools of scientific—with a difference. A Second Voice: A Century of Osteopathic Medicine in Ohio is the story of that difference. Focusing on the historical experience of a pivotal midwestern state, historian Carol Poh Miller illuminates struggles common to osteopathic medicine nationwide as it fought to secure its place in American health care.

First promulgated by Dr. Andrew Taylor Still in 1874, osteopathy was a reaction against the primitive medical practices of the period. Believing that the body had its own natural curative powers, Still manipulated vertebrae to free circulation and to remove pathology. Early osteopaths endured discrimination, as orthodox medicine and its allies sought to prevent the establishment of Still’s new healing method.

Written in conjunction with the one-hundredth anniversary of the Ohio Osteopathic Association, A Second Voice traces the origins and growth of the profession in Ohio. It recounts the early legal battles, the establishment of separate osteopathic hospitals, and the hard-fought campaigns to win equal practice rights and to build a state college of osteopathic medicine. Finally, it reconsiders the notorious murder trial of Cleveland osteopathic physician Sam Sheppard in the context of his family’s contributions to the osteopathic profession and a prosecution that, evidence has shown, fingered the wrong man.

A Second Voice is a valuable addition to the history of medicine in Ohio and the nation.

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Sexualizing Cancer
HPV and the Politics of Cancer Prevention
Laura Mamo
University of Chicago Press, 2023
The virus that changed how we think about cancer and its culprits—and the vaccine that changed how we talk about sex and its risks.
 
Starting in 2005, people in the US and Europe were inundated with media coverage announcing the link between cervical cancer and the sexually transmitted virus HPV. Within a year, product ads promoted a vaccine targeting cancer’s viral cause, and girls and women became early consumers of this new cancer vaccine. An understanding of HPV’s broadening association with other cancers led to the identification of new at-risk populations—namely boys and men—and ignited a plethora of gender and sexual issues related to cancer prevention.
 
Sexualizing Cancer is the first book dedicated to the emergence and proliferation of the HPV vaccine along with the medical capacity to screen for HPV—crucial landmarks in the cancer prevention arsenal based on a novel connection between sex and chronic disease. Interweaving accounts from the realms of biomedical science, public health, and social justice, Laura Mamo chronicles cervical cancer’s journey out of exam rooms and into public discourse. She shows how the late twentieth-century scientific breakthrough that identified the human papilloma virus as having a causative role in the onset of human cancer galvanized sexual politics, struggles for inclusion, new at-risk populations, and, ultimately, a new regime of cancer prevention. Mamo reveals how gender and other equity arguments from within scientific, medical, and advocate communities shaped vaccine guidelines, clinical trial funding, research practices, and clinical programs, with consequences that reverberate today. This is a must-read history of medical expansion—from a “woman’s disease” to a set of cancers that affect all genders—and of lingering sexualization, with specific gendered, racialized, and other contours along the way.
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Silicone Survivors
Women's Experiences with Breast Implants
Susan Zimmermann
Temple University Press, 1998
Susan Zimmermann talked with forty women about perhaps one of the most sensitive issues of body image and health - their breasts, the chief attribute of femininity. In the aftermath of the early 1990s controversy over the use of silicone breast implants, how do women decide to undergo surgery o enhance or reconstruct their bodies? How does surgery alter a woman's self-image? How did they face the possibility of debilitating autoimmune disease from rupturing or leaking implants?

Some opted for breast implants after mastectomies, others for cosmetic reasons. Some felt empowered by the surgery: "Being a woman, I just like breasts and felt like I got ripped off. ... I did it for myself." Others were pressured by their husbands: "He used to make fun of parts of my body. .... And, he made me believe that if I was ever to leave him, no one would have anything to do with me because I was this deformed type of person."

After surgery, some women were ecstatic, while others had a sense of inner conflict about what they had done to themselves: were they "faking it"? And a few were angry: "I was really angry inside that I had  had to put plastic bags filled with chemicals in my body in order for me to feel like I could do the Hoochie Koo on Saturday nights. ... I didn't wear tight clothes; I didn't want my children to find out."

Now, having faced years of medical and personal uncertainty, many have coped by reassessing their lives and their relationships, by sharing information and support with other women with implants, outreach that became a means for self-empowerment.
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front cover of Sleep in the Military
Sleep in the Military
Promoting Healthy Sleep Among U.S. Servicemembers
Wendy M. Troxel
RAND Corporation, 2015
Given the unprecedented demands on the U.S. military since 2001 and the risks posed by stress and trauma, there has been growing concern about the prevalence and consequences of sleep problems. This first-ever comprehensive review of military sleep-related policies and programs, evidence-based interventions, and barriers to achieving healthy sleep offers a detailed set of actionable recommendations for improving sleep across the force.
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front cover of Small Ideas for Saving Big Health Care Dollars
Small Ideas for Saving Big Health Care Dollars
Jodi L. Liu
RAND Corporation, 2014
A focused review of RAND Health research identified small ideas that could save the U.S. health care system $13 to $22 billion per year if successfully implemented. They include changing payment policy for emergency transport and greater use of $4 generic drugs. Small ideas do not require systemic change; thus, they may be both more feasible to operationalize and less likely to encounter stiff political and organizational resistance.
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front cover of The Social Medicine Reader, Second Edition
The Social Medicine Reader, Second Edition
Volume 3: Health Policy, Markets, and Medicine
Jonathan Oberlander, Larry R. Churchill, Sue E. Estroff, Gail E. Henderson, Nancy M. P. King, and Ronald P. Strauss, eds.
Duke University Press, 2005
Duke University Press is pleased to announce the second edition of the bestselling Social Medicine Reader. The Reader provides a survey of the challenging issues facing today’s health care providers, patients, and caregivers by bringing together moving narratives of illness, commentaries by physicians, debates about complex medical cases, and conceptually and empirically based writings by scholars in medicine, the social sciences, and the humanities. The first edition of The Social Medicine Reader was a single volume. This significantly revised and expanded second edition is divided into three volumes to facilitate use by different audiences with varying interests.

Praise for the 3-volume second edition of The Social Medicine Reader:
“A superb collection of essays that illuminate the role of medicine in modern society. Students and general readers are not likely to find anything better.”—Arnold S. Relman, Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Praise for the first edition:
“This reviewer strongly recommends The Social Medicine Reader to the attention of medical educators.”—Samuel W. Bloom, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association

Volume 3:

Over the past four decades the American health care system has witnessed dramatic changes in private health insurance, campaigns to enact national health insurance, and the rise (and perhaps fall) of managed care. Bringing together seventeen pieces new to this second edition of The Social Medicine Reader and four pieces from the first edition, Health Policy, Markets, and Medicine draws on a broad range of disciplinary perspectives—including political science, economics, history, and bioethics—to consider changes in health care and the future of U.S. health policy. Contributors analyze the historical and moral foundation of today’s policy debates, examine why health care spending is so hard to control in the United States, and explain the political dynamics of Medicare and Medicaid. Selections address the rise of managed care, its impact on patients and physicians, and the ethical implications of applying a business ethos to medical care; they also compare the U.S. health care system to the systems in European countries, Canada, and Japan. Additional readings probe contemporary policy issues, including the emergence of consumer-driven health care, efforts to move quality of care to the top of the policy agenda, and the implications of the aging of America for public policy.

Contributors: Henry J. Aaron, Drew E. Altman, George J. Annas, Robert H. Binstock, Thomas Bodenheimer, Troyen A. Brennan, Robert H. Brook, Lawrence D. Brown, Daniel Callahan, Jafna L. Cox, Victor R. Fuchs, Kevin Grumbach, Rudolf Klein, Robert Kuttner, Larry Levitt, Donald L. Madison, Wendy K. Mariner, Elizabeth A. McGlynn, Jonathan Oberlander, Geov Parrish, Sharon Redmayne, Uwe E. Reinhardt, Michael S. Sparer, Deborah Stone

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The Social Medicine Reader, Second Edition
Volume One: Patients, Doctors, and Illness
Nancy M. P. King, Ronald P. Strauss, Larry R. Churchill, Sue E. Estroff, Gail E. Henderson, and Jonathan Oberlander, eds.
Duke University Press, 2005
Duke University Press is pleased to announce the second edition of the bestselling Social Medicine Reader. The Reader provides a survey of the challenging issues facing today’s health care providers, patients, and caregivers by bringing together moving narratives of illness, commentaries by physicians, debates about complex medical cases, and conceptually and empirically based writings by scholars in medicine, the social sciences, and the humanities. The first edition of The Social Medicine Reader was a single volume. This significantly revised and expanded second edition is divided into three volumes to facilitate use by different audiences with varying interests.

Praise for the 3-volume second edition of The Social Medicine Reader:
“A superb collection of essays that illuminate the role of medicine in modern society. Students and general readers are not likely to find anything better.”—Arnold S. Relman, Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Praise for the first edition:
“This reviewer strongly recommends The Social Medicine Reader to the attention of medical educators.”—Samuel W. Bloom, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association

Volume 1:

A woman with what is quite probably a terminal illness must choose between courses of treatment based on contradictory diagnoses. A medical student causes acute pain in his patients as he learns to insert a central line. One doctor wonders how to react when a patient asks him to pray with her; another struggles to come to terms with his mistakes. A physician writes in a prominent medical journal about facilitating a dying woman’s wish to end her life on her own terms; letters to the editor reflect passionate responses both in support of and in opposition to his actions. These experiences and many more are vividly rendered in Patients, Doctors, and Illness, which brings together nineteen pieces that appeared in the first edition of The Social Medicine Reader and eighteen pieces new to this edition. This volume examines the roles and training of health care professionals and their relationship with patients, ethics in health care, and end-of-life experiences and decisions. It includes fiction and nonfiction narratives and poetry; definitions and case-based discussions of moral precepts in health care, such as truth telling, informed consent, privacy, and autonomy; and readings that provide legal, ethical, and practical perspectives on many familiar but persistent ethical and social questions raised by illness and care.

Contributors: Yehuda Amichai, Marcia Angell, George J. Annas, Marc D. Basson, Doris Betts, Amy Bloom, Abenaa Brewster, Raymond Carver, Eric J. Cassell, Larry R. Churchill, James Dickey, Gerald Dworkin, James Dwyer, Miles J. Edwards, Charles R. Feldstein, Chris Feudtner, Leonard Fleck, Arthur Frank, Benjamin Freedman, Atul Gawande, Jerome Groopman, Lawrence D. Grouse, David Hilfiker, Nancy M. P. King, Perri Klass, Melvin Konner, Bobbie Ann Mason, Steven H. Miles, Sharon Olds, Katha Pollitt, Timothy E. Quill, David Schenck, Daniel Shapiro, Susan W. Tolle, Alice Stewart Trillin, William Carlos Williams

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The Social Medicine Reader, Second Edition
Volume Two: Social and Cultural Contributions to Health, Difference, and Inequality
Gail E. Henderson, Sue E. Estroff, Larry R. Churchill, Nancy M. P. King, Jonathan Oberlander, and Ronald P. Strauss, eds.
Duke University Press, 2005
Duke University Press is pleased to announce the second edition of the bestselling Social Medicine Reader. The Reader provides a survey of the challenging issues facing today’s health care providers, patients, and caregivers by bringing together moving narratives of illness, commentaries by physicians, debates about complex medical cases, and conceptually and empirically based writings by scholars in medicine, the social sciences, and the humanities. The first edition of The Social Medicine Reader was a single volume. This significantly revised and expanded second edition is divided into three volumes to facilitate use by different audiences with varying interests.

Praise for the 3-volume second edition of The Social Medicine Reader:
“A superb collection of essays that illuminate the role of medicine in modern society. Students and general readers are not likely to find anything better.”—Arnold S. Relman, Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Praise for the first edition:
“This reviewer strongly recommends The Social Medicine Reader to the attention of medical educators.”—Samuel W. Bloom, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association

Volume 2:

Ranging from a historical look at eugenics to an ethnographic description of parents receiving the news that their child has Down syndrome, from analyses of inequalities in the delivery of health services to an examination of the meaning of race in genomics research, and from a meditation on the loneliness of the long-term caregiver to a reflection on what children owe their elderly parents, this volume explores health and illness. Social and Cultural Contributions to Health, Difference, and Inequality brings together seventeen pieces new to this edition of The Social Medicine Reader and five pieces that appeared in the first edition. It focuses on how difference and disability are defined and experienced in contemporary America, how the social categories commonly used to predict disease outcomes—such as gender, race and ethnicity, and social class—have become contested terrain, and why some groups have more limited access to health care services than others. Juxtaposing first-person narratives with empirical and conceptual studies, this compelling collection draws on several disciplines, including cultural and medical anthropology, sociology, and the history of medicine.

Contributors: Laurie K. Abraham, Raj Bhopal, Ami S. Brodoff, Daniel Callahan, David Diamond, Liam Donaldson, Alice Dreger, Sue E. Estroff, Paul Farmer, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Jerome Groopman, Gail E. Henderson, Linda M. Hunt, Barbara A. Koenig, Donald R. Lannin, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, Carol Levine, Judith Lorber, Nancy Mairs, Holly F. Mathews, James P. Mitchell, Joanna Mountain, Alan R. Nelson, Martin S. Pernick, Rayna Rapp, Sally L. Satel, Robert S. Schwartz, Brian D. Smedley, Adrienne Y. Stith, Sharon Sytsma, Gordon Weaver, Bruce Wilson, Irving Kenneth Zola

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front cover of Sudden Death and the Myth of CPR
Sudden Death and the Myth of CPR
Stefan Timmermans, foreword by Bern Shen
Temple University Press, 1999
Sudden Death and the Myth of CPR is for anyone who has taken a CPR course or who believes the images from television dramas. It is also for families of victims and survivors of CPR. It will engage emergency personnel, others in the medical field, and anyone concerned with ethical issues of death and dying.

Anyone who has ever taken a CPR course has wondered, "What would happen if I actually had to use CPR?" In Western societies, the lifesaving power of resuscitation has the status of a revered cultural myth. It promises life in the face of sudden death, but the reality is that lives are rarely saved. Medical researchers estimate the survival rate for out-of-hospital CPR to be between 1 and 3 percent. Sudden Death and the Myth of CPR explores the history of this medical innovation and the promotion of its effectiveness.

The overuse of resuscitation, Timmermans explains, defines people's experience with sudden death, something he learned firsthand by following the practice of lifesaving from street corner to emergency room. He argues that very few people are successfully resuscitated without brain damage despite the promotion of CPR's effectiveness through powerful media images. In vivid accounts of the day-to-day practices of cardiopulmonary resuscitation in one of the only studies o f sudden death, Timmermans records the astonishingly frank comments of emergency personnel. Doctors, nurses, social workers, and  paramedics express emotions from cynicism about going through the futile motions to genuine concern for victims' family members.

If a person who  was supposed to keep on living dies at the end of a resuscitative attempt, how socially meaningful is the dying? Timmermans asks tough questions and addresses the controversial ethical issues about the appropriateness of interfering with life and death. He suggests policy reform and the restoration of dignity to sudden death.
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front cover of Suicide Postvention in the Department of Defense
Suicide Postvention in the Department of Defense
Evidence, Policies and Procedures, and Perspectives of Loss Survivors
Rajeev Ramchand
RAND Corporation, 2015
A review of the scientific evidence on suicide postvention (organizational responses to prevent additional suicides and help loss survivors cope), guidance for other types of organizations, and the perspectives of the family and friends of service members who have died by suicide provide insights that may help the U.S. Department of Defense formulate its own policies and programs in a practical and efficient way.
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front cover of Suing the Tobacco and Lead Pigment Industries
Suing the Tobacco and Lead Pigment Industries
Government Litigation as Public Health Prescription
Donald G. Gifford
University of Michigan Press, 2010
"The topic, how tort law evolved over time into a system that allowed, for a moment at least, a parens patriae form of massive litigation against corporations, is exceedingly interesting and important. Gifford's treatment of this topic is highly informative, engaging, insightful, very current, and wise."
---David Owen, Carolina Distinguished Professor of Law, and Director of Tort Law Studies, University of South Carolina
In Suing the Tobacco and Lead Pigment Industries, legal scholar Donald G. Gifford recounts the transformation of tort litigation in response to the challenge posed by victims of 21st-century public health crises who seek compensation from the product manufacturers. Class action litigation promised a strategy for documenting collective harm, but an increasingly conservative judicial and political climate limited this strategy. Then, in 1995, Mississippi attorney general Mike Moore initiated a parens patriae action on behalf of the state against cigarette manufacturers. Forty-five other states soon filed public product liability actions, seeking both compensation for the funds spent on public health crises and the regulation of harmful products.
Gifford finds that courts, through their refusal to expand traditional tort claims, have resisted litigation as a solution to product-caused public health problems. Even if the government were to prevail, the remedy in such litigation is unlikely to be effective. Gifford warns, furthermore, that by shifting the powers to regulate products and to remediate public health problems from the legislature to the state attorney general, parens patriae litigation raises concerns about the appropriate allocation of powers among the branches of government.
Donald G. Gifford is the Edward M. Robertson Research Professor of Law at the University of Maryland School of Law.
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Superbugs
An Arms Race against Bacteria
William Hall, Anthony McDonnell, and Jim O'Neill
Harvard University Press, 2018

Antibiotics are powerful drugs that can prevent and treat infections, but they are becoming less effective as a result of drug resistance. Resistance develops because the bacteria that antibiotics target can evolve ways to defend themselves against these drugs. When antibiotics fail, there is very little else to prevent an infection from spreading.

Unnecessary use of antibiotics in both humans and animals accelerates the evolution of drug-resistant bacteria, with potentially catastrophic personal and global consequences. Our best defenses against infectious disease could cease to work, surgical procedures would become deadly, and we might return to a world where even small cuts are life-threatening. The problem of drug resistance already kills over one million people across the world every year and has huge economic costs. Without action, this problem will become significantly worse.

Following from their work on the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, William Hall, Anthony McDonnell, and Jim O’Neill outline the major systematic failures that have led to this growing crisis. They also provide a set of solutions to tackle these global issues that governments, industry, and public health specialists can adopt. In addition to personal behavioral modifications, such as better handwashing regimens, Superbugs argues for mounting an offense against this threat through agricultural policy changes, an industrial research stimulus, and other broad-scale economic and social incentives.

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front cover of Surrogates and Other Mothers
Surrogates and Other Mothers
The Debates over Assisted Reproduction
Ruth Macklin
Temple University Press, 1994

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.

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