Examining trans- healthcare as a key site through which struggles for health and justice take shape
Over the past two decades, medical and therapeutic approaches to transgender patients have changed radically, from treating a supposed pathology to offering gender-affirming care. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in New York City and Buenos Aires, Care without Pathology moves across the Americas to show how trans- health activists have taken on the project of depathologization.
In New York, Christoph Hanssmann examines activist attempts to overturn bans on using public health dollars to fund trans- health care. In Argentina, he traces how trans- activists marshaled medical statistics and personal biographies to reveal state violence directed against trans- people and travestis. Hanssmann also demonstrates the importance of understanding transphobia in the broader context of gendered racism, ableism, and antipoverty, arguing for the rise of a thoroughly coalition-based mass mobilization.
Care without Pathology highlights the distributive arguments activists made to access state funding for health care, combating state arguments that funding trans- health care is too specialized, too expensive, and too controversial. Hanssmann situates trans- health as a crucible within which sweeping changes are taking place—with potentially far-reaching effects on the economic and racial barriers to accessing care.
One of the major concerns about the changing U.S. health-care systems is whether they will improve or diminish the quality and cost-effectiveness of medical care. The shift from a fee-for-service to a prepaid method of reimbursement has greatly changed the incentives of patients to seek care as well as those of providers to supply it. This change poses a particular challenge for care of depressed patients, a vulnerable population that often does not advocate for its own care. This book documents the inefficiencies of our national systems--prepaid as well as fee-for-service--for treating depression and explores how they can be improved.
Although depression is a major illness affecting millions of people, it is seriously undertreated in the United States. The ongoing shift of mental-health care away from specialists and toward primary medical-care providers is causing fewer depressed patients to be appropriately diagnosed and treated. Depression is frequently more devastating than other major illnesses, such as arthritis and heart disease, because it often begins at a younger age, when people are at their productive peak and thus at risk of permanently damaging their careers. It also differs from many medical conditions in that its indirect costs are usually much higher than direct treatment costs.
The authors urge the integration of both medical and economic considerations in designing policies for the treatment of depression. They show that by spending more money efficiently on care, the nation will gain greater health improvements per dollar invested and a more productive population.
You are old, ill, in pain, and your doctor asks you what you want to do about it. You may be uncertain but you're definitely not alone. By the year 2020, some 50 million Americans will be over sixty-five, and as the nation ages we must all ask what we ought to do about the health and medical care of our elderly. Our response will have profound consequences, not just for individuals and families, but for society as a whole. This book helps us start to form an answer.
To make decisions about medical care in old age, we need to know more about the reality of being elderly and sick, and Choosing Medical Care in Old Age gives us the opportunity. Muriel Gillick, a noted physician who specializes in the care of the elderly and in medical ethics, presents a panoply of stories drawn from her clinical experience. These encounters, with the robust and the frail, the demented and the dying, capture the texture of the experience of being old and faced with critical medical questions. From the stories of older people struggling to make choices in the face of acute illness, stories that are often poignant and sometimes tragic, Gillick develops broad guidelines for medical decision–making for the elderly. Within this framework, she confronts particular concerns and questions. When are certain procedures too burdensome to be justified? What are unacceptable risks? Should family members serve as exclusive spokespersons for relatives who can no longer speak for themselves? Gillick's bold and personal prescription for medical care for the elderly calls for a change in the way medicine is understood and practiced, as well as for changes in the institutions that serve the elderly, such as hospitals and nursing homes. An intelligent and deeply compassionate inquiry into the difficult issues and real–life dilemmas raised by current practices, her book offers a first step toward those changes.
In The Colonial Politics of Global Health, Jessica Lynne Pearson explores the collision between imperial and international visions of health and development in French Africa as decolonization movements gained strength.
After World War II, French officials viewed health improvements as a way to forge a more equitable union between France and its overseas territories. Through new hospitals, better medicines, and improved public health, French subjects could reimagine themselves as French citizens. The politics of health also proved vital to the United Nations, however, and conflicts arose when French officials perceived international development programs sponsored by the UN as a threat to their colonial authority. French diplomats also feared that anticolonial delegations to the United Nations would use shortcomings in health, education, and social development to expose the broader structures of colonial inequality. In the face of mounting criticism, they did what they could to keep UN agencies and international health personnel out of Africa, limiting the access Africans had to global health programs. French personnel marginalized their African colleagues as they mapped out the continent’s sanitary future and negotiated the new rights and responsibilities of French citizenship. The health disparities that resulted offered compelling evidence that the imperial system of governance should come to an end.
Pearson’s work links health and medicine to postwar debates over sovereignty, empire, and human rights in the developing world. The consequences of putting politics above public health continue to play out in constraints placed on international health organizations half a century later.
In 1917, shortly after the United States’ declaration of war on Germany, Guy Emerson Bowerman, Jr., enlisted in the American army’s ambulance service. Like other young ambulance drivers—Hemingway, Dos Passos, Cummings, Cowley—Bowerman longed to “see the show.” He was glad to learn that the ambulance units were leaving for France right away.
For seventeen months, until the armistice of November 1918, Bowerman kept an almost daily diary of the war. To read his words today is to live the war with an immediacy and vividness of detail that is astonishing.
Only twenty when he enlisted, Bowerman was an idealistic, if snobbish, young man who exulted that his section was made up mostly of young “Yalies” like himself. But he expected the war to change him, and it did. In the end he writes that he and his compatriots scarcely remember a world at peace. "The old life was gone forever. . ."
Guy Bowerman’s unit was attached to a French infantry division stationed near Verdun. Sent to halt the German drive to Paris in 1918, the division participated in the decisive counterattack of July and tracked the routed Germans through Belgium. Then, “unwarned,” Bowerman and his comrades were “plunged into … a life of peace.” Into this life, he writes, they walked “bewildered,” like “men fearing ambush.”
This remarkable chronicle of one young man’s rite of passage is destined to become a classic in the literature of the Great War.
As David Kelly writes, "Catholic moral theology has not been completely constant over the centuries; it has learned and developed." In Contemporary Catholic Health Care Ethics he demonstrates how Catholic health care ethics can—and should—evolve similarly in response to the lightning speed of modern medical advances. Kelly draws on and analyzes the Catholic tradition of medical ethics—but he does not shy away from criticizing it as well, giving health care professionals, hospital ethics committees, and students a fresh treatment of Catholic health care ethics emphasizing theology, methodology, and application.
First discussing the Catholic understanding of the human person, Kelly proposes a Catholic Christian approach to the meaning of human life as it applies specifically to health care. He includes a brief history of the relationship between religion and medicine, and makes strong claims about how theology ought and ought not to be applied in health care ethics. Drawing from the terminology and approaches used by secular bioethics, he suggests how a Catholic perspective on health care can utilize certain secular moral-philosophical positions, even as they apply to the issues of birth control, and end-of life concerns. As practitioners, patients, and families face the difficult decision to continue or stop treatment for dying patients, Kelly compassionately, but practically, explores their concerns in light of American law and ethics. Finally, he provides measured insight on pain management, hospital ethics committees, stem cell research, genetic engineering, and allocation of health care resources.
Contemporary Catholic Health Care Ethics is informed, challenging, articulate, and bold—bringing to the extremely important field of Catholic health care ethics a much-needed and welcome voice, unafraid to speak to the most difficult issues of the 21st century.
Contemporary Catholic Health Care Ethics, Second Edition, integrates theology, methodology, and practical application into a detailed and practical examination of the bioethical issues that confront students, scholars, and practitioners. Noted bioethicists Gerard Magill, Henk ten Have, and David F. Kelly contribute diverse backgrounds and experience that inform the richness of new material covered in this second edition.
The book is organized into three sections: theology (basic issues underlying Catholic thought), methodology (how Catholic theology approaches moral issues, including birth control), and applications to current issues. New chapters discuss controversial end-of-life issues such as forgoing treatment, killing versus allowing patients to die, ways to handle decisions for incompetent patients, advance directives, and physician-assisted suicide. Unlike anthologies, the coherent text offers a consistent method in order to provide students, scholars, and practitioners with an understanding of ethical dilemmas as well as concrete examples to assist in the difficult decisions they must make on an everyday basis.
This is the first book to examine challenges in the healthcare sector in the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries (Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain). These countries experienced remarkably swift transformations from small fishing and pearling communities at the beginning of the twentieth century to wealthy petro-states today. Their healthcare systems, however, are only now beginning to catch up.
Rapid changes to the population and lifestyles of the GCC states have completely changed—and challenged—the region’s health profile and infrastructure. While major successes in combatting infectious diseases and improving standards of primary healthcare are reflected in key health indicators, new trends have developed; increasingly “lifestyle” or “wealthy country” diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, have replaced the old maladies. To meet these emerging healthcare needs, GCC states require highly trained and skilled healthcare workers, an environment that supports local training, state-of-the-art diagnostic laboratories and hospitals, research production and dissemination, and knowledge acquisition. They face shortages in most if not all of these areas. This book provides a comprehensive study of the rapidly changing health profile of the region, the existing conditions of healthcare systems, and the challenges posed to healthcare management across the six states of the GCC.
“[Anderson] writes with passion, wit, and panache, and the principal virtues of The Cultivation of Whiteness are the old-fashioned ones of thoroughness, accuracy, and impeccable documentation. . . . [His] sensitive study is a model of how contentious historical issues can be confronted.”—W. F. Bynum, Times Literary Supplement
“One of the virtues of The Cultivation of Whiteness is that it brings together aspects of Australian life and history that are now more often separated—race and environment, blood and soil, medicine and geography, tropical science and urban health, biological thought and national policy, Aboriginality and immigration, the body and the mind. The result is a rich and subtle history of ideas that is both intellectual and organic, and that vividly evokes past states of mind and their lingering, haunting power.”—Tom Griffiths, Sydney Morning Herald
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