A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY42 start with G start with G
Over a period of six years, Judith Farquhar and Lili Lai worked with seven minority nationality groups in China’s southern mountains, observing how medicines were gathered and local healing systems codified. Gathering Medicines shares their intimate view of how people understand ethnicity, locality, the body, and nature. This ethnography of knowledge diversities in multiethnic China is a testament to the rural wisdom of mountain healers, one that theorizes, from the ground up, the dynamic encounters between formal statist knowledge and the popular authority of the wild.
This revised volume, originally published in Sweden, consolidates multidisciplinary research on gender inequalities in health. Reviewing previous research and presenting new empirical data from Sweden and elsewhere, the authors examine basic concepts, possible hypotheses, explanatory models, and policy solutions for the biological and social causes of the differences in health between men and women. Along with discussions of reproductive, mental, and occupational health, this book reviews critical issues such as violence and asks important questions, such as why men are dying younger.
The volume also analyzes how Sweden’s labor market, social structure, and health care system have contributed to these gender differences, and what effects these factors will have in the future. Sweden’s experience as a pioneer in health achievement and gender equality provides valuable insights into the health-related challenges remaining for the rest of the world.
Author Kim Clark relates the stories of Matilde Hidalgo and other women who successfully challenged newly instituted Ecuadorian state programs in the wake of the Liberal Revolution of 1895. New laws, while they did not specifically outline women’s rights, left loopholes wherein women could contest entry into education systems and certain professions and vote in elections. As Clark demonstrates, many of those who seized these opportunities were unattached women who were socially and economically disenfranchised.
Political and social changes during the liberal period drew new groups into the workforce. Women found novel opportunities to pursue professions where they did not compete directly with men. Training women for work meant expanding secular education systems and normal schools. Healthcare initiatives were also introduced that employed and targeted women to reduce infant mortality, eradicate venereal diseases, and regulate prostitution.
Many of these state programs attempted to control women’s behavior under the guise of morality and honor. Yet highland Ecuadorian women used them to better their lives and to gain professional training, health care, employment, and political rights. As they engaged state programs and used them for their own purposes, these women became modernizers and agents of change, winning freedoms for themselves and future generations.
Disability and gender, terms that have previously seemed so clear-cut, are becoming increasingly complex in light of new politics and scholarship. These words now suggest complicated sets of practices and ways of being.
Contributors to this innovative collection explore the intersection of gender and disability in the arts, consumer culture, healing, the personal and private realms, and the appearance of disability in the public sphere—both in public fantasies and in public activism. Beginning as separate enterprises that followed activist and scholarly paths, gender and disability studies have reached a point where they can move beyond their boundaries for a common landscape to inspire new areas of inquiry. Whether from a perspective in the humanities, social sciences, sciences, or arts, the shared subject matter of gender and disability studies—the body, social and cultural hierarchy, identity, discrimination and inequality, representation, and political activism—insistently calls for deeper conversation. This volume provides fresh findings not only about the discrimination practiced against women and people with disabilities, but also about the productive parallelism between these two categories.
David Nathan was stunned when he first saw Dayem Saif at Children's Hospital in Boston in September 1968. Dayem was then a six-year-old with the stature of an average-sized boy of two. He wore baby shoes on his tiny feet and was unable to walk without holding his mother's hand. His color was dark yet pasty and his face horribly misshapen. The child was being ravaged by thalassemia, a life-threatening inherited disease of the blood, and one of the leading causes of disfigurement, disability, and death in children worldwide. Without effective treatment, Dayem would almost certainly die before his twentieth birthday.
Genes, Blood, and Courage is David Nathan's absorbing story of the thirty-year struggle to keep Dayem alive. "Immortal Sword" is the English translation of Dayem's Arabic name, and under Nathan's care Dayem, indeed, seems immortal. Despite his continual reluctance to follow his doctor's orders and the repeated hospitalizations that result, Dayem--the misshapen, stunted boy--survives to become a handsome, successful businessman.
In Genes, Blood, and Courage Nathan goes beyond his struggles with this seemingly immortal patient to describe in detail the emergence, over the past twenty-five years, of an entirely new force in medical care called molecular medicine. As Dayem's case illustrates, this new area of human genetic research--in which Nathan is a leading clinical investigator--promises tremendous advances in the rational diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of inherited disorders, such as thalassemia and sickle cell anemia, and even of acquired illnesses such as cancer and infectious disease.
Genes, Blood, and Courage is a celebration not just of Dayem's triumphs but also of the tremendous accomplishments and potential of the American biomedical research enterprise in the late twentieth century.
They mastermind our lives, shaping our features, our health, and our behavior, even in the sacrosanct realms of love and sex, religion, aging, and death. Yet we are the ones who house, perpetuate, and give the promise of immortality to these biological agents, our genetic gods. The link between genes and gods is hardly arbitrary, as the distinguished evolutionary geneticist John Avise reveals in this compelling book. In clear, straightforward terms, Avise reviews recent discoveries in molecular biology, evolutionary genetics, and human genetic engineering, and discusses the relevance of these findings to issues of ultimate concern traditionally reserved for mythology, theology, and religious faith.
The book explains how the genetic gods figure in our development--not just our metabolism and physiology, but even our emotional disposition, personality, ethical leanings, and, indeed, religiosity. Yet genes are physical rather than metaphysical entities. Having arisen via an amoral evolutionary process--natural selection--genes have no consciousness, no sentient code of conduct, no reflective concern about the consequences of their actions. It is Avise's contention that current genetic knowledge can inform our attempts to answer typically religious questions--about origins, fate, and meaning. The Genetic Gods challenges us to make the necessary connection between what we know, what we believe, and what we embody.
Our genetic markers have come to be regarded as portals to the past. Analysis of these markers is increasingly used to tell the story of human migration; to investigate and judge issues of social membership and kinship; to rewrite history and collective memory; to right past wrongs and to arbitrate legal claims and human rights controversies; and to open new thinking about health and well-being. At the same time, in many societies genetic evidence is being called upon to perform a kind of racially charged cultural work: to repair the racial past and to transform scholarly and popular opinion about the “nature” of identity in the present.
Genetics and the Unsettled Past considers the alignment of genetic science with commercial genealogy, with legal and forensic developments, and with pharmaceutical innovation to examine how these trends lend renewed authority to biological understandings of race and history.
This unique collection brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines—biology, history, cultural studies, law, medicine, anthropology, ethnic studies, sociology—to explore the emerging and often contested connections among race, DNA, and history. Written for a general audience, the book’s essays touch upon a variety of topics, including the rise and implications of DNA in genealogy, law, and other fields; the cultural and political uses and misuses of genetic information; the way in which DNA testing is reshaping understandings of group identity for French Canadians, Native Americans, South Africans, and many others within and across cultural and national boundaries; and the sweeping implications of genetics for society today.
In Genius Belabored: Childbed Fever and the Tragic Life of Ignaz Semmelweis, Theodore G. Obenchain traces the life story of a nineteenth-century Hungarian obstetrician who was shunned and marginalized by the medical establishment for advancing a far-sighted but unorthodox solution to the appalling mortality rates that plagued new mothers of the day.
In engrossing detail, Obenchain recreates for readers the sights, smells, and activities within a hospital of that day. In an era before the acceptance of modern germ science, physicians saw little need for cleanliness or hygiene. As a consequence, antiseptic measures were lax and rudimentary. Especially vulnerable to contamination were new mothers, who frequently contracted and died from childbed fever (puerperal fever). Genius Belabored follows Semmelweis’s awakening to the insight that many of these deaths could be avoided with basic antiseptic measures like hand washing.
The medical establishment, intellectually unprepared for Semmelweis’s prescient hypothesis, rejected it for a number of reasons. It was unorthodox and went against the lingering Christian tradition that the dangers of childbirth were inherent to the lives of women. Complicating matters, colleagues did not consider Semmelweis an easy physician to work with. His peers described him as strange and eccentric. Obenchain offers an empathetic and insightful argument that Semmelweis suffered from bipolar disorder and illuminates how his colleagues, however dedicated to empirical science they might have been, misjudged Semmelweis’s methods based upon ignorance and their emotional discomfort with him.
In Genius Belabored, Obenchain identifies Semmelweis’s rightful place in the pantheon of scientists and physicians whose discoveries have saved the lives of millions. Obenchain’s biography of Semmelweis offers unique insights into the practice of medicine and the mindsets of physicians working in the premodern era. This fascinating study offers much of interest to general readers as well as those interested in germ theory, the history of medicine and obstetrics, or anyone wishing to better understand the trajectory of modern medicine.
"The algorithms in this book have been developed by Drs. Warren and Mahmoud, as the result of a systematic effort to produce such guides. The book is presented as another in the series "Studies in Infectious Disease Research" and is a most welcome addition, certain to supply a major and hitherto inadequately fulfilled need."—from the Foreword, by Edward H. Kass, M. D., Ph.D
This book examines why physicians are often surprisingly reluctant to follow guidelines for treating patients based on research data. It assesses the merits of these concerns—which include worries about legal liability, financial incentives, the scientific validity of the data, and the objectivity of the issuer of the guidelines. It also proposes ways of developing more useful data and more effective guidelines that would reduce their objections.
This fascinating new book radically rewrites all that we know about eighteenth-century childbirth by placing women’s voices at the center of the story. Examining childbirth from the perspective of the birthing woman, this research offers new perspectives on the history of the family, the social history of medicine, community and neighborhood studies, and the study of women’s lives in eighteenth-century England.
From “quickening” through to “confinement,” “giving caudle,” delivery, and “lying-in,” birth was once a complex ritual that involved entire communities. Drawing on an extensive and under-researched body of materials, such as letters, diaries, and recipe books, this book offers critical new perspectives on the history of the family, community, and the lives of women in the coming age of modern medicine. It unpacks the rituals of contemporary childbirth—from foods traditionally eaten before and after birth, birthing clothing, and how a woman’s relationship with her family, husband, friends, and neighbors changed during and after pregnancy. In this important and deeply moving study, we are invited onto a detailed and emotional journey through motherhood in an age of immense socio-cultural and intellectual change.
The Global Burden of Disease and Injury Series details and analyzes global patterns of death and disability, providing a bold, comprehensive examination of the state of the world's health.
The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) provides systematic epidemiological estimates for an unprecedented 150 major health conditions. Its methods and results are presented here, including: disaggregated death and disability data; projections to the year 2020; and risk factor evaluations. While it minutely examines causes of death, the GBD is unique in its inclusion of disability. The authors explore the technical bases and moral implications of incorporating social, physical, and mental disabilities in health assessments, explicating the indicator they have developed, the disability-adjusted life-year (DALY). The GBD provides indispensable global and regional data for health planning, research, and education.
Among the study's results: Depression was the fourth leading cause of disease-burden in 1990 and by 2020 will be the single leading cause. Injuries cause over 15 percent of death and disability. HIV will by 2010 inflict as great a burden as the age-old epidemic tuberculosis. By 2020, tobacco use will account for 9 million deaths annually. Ultimately, pneumonia and diarrhea, both primarily diseases of childhood, will continue to inflict the greatest health burden of all.
Deaths from infectious diseases continue to take a heavy toll even though there have been spectacular successes in their control over the last thirty years. In the developing regions, five of the ten leading causes of death and disease burden in 1990 were infectious diseases--respiratory infections, diarrhea, tuberculosis, measles, and malaria--while in the developed regions the only infectious disease among the ten leading causes of death in 1990 was respiratory infections.
This volume contains comprehensive data and detailed discussions of the global epidemiologies of twenty-three infectious diseases, including the above-mentioned conditions as well as hepatitis B, meningitis, polio, and tetanus.
The Global Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases will serve as a comprehensive reference for epidemiologists, public health professionals, and tropical disease specialists.
Over 50 percent of all deaths worldwide are from noncommunicable diseases. The results of the Global Burden of Disease Study dispel the notions that these noncommunicable diseases are related to affluence. In all developing regions, except for India and sub-Saharan Africa, noncommunicable diseases are responsible for more deaths than infectious diseases. Deaths from noncommunicable diseases have been projected to climb from 28.1 million deaths in 1990 to 49.7 million in 2020, increasing as a proportion of all deaths from 55 percent in 1990 to 73 percent in 2020.
This volume provides comprehensive data and detailed discussions of the epidemiologies of all major cancers and cardiovascular conditions, as well as those of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, ulcers, diabetes, nephritis, cirrhosis, and appendicitis.
Global Health in Africa is a first exploration of selected histories of global health initiatives in Africa. The collection addresses some of the most important interventions in disease control, including mass vaccination, large-scale treatment and/or prophylaxis campaigns, harm reduction efforts, and nutritional and virological research.The chapters in this collection are organized in three sections that evaluate linkages between past, present, and emergent. Part I, “Looking Back,” contains four chapters that analyze colonial-era interventions and reflect upon their implications for contemporary interventions. Part II, “The Past in the Present,” contains essays exploring the historical dimensions and unexamined assumptions of contemporary disease control programs. Part III, “The Past in the Future,” examines two fields of public health intervention in which efforts to reduce disease transmission and future harm are premised on an understanding of the past.
This much-needed volume brings together international experts from the disciplines of demography, anthropology, and historical epidemiology. Covering health initiatives from smallpox vaccinations to malaria control to HIV campaigns, Global Health in Africa offers a first comprehensive look at some of global health’s most important challenges.
The international community has made great progress in improving global health. But staggering health inequalities between rich and poor still remain, raising fundamental questions of social justice. In a book that systematically defines the burgeoning field of global health law, Lawrence Gostin drives home the need for effective global governance for health and offers a blueprint for reform, based on the principle that the opportunity to live a healthy life is a basic human right.
Gostin shows how critical it is for institutions and international agreements to focus not only on illness but also on the essential conditions that enable people to stay healthy throughout their lifespan: nutrition, clean water, mosquito control, and tobacco reduction. Policies that shape agriculture, trade, and the environment have long-term impacts on health, and Gostin proposes major reforms of global health institutions and governments to ensure better coordination, more transparency, and accountability. He illustrates the power of global health law with case studies on AIDS, influenza, tobacco, and health worker migration.
Today's pressing health needs worldwide are a problem not only for the medical profession but also for all concerned citizens. Designed with the beginning student, advanced researcher, and informed public in mind, Global Health Law will be a foundational resource for teaching, advocacy, and public discourse in global health.
With lessons learned from COVID-19, a world-leading expert on pandemic preparedness proposes a pragmatic plan urgently needed for the future of global health security.
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how unprepared the world was for such an event, as even the most sophisticated public health systems failed to cope. We must have far more investment and preparation, along with better detection, warning, and coordination within and across national boundaries. In an age of global pandemics, no country can achieve public health on its own. Health security planning is paramount.
Lawrence O. Gostin has spent three decades designing resilient health systems and governance that take account of our interconnected world, as a close advisor to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and many public health agencies globally. Global Health Security addresses the borderless dangers societies now face, including infectious diseases and bioterrorism, and examines the political, environmental, and socioeconomic factors exacerbating these threats. Weak governance, ineffective health systems, and lack of preparedness are key sources of risk, and all of them came to the fore during the COVID-19 crisis, even—sometimes especially—in wealthy countries like the United States. But the solution is not just to improve national health policy, which can only react after the threat is realized at home. Gostin further proposes robust international institutions, tools for effective cross-border risk communication and action, and research programs targeting the global dimension of public health.
Creating these systems will require not only sustained financial investment but also shared values of cooperation, collective responsibility, and equity. Gostin has witnessed the triumph of these values in national and international forums and has a clear plan to tackle the challenges ahead. Global Health Security therefore offers pragmatic solutions that address the failures of the recent past, while looking toward what we know is coming. Nothing could be more important to the future health of nations.
The Global Burden of Disease and Injury Series details and analyzes global patterns of death and disability, providing a bold, comprehensive examination of the state of the world's health.
The encyclopedic Global Health Statistics provides, for the first time, epidemiological estimates for all major diseases and injuries. As part of the Global Burden of Disease project, over 100 disease experts analyzed these data, collected from exhaustive searches of registration data and published and unpublished studies.
Formatted for English, French, and Spanish readers, the figures are displayed in a comprehensive set of tables, presenting for over 200 causes estimates of mortality, incidence, prevalence, durations, and average ages of onset in 1990--all disaggregated by age, sex, and region. Demographic tables and projections of deaths and death rates are also provided.
This succinct data-set provides for the general reader the set of tools necessary to understand disease and injury from a global perspective; and it provides to the researcher unprecedented data to serve as a starting point for further study. This book should stand as an unparalleled desktop reference for anyone interested in the health of populations.
Debates over health care have focused for so long on economics that the proper goals for medicine seem to be taken for granted; yet problems in health care stem as much from a lack of agreement about the goals and priorities of medicine as from the way systems function. This book asks basic questions about the purposes and ends of medicine and shows that the answers have practical implications for future health care delivery, medical research, and the education of medical students.
The Hastings Center coordinated teams of physicians, nurses, public health experts, philosophers, theologians, politicians, health care administrators, social workers, and lawyers in fourteen countries to explore these issues. In this volume, they articulate four basic goals of medicine — prevention of disease, relief of suffering, care of the ill, and avoidance of premature death — and examine them in light of the cultural, political, and economic pressures under which medicine functions. In reporting these findings, the contributors touch on a wide range of diverse issues such as genetic technology, Chinese medicine, care of the elderly, and prevention and public health.
The Goals of Medicine clearly demonstrates the importance of clarifying the purposes of medicine before attempting to change the economic and organizational systems. It warns that without such examination, any reform efforts may be fruitless.
Discussions and debates over the medical use of stem cells and cloning have always had a religious component. But there are many different religious voices. This anthology on how religious perspectives can inform the difficult issues of stem cell research and human cloning is essential to the discussion. Contributors reflect the spectrum of Christian responses, from liberal Protestant to evangelical to Roman Catholic. The noted moral philosopher, Laurie Zoloth, offers a Jewish approach to cloning, and Sondra Wheeler contributes her perspective on both Jewish and Christian understandings of embryonic stem cell research.
In addition to the discussions found here, God and the Embryo includes a series of official statements on stem cell research and cloning from religious bodies, including the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church in America, the United Methodist Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America and the Rabbinical Council of America. "Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry," from the statement of the President's Council on Bioethics, concludes the book.
The debates and the discussions will continue, but for anyone interested in the nuances of religious perspectives that make their important contributions to these ethically challenging and important dialectics, God and the Embryo is an invaluable resource.
For copyright reasons, this edition is not available in the South African Development Community and Kenya.
Illness provides a mirror that allows sufferers to see themselves and to become more introspective. As they struggle for control over illness and control over time, they also struggle to control the central images of the self. For example, the chronically ill may situate their self-concepts in the past, present, or future. Charmaz examines under what conditions they situate their self-concepts in each of those timeframes. People may say they live one day at a time. They may bracket certain experiences, such as a heart attack, as timemarkers or turning points in the past. Or they may look ahead to recovering their health. Or ahead to death.
Charmaz artfully combines near jargon-free analysis with moving stories about how people have experienced illness, usually told in the sufferers' own words. She enters the world of the chronically ill, and brings us into it.
This new paperback edition, updated with the latest information and new material, offers parents and educators a rich and invaluable resource on how children learn to live in family and society from birth to age six. Norbert Herschkowitz, MD, and his wife Elinore Chapman Herschkowitz draw on their lifetime of experience in studying infants and children to explain how brain development shapes a child’s personality and behavior. Organizing their narrative by age, the authors examine a wide range of social development issues, from appropriate rule-setting to the development of key character elements in a child such as moral sensibility, temperament, language development, playing, aggression, impulse control, and empathy.
Some of the most popular features of the hardcover edition are retained here, including the question-and-answer section that concludes each chapter with real questions posed by parents to Dr. Herschkowitz, as well as brain maps and charts that display milestones in the development of various skills. Additional new material addresses concerns about prematurely born babies and the issue of resilience in children.
In today’s world, children grow up in an incredibly complex and highly sensory environment. A Good Start in Life offers a clear, concise, and richly detailed guide infused with warmth and encouragement that enables parents and educators to constructively stimulate and shape their children’s cognitive and social development.
“A must read . . . a gift to all parents.”—Rosemarie T. Truglio, vice-president, Education and Research, Sesame Workshop
“Do the first three years of life represent a critical period for all aspects of development? Are we the product of our genes or of our environment? Does early exposure to Mozart make for smarter babies? The answers to these and other pressing questions are skillfully and elegantly answered in this wonderful book, which I enthusiastically recommend.”
—Charles A. Nelson, Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Child Psychology, Neuroscience, and Pediatrics, University of Minnesota
“This delightfully written book . . . is not merely a how-to book, but a book about understanding how a child truly grows.”
—Guy McKhann, MD, The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
AIDS. Ebola. "Killer microbes." All around us the alarms are going off, warning of the danger of new, deadly diseases. And yet, as Nancy Tomes reminds us in her absorbing book, this is really nothing new. A remarkable work of medical and cultural history, The Gospel of Germs takes us back to the first great "germ panic" in American history, which peaked in the early 1900s, to explore the origins of our modern disease consciousness.
Little more than a hundred years ago, ordinary Americans had no idea that many deadly ailments were the work of microorganisms, let alone that their own behavior spread such diseases. The Gospel of Germs shows how the revolutionary findings of late nineteenth-century bacteriology made their way from the laboratory to the lavatory and kitchen, with public health reformers spreading the word and women taking up the battle on the domestic front. Drawing on a wealth of advice books, patent applications, advertisements, and oral histories, Tomes traces the new awareness of the microbe as it radiated outward from middle-class homes into the world of American business and crossed the lines of class, gender, ethnicity, and race.
Just as we take some of the weapons in this germ war for granted--fixtures as familiar as the white porcelain toilet, the window screen, the refrigerator, and the vacuum cleaner--so we rarely think of the drastic measures deployed against disease in the dangerous old days before antibiotics. But, as Tomes notes, many of the hygiene rules first popularized in those days remain the foundation of infectious disease control today. Her work offers a timely look into the history of our long-standing obsession with germs, its impact on twentieth-century culture and society, and its troubling new relevance to our own lives.
As local governments and organizations assume more responsibility for ensuring the public health, identity politics play an increasing yet largely unexamined role in public and policy attitudes toward local problems. In Governing How We Care, medical anthropologist Susan Shaw examines the relationship between government and citizens using case studies of needle exchange and Welfare-to-Work programs to illustrate the meanings of cultural difference, ethnicity, and inequality in health care.
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted over six years in a small New England city, Shaw presents critical perspectives on public health intervention efforts. She looks at online developments in health care and makes important correlations between poverty and health care in the urban United States. Shaw also highlights the new concepts of community and forms of identity that emerge in our efforts to provide effective health care. Governing How We Care shows how government-sponsored community health and health care programs operate in an age of neoliberalism.
A masterpiece by one of the West’s best-loved authorsJust when Sacramento journalist Marty Martinez thinks his life can’t get any worse, it does. His beloved son has died of AIDS, his wife has divorced him and joined a cult, and his daughter blames him for the disintegration of their family. Then a chance medical examination reveals that he has prostate cancer. Marty faces his new role as a cancer patient with awkward grit and desperation. He is a sympathetic, utterly convincing character seeking faith in a Catholic Church as troubled as he is. He brings increased intensity to his career as he investigates a far-reaching political scandal, reunites his family in unexpected ways, and finds love with a fellow cancer patient. Grace Period is a profound and sometimes hilarious novel about living with serious illness. Marty copes with fear and the painful, sometimes embarrassing, treatment of his disease, but instead of winding down his life he finds fresh purpose and a joyful new love. Haslam brilliantly depicts the complexities of everyday life and the intricate, sometimes tortured bonds of family and friendship. In Grace Period, Haslam shows us that existence at the precarious edge of life offers not only pain and loss but hope, a chance at redemption, love, and even happiness. Grace Period is his masterwork.
Great Medical Discoveries offers a short illustrated history of the city’s contribution to the medical sciences, from the medieval period to the present day, when it is home to some of the world’s leading large scientific institutions. In charting this remarkable history, the book showcases twenty discoveries across the centuries. In the mid-twentieth century, for instance, Oxford led the field of experimental medicine, and William Harvey, Thomas Willis, and Thomas Sydenham all gained eponymous status with their pioneering research into the workings of the human body. In the mid-seventeenth century, Dorothy Hodgkin’s development of x-ray crystallography earned her a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Meanwhile, the work of epidemiologist Richard Doll saved millions of lives by making clear the long-term dangers of smoking and the benefits of quitting.
Great Medical Discoveries traces these and other examples of groundbreaking research—from the scientific application of anesthetics to new treatments for hemophilia and life-saving advances in neurosurgery—and shows how they form part of a wider tapestry of work that has helped shape the medical sciences and improve human health.
In The Greatest Killer, Donald R. Hopkins provides a fascinating account of smallpox and its role in human history. Starting with its origins 10,000 years ago in Africa or Asia, Hopkins follows the disease through the ancient and modern worlds, showing how smallpox removed or temporarily incapacitated heads of state, halted or exacerbated wars, and devastated populations that had never been exposed to the disease. In Hopkins's history, smallpox was one of the most dangerous-and influential-factors that shaped the course of world events.
A Greenhouse for the Mind continues the story of the school, focusing on how its teachers and counselors create an educational environment in which children will want and be able to learn. Jacquelyn Seevak Sanders worked closely with Bettelheim for thirteen years as a counselor and assistant principal and since 1973 has been director of the Orthogenic School. She offers her interpretation of Bettelheim's vision of a healing world for children, as well as her own ideas and new perspectives from the last decade.
In a warm and anecdotal style, Sanders relates the experiences and overarching theoretical principles that have shaped the school and its curriculum. She describes how the staff, schedules, and physical appearance of the school have been developed to create a stable and safe place to learn; how teachers confront their own emotional vulnerability; how the staff accepts the children themselves while disciplining unacceptable behavior; and how the attention of the inattentive can be gained. She chronicles the successes and setbacks of the staff in developing a curriculum that includes reading, science, and physical education, and she exemplifies the school's principles and practices through a story of an imaginary student's educational development.
In addition to her experience at the Orthogenic School, Sanders has worked with teachers at all levels from nursery schools to universities, and in A Greenhouse for the Mind she passes on what she has learned about educating difficult children—principles that have been helpful to both disturbed children in a unique setting and more typical children in ordinary settings. Her attention to the role of emotions in the learning process adds an often neglected dimension to traditional cognitive and instructional approaches.
Most discussions of health care center on medical advances, cost, and the roles of insurers and government agencies. With The Grey Zone of Health and Illness, Alan Blum offers a new perspective, outlining a highly nuanced theoretical approach to health and health care alike. Drawing on a range of thinkers, Blum explains how our current understanding of health care tends to posit it as a sort of state of permanent emergency, like the nuclear standoff of the Cold War. To move beyond that, he argues, will require a complete rethinking of health and sickness, self-governance and negligence. A heady, cutting-edge intervention in a critical area of society, The Grey Zone of Health and Illness will have wide ramifications in the academy and beyond.
Guarding the Golden Gate covers not only the creation and operation of the station, which is integral to San Francisco’s history, but also discusses the challenges of life on Angel Island—a small, exposed, and nearly waterless landmass on the north side of the Bay. The book reveals the steps taken to prevent the spread of diseases not only into the United States but also into other ports visited by ships leaving San Francisco; the political struggles over the establishment of a national quarantine station; and the day-to-day life of the immigrants and staff inhabiting the island. With the advancement of the understanding of infectious diseases and the development of treatments, the quarantine station’s activities declined in the 1930s, and the facility ultimately shuttered its doors in 1949.
While Angel Island is now a California state park, it remains as a testament to an influential period in the nation’s history that offers rich insights into efforts to maintain the public’s safety during health crises.
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