A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY147 start with H start with H
Feared by most, sought out by others, pain may manifest itself as a benevolent messenger warning of imminent danger or a repellent nemesis that undermines and incapacitates us. Throughout the ages pain has intrigued those who focus on the soul and the sacred in equal measure to those who specialize in the body and medicine.
In The History of Pain, Roselyne Rey draws on multidisciplinary sources to explore this universally shared experience. From classical antiquity to the twentieth century, she contrasts the different cultural perceptions of pain in each period, as well as the medical theories advanced to explain its mechanisms, and the various therapeutic remedies formulated to relieve those suffering from it.
This broad historical perspective, both accurate and remarkably erudite, highlights the extraordinary transformation in humanity's relationship to pain, chronicles the considerable progress made in its understanding and treatment, and explores the shadowy areas of mystery which remain to this day.
WINNER, 2017 RACHEL CARSON PRIZE, SOCIETY FOR THE SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE
In 2002, Sierra Leone emerged from a decadelong civil war. Seeking international attention and development aid, its government faced a dilemma. Though devastated by conflict, Sierra Leone had a low prevalence of HIV. However, like most African countries, it stood to benefit from a large influx of foreign funds specifically targeted at HIV/AIDS prevention and care.
What Adia Benton chronicles in this ethnographically rich and often moving book is how one war-ravaged nation reoriented itself as a country suffering from HIV at the expense of other, more pressing health concerns. During her fieldwork in the capital, Freetown, a city of one million people, at least thirty NGOs administered internationally funded programs that included HIV/AIDS prevention and care. Benton probes why HIV exceptionalism—the idea that HIV is an exceptional disease requiring an exceptional response—continues to guide approaches to the epidemic worldwide and especially in Africa, even in low-prevalence settings.
In the fourth decade since the emergence of HIV/AIDS, many today are questioning whether the effort and money spent on this health crisis has in fact helped or exacerbated the problem. HIV Exceptionalism does this and more, asking, what are the unanticipated consequences that HIV/AIDS development programs engender?
An 1865 report on public health in New York painted a grim picture of "high brick blocks and closely-packed houses . . . literally hives of sickness" propagating epidemics of cholera, smallpox, typhoid, typhus, and yellow fever, which swept through the whole city. In this stimulating collection of essays, nine historians of American medicine explore New York's responses to its public health crises from colonial times to the present. The essays illustrate the relationship between the disease environment of New York and changes in housing, population, social conditions, and the success of medical science, linking such factors to New York's experiences with smallpox, polio, and AIDS.
The volume is essential reading for anyone interested in American public health and the social history of New York.
The contributors are Ronald Bayer, Elizabeth Blackmar, Gretchen A. Condran, Elizabeth Fee, Daniel M. Fox, Evelynn M. Hammonds, Alan M. Kraut, Judith Walzer Leavitt, and Naomi Rogers. David Rosner is a professor of history at Baruch College and The Graduate School of the City University of New York. Robert R. Macdonald is the director of the Museum of the City of New York.
A publication of the Museum of the City of New York
Choice Reviews 1995 November
This is one of a series of books focusing on the impact of disease intended to enhance the understanding of both past and present regarding reactions to periodic epidemics. Robert B. Macdonald, director of the Museum of the City of New York, which supports this series, states: "The individual and collective responses to widespread sickness are mirrors to the cultural, religious, economic, political, and social histories of cities and nations." Rosner selected eight renowned and respected individuals to describe the reactions and responses to smallpox, polio, and AIDS epidemics in New York City since 1860, and the efforts of officials and professionals to deal with the impact of disease. Essayists present disease broadly from economic, social, political, and health perspectives. Causes of epidemics include the expected and usual: thousands of immigrants pouring into the city, inadequate water and food supplies, lack of sewage disposal, unemployment leading to poverty. An unexpected cause was the avarice of real estate investors, inexorably driving up housing costs.
Highly recommended for all students of history, public health, health policy, and sociology. Upper-division undergraduate through professional. Copyright 1999 American Library Association
Dr. Kaplan, winner of $100,000 Kettering Prize for cancer research, has now updated and enlarged his authoritative reference, once again drawing heavily upon the uniquely comprehensive and coherent Stanford data garnered over a twenty-year period. This edition incorporates discussion of the newer radionuclides, computed tomography and ultrasound, as well as such recent developments as the transmissibility controversy.
Major sections have been added on cell culture, surface marker characterization, and cytogenetics. The material on cell-mediated immunity has been doubled, and an entirely new chapter has been included on chemotherapy, offering an analysis of evidence bearing on the selection of optimal treatment.
While many books have claimed parallels between modern physics and Eastern philosophy, none have dealt with the historical influences of both Chinese traditional thought and non-mechanistic, holistic western thought on the philosophies of the scientists who developed electromagnetic field theory. In The Holistic Inspirations of Physics, R. Valentine Dusek asks: to what extent is classical field theory a product of organic and holistic philosophies and frameworks?
Electromagnetic theory has been greatly influenced by holistic worldviews, Dusek posits, and he highlights three alternative scientific systems that made the development of electromagnetic theory possible: medieval Chinese science, Western Renaissance occultism, and the German romantic traditions. He situates these "alternative" approaches in their social context and background, and traces their connection with components of “accepted” physical science in relation to a number of social movements and philosophical theories.
Readers will learn of specific contributions made by these alternative traditions, such as the Chinese inventing the compass and discovering the earth's magnetic field and magnetic declination. Western alchemical ideas of active forces and "occult" influences contributed to Newton's theory of gravitation force as action at a distance, rather as a result of purely mechanical collisions and contact action.
Dusek also describes the extent to which women's culture supplied (often without credit) the philosophical background ideas that were absorbed into mainstream field theory.
Homicidal insanity has remained a vexation to both the psychiatric and legal professions despite the panorama of scientific and social change during the past 200 years. The predominant opinion today among psychiatrists is that no correlation exists between dangerousness and specific mental disorders. But for generation after generation, psychiatrists have reported cases of insane homicide that were clinically similar. Although psychiatric theory changed and psychiatric nosology was inconsistent, the mental phenomena psychiatrists identified in such cases remained the same. The central thesis of Homicidal Insanity is that as psychiatric theory changed, psychiatrists regarded these phenomena variously as symptoms of mental disease or the disease in itself. It is possible to trace these phenomena throughout the history of Anglo-American psychiatric theory and practice. A secondary thesis of the book is that psychiatrists have used these phenomena as predictors and markers in the practical matters of preventing insane homicide and of testifying in the courts to defend the irresponsible and expose the culpable.
Hoffman became central to Riegle’s caregiving when he asked her to be his health-care proxy, and although she willingly chose to do this, she explores her conflicting feelings about herself in this role and about her involvement with Riegle and his grueling struggle with hospitalization, illness, and, finally, death. She tells of the waves of grief that echoed throughout her life, awakening memories of other losses, entering her dreams and fantasies, and altering her relationships with friends, family, and even total strangers.
Hoffman’s memoir gives voice to the psychological and emotional havoc AIDS creates for those in the difficult role of caring for the terminally ill and it gives recognition to the role that lesbians continue to play in the AIDS emergency. A foreword by Urvashi Vaid, former executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, offers a meditation on the politics of AIDS and the role of family in the lives of lesbians and gay men.
How did menopause change from being a natural (and often welcome) end to a woman's childbearing years to a deficiency disease in need of medical and pharmacological intervention? As she traces the medicalization of menopause over the last 100 years, historian Judith Houck challenges some widely held assumptions. Physicians hardly foisted hormones on reluctant female patients; rather, physicians themselves were often reluctant to claim menopause as a medical problem and resisted the widespread use of hormone therapy for what was, after all, a normal transition in a woman's lifespan. Houck argues that the medical and popular understandings of menopause at any given time depended on both pharmacological options and cultural ideas and anxieties of the moment. As women delayed marriage and motherhood and entered the workforce in greater numbers, the medical understanding, cultural meaning, and experience of menopause changed. By examining the history of menopause over the course of the twentieth century, Houck shows how the experience and representation of menopause has been profoundly influenced by biomedical developments and by changing roles for women and the changing definition of womanhood.
The pandemic left disorder and crises in its wake everywhere it struck. Drawing on disciplines including public health, politics, and socioeconomics, this book tracks the spread of COVID-19 to weave a coherent picture that explains how scientists learned about the virus, how authorities reacted around the world, and how different societies coped.
Written by a leading team of public health, policy, and economics experts, How COVID-19 Took Over the World provides an in-depth analysis of various countries’ responses to the pandemic, as well as suggestions to increase the capability to fight future pandemics. The first part of the book provides an overview of global governance and international cooperation, the economic and social consequences of the outbreak, and breakthroughs in mathematical modeling and COVID-19 vaccines. The second part of the book examines and compares specific countries and regions through the lens of good governance, social contract, and political trust.
How COVID-19 Took Over the World is essential for anyone seeking to learn from the impact of COVID-19, particularly professionals and policymakers, as well as those with a general interest in governance and pandemics.
The MacArthur Foundation addressed these questions head-on by funding a landmark study known as "Midlife in the U.S.," or MIDUS. For the first time in a single study, researchers were able to integrate epidemiological, sociological, and psychological assessments, as well as innovative new measures to evaluate how work and family life influence each other.
How Healthy Are We? presents the key findings from the survey in three sections: physical health, quality of life and psychological well-being, and the contexts (family, work) of the midlife. The topics covered by almost forty scholars in a wide variety of fields are vast, including everything from how health and well-being vary with socioeconomic standing, gender, race, or region of the country to how middle-aged people differ from younger or older adults in their emotional experience and quality of life. This health—the study measures not only health-the absence of illness—but also reports on the presence of wellness in middle-aged Americans.
The culmination of a decade and a half of research by leading scholars, How Healthy Are We? will dramatically alter the way we think about health in middle age and the factors that influence it. Researchers, policymakers, and others concerned about the quality of midlife in contemporary America will welcome its insights.
* Having a good life means having good relationships with others to almost 70% of those surveyed. Less than 40% mentioned their careers.
* Reports of disruptive daily stressors vary by age, with young adults and those in midlife experiencing more than those in later adulthood.
* Men have higher assessments of their physical and mental health than woman until the age of 60.
Most psychologists claim that we begin to develop a “theory of mind”—some basic ideas about other people’s minds—at age two or three, by inference, deduction, and logical reasoning.
But does this mean that small babies are unaware of minds? That they see other people simply as another (rather dynamic and noisy) kind of object? This is a common view in developmental psychology. Yet, as this book explains, there is compelling evidence that babies in the first year of life can tease, pretend, feel self-conscious, and joke with people. Using observations from infants’ everyday interactions with their families, Vasudevi Reddy argues that such early emotional engagements show infants’ growing awareness of other people’s attention, expectations, and intentions.
Reddy deals with the persistent problem of “other minds” by proposing a “second-person” solution: we know other minds if we can respond to them. And we respond most richly in engagement with them. She challenges psychology’s traditional “detached” stance toward understanding people, arguing that the most fundamental way of knowing minds—both for babies and for adults—is through engagement with them. According to this argument the starting point for understanding other minds is not isolation and ignorance but emotional relation.
Today, a world without “gender” is hard to imagine. Gender is at the center of contentious political and social debates, shapes policy decisions, and informs our everyday lives. Its formulation, however, is lesser known: Gender was first used in clinical practice. This book tells the story of the invention of gender in American medicine, detailing how it was shaped by mid-twentieth-century American notions of culture, personality, and social engineering.
Sandra Eder shows how the concept of gender transformed from a pragmatic tool in the sex assignment of children with intersex traits in the 1950s to an essential category in clinics for transgender individuals in the 1960s. Following gender outside the clinic, she reconstructs the variable ways feminists integrated gender into their theories and practices in the 1970s. The process by which ideas about gender became medicalized, enforced, and popularized was messy, and the route by which gender came to be understood and applied through the treatment of patients with intersex traits was fraught and contested. In historicizing the emergence of the sex/gender binary, Eder reveals the role of medical practice in developing a transformative idea and the interdependence between practice and wider social norms that inform the attitudes of physicians and researchers. She shows that ideas like gender can take on a life of their own and may be used to question the normative perceptions they were based on. Illuminating and deeply researched, the book closes a notable gap in the history of gender and will inspire current debates on the relationship between social norms and medical practice.
This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.
An eye-opening exploration of the medical origins of gender in modern US history.
Today, a world without “gender” is hard to imagine. Gender is at the center of contentious political and social debates, shapes policy decisions, and informs our everyday lives. Its formulation, however, is lesser known: Gender was first used in clinical practice. This book tells the story of the invention of gender in American medicine, detailing how it was shaped by mid-twentieth-century American notions of culture, personality, and social engineering.
Sandra Eder shows how the concept of gender transformed from a pragmatic tool in the sex assignment of children with intersex traits in the 1950s to an essential category in clinics for transgender individuals in the 1960s. Following gender outside the clinic, she reconstructs the variable ways feminists integrated gender into their theories and practices in the 1970s. The process by which ideas about gender became medicalized, enforced, and popularized was messy, and the route by which gender came to be understood and applied through the treatment of patients with intersex traits was fraught and contested. In historicizing the emergence of the sex/gender binary, Eder reveals the role of medical practice in developing a transformative idea and the interdependence between practice and wider social norms that inform the attitudes of physicians and researchers. She shows that ideas like gender can take on a life of their own and may be used to question the normative perceptions they were based on. Illuminating and deeply researched, the book closes a notable gap in the history of gender and will inspire current debates on the relationship between social norms and medical practice.
As the COVID-19 pandemic has affected every corner of the world, changing our relationship to our communities, to our jobs, and to each other, the most pressing question has been—when will it end? Researchers around the globe are urgently trying to answer this question by racing to test and distribute a vaccine that could end the greatest public health threat of our time. In How to Make a Vaccine, an expert who has firsthand experience developing vaccines tells an optimistic story of how three hundred years of vaccine discovery and a century and a half of immunology research have come together at this powerful moment—and will lead to multiple COVID-19 vaccines.
Dr. John Rhodes draws on his experience as an immunologist, including working alongside a young Anthony Fauci, to unravel the mystery of how vaccines are designed, tested, and produced at scale for global deployment. Concise and accessible, this book describes in everyday language how the immune system evolved to combat infection, how viruses responded by evolving ways to evade our defenses, and how vaccines do their work. That history, and the pace of current research developments, make Rhodes hopeful that multiple vaccines will protect us. Today the complex workings of the immune system are well understood. The tools needed by biomedical scientists stand ready to be used, and more than 160 vaccine candidates have already been produced. But defeating COVID-19 won’t be the end of the story: Rhodes describes how discoveries today are also empowering scientists to combat future threats to global health, including a recent breakthrough in the development of genetic vaccines, which have never before been used in humans.
As the world prepares for a vaccine, Rhodes offers a current and informative look at the science and strategies that deliver solutions to the crisis.
In How to Respond Better to the Next Pandemic Allen Buchanan argues that, contrary to widespread opinion, the primary cause of flawed COVID-19 policy was not defective leadership, but rather institutional failure. Decisions were made through processes that lacked the most basic safeguards against the large-institution “yes-man” and group-think phenomena and included virtually no provisions for holding decision makers accountable. More fundamentally, policy makers did not fulfill the crucial duty to provide plausible public justifications for their decisions. They disguised the fact that scientific opinion was divided on the appropriateness of the policies they endorsed and labeled those who disagreed with them as anti-scientific. In some cases, they responded to criticism, not by engaging it on the issues, but by branding their critics as quacks.
In 1989 Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery that normal genes under certain conditions can cause cancer. In this book, Bishop tells us how he and Varmus made their momentous discovery. More than a lively account of the making of a brilliant scientist, How to Win the Nobel Prize is also a broader narrative combining two major and intertwined strands of medical history: the long and ongoing struggles to control infectious diseases and to find and attack the causes of cancer.
Alongside his own story, that of a youthful humanist evolving into an ambivalent medical student, an accidental microbiologist, and finally a world-class researcher, Bishop gives us a fast-paced and engrossing tale of the microbe hunters. It is a narrative enlivened by vivid anecdotes about our deadliest microbial enemies--the Black Death, cholera, syphilis, tuberculosis, malaria, smallpox, HIV--and by biographical sketches of the scientists who led the fight against these scourges.
Bishop then provides an introduction for nonscientists to the molecular underpinnings of cancer and concludes with an analysis of many of today's most important science-related controversies--ranging from stem cell research to the attack on evolution to scientific misconduct. How to Win the Nobel Prize affords us the pleasure of hearing about science from a brilliant practitioner who is a humanist at heart. Bishop's perspective will be valued by anyone interested in biomedical research and in the past, present, and future of the battle against cancer.
An engrossing history of the century that transformed our knowledge of the body’s inner senses
The years between 1833 and 1945 fundamentally transformed science’s understanding of the body’s inner senses, revolutionizing fields like philosophy, the social sciences, and cognitive science. In How We Became Sensorimotor, Mark Paterson provides a systematic account of this transformative period, while also demonstrating its substantial implications for current explorations into phenomenology, embodied consciousness, the extended mind, and theories of the sensorimotor, the body, and embodiment.
Each chapter of How We Became Sensorimotor takes a particular sense and historicizes its formation by means of recent scientific studies, case studies, or coverage in the media. Ranging among a diverse array of sensations, including balance, fatigue, pain, the “muscle sense,” and what Maurice Merleau-Ponty termed “motricity,” Paterson’s analysis moves outward from the familiar confines of the laboratory to those of the industrial world and even to wild animals and their habitats. He uncovers important stories, such as how forgotten pain-measurement schemes transformed criminology, or how Penfield’s outmoded concepts of the sensory and motor homunculi of the brain still mar psychology textbooks.
Complete with original archival research featuring illustrations and correspondence, How We Became Sensorimotor shows how the shifting and sometimes contested historical background to our understandings of the senses are being extended even today.
This edited volume focuses on medical and philosophical debates on human intelligence and animal perception in the early modern age, providing fresh insights into the influence of medical discourse on the rise of modern philosophical anthropology. Contributions from distinguished historians of philosophy and medicine focus on sixteenth-century zoological, psychological, and embryological discourses on man; the impact of mechanism and comparative anatomy on philosophical conceptions of body and soul; and the key status of sensibility in the medical and philosophical enlightenment.
The authors of these eight essays examine the social and ethical implications of new biomedical technologies—from behavior control to organ transplants and human experimentation. They also examine the shortcomings in our system of medical care—from the disappearance of the general practitioner to problems of medical care for the poor.
In an introductory essay, Irene Taviss analyzes the allocation of resources to biomedical research and medical care and considers problems related to human experimentation, organ transplantation, and genetic and behavior control. She also discusses possible controls in these fields—legal controls as well as formal professional codes and informal professional practices. In discussing the rare disease phenylketonuria, a cause of mental retardation, Samuel P. Bessman and Judith P. Swazey point out the dangers of a hasty decision to institute legislative controls of diseases on the basis of inadequate scientific evidence. In separate essays, Edmund D. Pellegrino and Louis Lasagna examine the problems of establishing professional controls over different kinds of human experimentation. Everett P. Mendelsohn, Judith P. Swazey, and Irene Taviss present an overview of the new behavior control technologies and point out the dilemmas that have resulted from these developments. Victor Sidel's essay examines the effects of new technologies on the practice of medicine and the potential effects on society. The two final essays deal with the organization and delivery of medical care. Mark G. Field reports on the problems caused by medical specialization and the disappearance of the general practitioner and proposes some remedies. John H. Knowles analyzes medical manpower shortages in various specialties and the effects of these shortages on the health care of the nation.
In The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe, Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers uncover a fascinating story of how medical scientists came to conceptualize the body as an integrated yet brittle whole. Responding to the harrowing experience of the Great War, the medical community sought conceptual frameworks to understand bodily shock, brain injury, and the vast differences in patient responses they occasioned. Geroulanos and Meyers carefully trace how this emerging constellation of ideas became essential for thinking about integration, individuality, fragility, and collapse far beyond medicine: in fields as diverse as anthropology, political economy, psychoanalysis, and cybernetics.
Moving effortlessly between the history of medicine and intellectual history, The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe is an intriguing look into the conceptual underpinnings of the world the Great War ushered in.
The book begins with a readable, authoritative review of human fertility in its natural state. Leridon summarizes and evaluates current knowledge, drawing together rare statistical data on physiological variables as well as demographic treatments of these data. After discussing the classical framework used by demographers, Leridon undertakes a "microdemographic" analysis in which he focuses on the individual and explicates the biological processes through which social, psychological, and economic factors affect fertility. He isolates its components—fecundability, intrauterine mortality, the physiological nonsusceptible period, and sterility—then reviews the composite effect of variation in any one component.
Leridon considers situations of controlled fertility: contraception, abortion, and sterilization. The author also presents valuable new data from his own investigations of varying risks of intrauterine mortality. Finally, he shows how the previous approaches can be complemented by the use of mathematical models.
This book is an entry into the fierce current debate among psycholinguists, neuroscientists, and evolutionary theorists about the nature and origins of human language. A prominent neuroscientist here takes up the Darwinian case, using data seldom considered by psycholinguists and neurolinguists to argue that human language--though more sophisticated than all other forms of animal communication--is not a qualitatively different ability from all forms of animal communication, does not require a quantum evolutionary leap to explain it, and is not unified in a single "language instinct."
Using clinical evidence from speech-impaired patients, functional neuroimaging, and evolutionary biology to make his case, Philip Lieberman contends that human language is not a single separate module but a functional neurological system made up of many separate abilities. Language remains as it began, Lieberman argues: a device for coping with the world. But in a blow to human narcissism, he makes the case that this most remarkable human ability is a by-product of our remote reptilian ancestors' abilities to dodge hazards, seize opportunities, and live to see another day.
This is the most comprehensive approach ever made to the human skeleton as a biological entity. It provides a holistic view, from the molecular and cellular level up to functional gross anatomy. The book synthesizes the latest research in a wide range of fields, including forensics, anthropology, cell biology, orthopedics, biomechanics, functional anatomy, and paleontology. Throughout the book the skeleton's functional and dynamic aspects are emphasized.
The first part of the book focuses on bone as living tissue: its composition, formation, growth and remodeling capabilities, and mechanical properties. The second part examines individual bones in the human body, combining strictly anatomical information with discussion of the major functions of each body section. For example, the chapter describing the axial skeleton is paired with one on the mechanics of breathing. The final part of the book surveys the archaeological and forensic applications of skeletal biology, including the estimation of age, sex, race, and stature; the effects of fracture and pathology on bone; and the modes of reconstructing skeletal remains. Elegant, detailed illustrations of the individual bones from several views and of the regions of the skeleton enhance the text.
Human Structure is an innovative introduction to human gross anatomy with a twofold approach to view the basics of anatomy from a broad scientific perspective and to explain the facts of form and function in terms and concepts that minimize the usual confusion and anxiety of beginning anatomy studies. Functional, comparative, and developmental anatomy are ingeniously woven into a single explanatory perspective, presenting human anatomy as an intelligible whole rather than as a heap of disconnected facts to be memorized. As a result, Human Structure is suitable not only for first-year medical students but also for undergraduates in premedical or biological science courses, for students in paramedical or college-level nursing programs, and indeed for anyone seeking a refresher course in human anatomy.
The book begins with the generalized segmental organization characteristic of vertebrates and then examines the most obviously segmented parts of the human body: the bones, muscles, vessels, and nerves of the trunk between the neck and the pelvis. The book progresses through regions where the simple organizational plan has undergone more and more radical modifications and ends with the ancient and extreme specializations found in the head. At each step, the authors widen our intellectual understanding of how these modifications have been imposed, onto-genetically or phylogenetically, upon simpler precursors.
The prose is personal and literate, peppered with inventive elucidations of concepts and accompanied by a wealth of illustrations designed for conceptual clarity and ease of visualization. The level of presentation has been finely tuned, over several years of class testing, to enhance its pedagogical effectiveness in human anatomy courses.
Humanizing Brain Tumors details the lived experiences of patients and their loved ones, from the presentation of symptoms to diagnosis and treatment. These nine test cases and the accompanying compendium offer insight and guidance to anyone living with, caring for, or treating those with brain tumors. Written with a humanistic, yet realistic touch, the authors have created a resource that reminds readers of the important partnership between doctors, patients, and caregivers.
This collection delves into our modern understanding of brain tumors, using clinical presentation to illustrate the patient experience and summarize methods of treatment. Imagery, including both MRI scans and medical illustrations, facilitates a vivid description of neuroanatomy. Providing a concise description of modern forms of treatment for patients affected with brain tumors, this book presents a patient-centric perspective.
Humanizing Brain Tumors will appeal to the hundreds of thousands of patients and their loved ones who are affected by brain tumors every year.
Now, for the first time, modern readers may consult the single sustained exposition of his views that Owen ever provided: his Hunterian Lectures. Phillip Reid Sloan has transcribed and edited the seven surviving lectures and has written an introduction and commentary that situate this work in the context of Owen's life and the scientific life of the time. The lectures survey some of the history of comparative anatomy since Aristotle and draw on work by some of Owen's contemporaries. Their chief value, however, lies in Owen's elucidation of his own view on the relationships among various groups of living things.
"Owen is one of the linchpin figures of Victorian science. The publication of these lectures is important, and Sloan is to be commended for a fine transcription."—Adrian Desmond, University College, London
Antiquity’s most prolific and influential medical writer and practitioner.
Galen of Pergamum (129–?199/216), physician to the court of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, was a philosopher, scientist, medical historian, theoretician, and practitioner who wrote forcefully and prolifically on an astonishing range of subjects and whose impact on later eras rivaled that of Aristotle. Galen synthesized the entirety of Greek medicine as a basis for his own doctrines and practice, which comprehensively embraced theory, practical knowledge, experiment, logic, and a deep understanding of human life and society.
His treatise Hygiene, also known as “On the Preservation of Health” (De sanitate tuenda), was written during one of Galen’s most prolific periods (170–180) and ranks among his most important and influential works, providing a comprehensive account of the practice of preventive medicine that still has relevance today. Also included in this two-volume edition are two shorter treatises on the relationship between health and wellness. Thrasybulus explores the theoretical question of whether hygiene is part of medicine or gymnastics, and in so doing delineates the interrelated roles of doctors and physical therapists. On Exercise with a Small Ball strenuously advocates that activity’s superiority to all other forms of exercise.
Antiquity’s most prolific and influential medical writer and practitioner.
Galen of Pergamum (129–?199/216), physician to the court of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, was a philosopher, scientist, medical historian, theoretician, and practitioner who wrote forcefully and prolifically on an astonishing range of subjects and whose impact on later eras rivaled that of Aristotle. Galen synthesized the entirety of Greek medicine as a basis for his own doctrines and practice, which comprehensively embraced theory, practical knowledge, experiment, logic, and a deep understanding of human life and society.
His treatise Hygiene, also known as “On the Preservation of Health” (De sanitate tuenda), was written during one of Galen’s most prolific periods (170–180) and ranks among his most important and influential works, providing a comprehensive account of the practice of preventive medicine that still has relevance today. Also included in this two-volume edition are two shorter treatises on the relationship between health and wellness. Thrasybulus explores the theoretical question of whether hygiene is part of medicine or gymnastics, and in so doing delineates the interrelated roles of doctors and physical therapists. On Exercise with a Small Ball strenuously advocates that activity’s superiority to all other forms of exercise.
High blood pressure is one of our most severe public health problems, and any national health policy must take account of the dilemmas posed by hypertension. This disease is widespread in the United States, affecting between 10 and 30 percent of the adult population. Of the 24 million Americans so afflicted, only about three million are thought to be adequately treated; yet treatment of all hypertensives would cost perhaps five billion dollars a year.
In their ground-breaking study, Weinstein and Stason apply the tools of cost-benefit analysis to examine the policy implications of existing approaches to hypertension. Their conclusions have important consequences for allocating the resources available to combat the disease, and they identify the salient questions to be answered by new research. The authors' recommendations would lead to significant changes in current approaches (the much-publicized effort to screen for new cases, for instance). They suggest that criteria for case-finding and treatment be radically altered to take account of differences in the complications of high blood pressure as a function of age, sex, and race. They stress patient compliance as the single most important factor in reducing deaths—considerably more important right now than screening. Their research priorities include: determining the extent to which early or mild hypertension affects the rate of complication; pinning down the role that side-effects of medication play in the demonstrably poor adherence of patients to treatment; and developing alternative programs to improve patient adherence.
Over the course of several centuries, Western masculinity has successfully established itself as the voice of reason, knowledge, and sanity—the basis for patriarchal rule—in the face of massive testimony to the contrary. Hysterical Men boldly challenges this triumphant vision of the stable and secure male by examining the central role played by modern science and medicine in constructing and sustaining it.
Mark Micale reveals the hidden side of this vision, that is, the innumerable cases of disturbed and deranged men who passed under the eyes of male medical and scientific elites from the seventeenth century onward. Since ancient times, physicians and philosophers had closely observed and extravagantly theorized female weakness, emotionality, and madness. What these male experts failed to see—or saw but did not acknowledge—was masculine nervous and mental illness among all classes and in diverse guises. While cultural and literary intellectuals pioneered new languages of male emotional distress, European science was invested in cultivating and protecting the image of male, middle-class detachment, objectivity, and rationality despite rampant counter-evidence in the clinic, in the laboratory, and on battlefields.
The reasons for suppressing male neurosis from the official discourses of science and medicine as well as from popular view range from the personal and psychological to the professional and the political. They make for a history full of profound silences, omissions, and amnesias. Now, however, under the greatly altered circumstances of today’s gender revolution, Micale’s work allows this story to be heard.
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