front cover of ‘I Know Who Caused COVID-19’
‘I Know Who Caused COVID-19’
Pandemics and Xenophobia
Zhou Xun and Sander L. Gilman
Reaktion Books, 2021
A timely exploration of the global explosion in xenophobia during the COVID-19 pandemic.
 
Through a close analysis of four cases from around the world, this book explores prejudice toward groups who are thought to have caused and spread COVID-19: the residents of Wuhan and Black African communities in China; ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel; African-Americans in the United States and Black/Asian/mixed ethnic communities in the United Kingdom; and White right-wing groups in the United States and Europe. The authors examine stereotyping and the false attribution of blame towards these groups, as well as what happens when a collective is actually at fault, and how the community deals with these conflicting issues.
 
This is a timely, cogent examination of the blame and xenophobia that have been brought to the surface by the COVID-19 pandemic.
[more]

logo for Michigan Publishing Services
iatrogenesis
Essays on Becoming a Physician
University of Michigan Medical Students
Michigan Publishing Services, 2018
In iatrogenesis: Essays on Becoming a Physician, medical students share coming-of-age stories that illustrate the rigorous, rewarding, and sometimes unforgiving journey into medicine.
 
In Greek, iatro- means doctor, and -genesis means origin: Iatrogenesis thus describes any effect, good or bad, brought forth by a physician’s actions. This essay compendium looks beyond a physician’s impact on patients, instead turning inward to examine the impact of medical training on student doctors. These essays written by University of Michigan medical students span from the donning of the White Coat to graduation. Along the way, each writer weaves a story, the threads of which unite in a tapestry highlighting the universality of this coming-of-age journey. These essays breathe life into each stage of medical apprenticeship, displaying the full spectrum of human emotion as medical students find ways to reinvent themselves as the physicians of tomorrow.
 
[more]

front cover of Iatrogenicity
Iatrogenicity
Causes and Consequences of Iatrogenesis in Cardiovascular Medicine
Gussak, Ihor B
Rutgers University Press, 2017
Iatrogenesis is the occurrence of untoward effects resulting from actions of health care providers, including medical errors, medical malpractice, practicing beyond one’s expertise, adverse effects of medication, unnecessary treatment, inappropriate screenings, and surgical errors. This is a huge public health issue: tens to hundreds of thousands of deaths are attributed to iatrogenic causes each year in the U.S., and vulnerable populations such as the elderly and minorities are particularly susceptible. 

Edited by two renowned cardiology experts, Iatrogenicity: Causes and Consequences of Iatrogenesis in Cardiovascular Medicine addresses both the iatrogenicity that arises with cardiovascular interventions, as well as non-cardiovascular interventions that result in adverse consequences on the cardiovascular system. The book aims to achieve three things: to summarize the available information on this topic in a single high-yield volume; to highlight the human and financial cost of iatrogenesis; and to describe and propose potential interventions to ameliorate the effects of iatrogenesis. This accessible book is a practical reference for any practicing physician who sees patients with cardiovascular issues. .
 
[more]

front cover of Identifying Future Disease Hot Spots
Identifying Future Disease Hot Spots
Infectious Disease Vulnerability Index
Melinda Moore
RAND Corporation, 2016
Recent high-profile outbreaks such as Ebola and Zika have illustrated the transnational nature of infectious diseases. Countries that are most vulnerable to outbreaks may be higher priorities for technical support. RAND’s Infectious Disease Vulnerability Index should help U.S. government and international agencies identify these countries and inform programming to preemptively mitigate the spread and effects of potential transnational outbreaks.
[more]

logo for University of Minnesota Press
If Memory Serves
Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past
Christopher Castiglia
University of Minnesota Press, 2011

The AIDS epidemic soured the memory of the sexual revolution and gay liberation of the 1970s, and prominent politicians, commentators, and academics instructed gay men to forget the sexual cultures of the 1970s in order to ensure a healthy future. But without memory there can be no future, argue Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed in this exploration of the struggle over gay memory that marked the decades following the onset of AIDS.

Challenging many of the assumptions behind first-wave queer theory, If Memory Serves offers a new perspective on the emergence of contemporary queer culture from the suppression and repression of gay memory. Drawing on a rich archive of videos, films, television shows, novels, monuments, paintings, and sculptures created in the wake of the epidemic, the authors reveal a resistance among critics to valuing—even recognizing—the inscription of gay memory in art, literature, popular culture, and the built environment. Castiglia and Reed explore such topics as the unacknowledged ways in which the popular sitcom Will and Grace circulated gay subcultural references to awaken a desire for belonging among young viewers; the post-traumatic (un)rememberings of queer theory; and the generation of “ideality politics” in the art of Félix González-Torres, the film Chuck & Buck, and the independent video Video Remains.

Inspired by Alasdair MacIntyre’s insight that “the possession of a historical identity and the possession of a social identity coincide,” Castiglia and Reed demonstrate that memory is crafted in response to inadequacies in the present—and therefore a constructive relation to the past is essential to the imagining of a new future.

[more]

front cover of Illness or Deviance?
Illness or Deviance?
Drug Courts, Drug Treatment, and the Ambiguity of Addiction
Jennifer Murphy
Temple University Press, 2015
Is drug addiction a disease that can be treated, or is it a crime that should be punished? In her probing study, Illness or Deviance?, Jennifer Murphy investigates the various perspectives on addiction, and how society has myriad ways of handling it—incarcerating some drug users while putting others in treatment.

Illness or Deviance? highlights the confusion and contradictions about labeling addiction. Murphy’s fieldwork in a drug court and an outpatient drug treatment facility yields fascinating insights, such as how courts and treatment centers both enforce the “disease” label of addiction, yet their management tactics overlap treatment with “therapeutic punishment.” The “addict" label is a result not just of using drugs, but also of being a part of the drug lifestyle, by selling drugs. In addition, Murphy observes that drug courts and treatment facilities benefit economically from their cooperation, creating a very powerful institutional arrangement.

Murphy contextualizes her findings within theories of medical sociology as well as criminology to identify the policy implications of a medicalized view of addiction.
[more]

logo for University of Minnesota Press
Imagining Illness
Public Health and Visual Culture
David Serlin
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
From seventeenth-century broadsides about the handling of dead bodies, printed during London's plague years, to YouTube videos about preventing the transmission of STDs, public health advocacy and education has always had a powerful visual component. Imagining Illness explores the diverse visual culture of public health, broadly defined, from the nineteenth century to the present.

Contributors to this volume examine historical and contemporary visual practices-Chinese health fairs, documentary films produced by the World Health Organization, illness maps, fashions for nurses, and live surgery on the Internet-in order to delve into the political and epidemiological contexts underlying their creation and dissemination.
 
Contributors: Liping Bu, Alma College; Lisa Cartwright, U of California, San Diego; Roger Cooter, U College London; William H. Helfand; Lenore Manderson, Monash U, Australia; Emily Martin, New York U; Gregg Mitman, U of Wisconsin, Madison; Mark Monmonier, Syracuse U; Kirsten Ostherr, Rice U; Katherine Ott, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian; Shawn Michelle Smith, Art Institute of Chicago; Claudia Stein, Warwick U.
[more]

front cover of Imagining Progress
Imagining Progress
Science, Faith, and Child Mortality in America
Kristin Johnson
University of Alabama Press, 2024
Explores the intellectual history of Americans’ divergent assumptions about God, nature, and science

Offering fascinating examples from the works of diverse writers and thinkers such as Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, W. E. B. Du Bois, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Shelton Dover, Kristin Johnson traces the history of Americans’ complicated faith in science and the various triumphs and tragedies that faith has inspired. Imagining Progress reveals many of the complex factors involved in the polarized state of contemporary American attitudes toward science, scientists, public health, medicine, and science policy.

Humankind has always wrestled with the existence of suffering, how to respond to suffering, whom to care for, and in what ways. For two centuries, many American ministers, physicians, and scientists believed that an omnipotent and omniscient God created the world such that people might relieve suffering through ingenuity and learning. Others responded to the new worldview introduced by the scientific revolution as a threat to the divine order. In Imagining Progress, Johnson traces the history of Americans’ evolving relationship with science and religion at “one of its most dramatic places”—the bedsides of dying children. It’s here, in the crucible of parental despair, that she illuminates diverging assumptions about God, nature, and history.

From Cotton Mather’s campaign for smallpox inoculation to battles over teaching evolution in the 1920s, Johnson adroitly weaves an interdisciplinary history of medicine, science, theology, and activism. She follows a wide cast of characters from across theological, scientific, and political spectrums. What emerges is a kaleidoscopic portrait of diverse, often contradictory hopes and anxieties inspired by new theories of nature and human existence. Johnson also discerns a problematic pattern of invoking science both to ameliorate the suffering of some children while ignoring the suffering of others.
 
[more]

front cover of Immunization
Immunization
How Vaccines became Controversial
Stuart Blume
Reaktion Books, 2021
As the world pins its hope for the end of the coronavirus pandemic to the successful rollout of vaccines, this book offers a vital long view of such efforts—and our resistance to them.
 
At a time when vaccines are a vital tool in the fight against COVID-19 in all its various mutations, this hard-hitting book takes a longer historical perspective. It argues that globalization and cuts to healthcare have been eroding faith in the institutions producing and providing vaccines for more than thirty years. It tells the history of immunization from the work of early pioneers such as Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch through the eradication of smallpox in 1980, to the recent introduction of new kinds of genetically engineered vaccines. Immunization exposes the limits of public health authorities while suggesting how they can restore our confidence. Public health experts and all those considering vaccinations should read this timely history.
[more]

front cover of The Impact of Mindfulness Meditation Programs on Performance-Related Outcomes
The Impact of Mindfulness Meditation Programs on Performance-Related Outcomes
Implications for the U.S. Army
Kimberly A. Hepner
RAND Corporation, 2022
This report presents results from a systematic review and meta-analyses of research examining how mindfulness meditation affects 13 performance-related outcomes of interest to the U.S. Army and broader military. The authors supplemented the systematic review by examining how mindfulness meditation could support stress management and exploring characteristics of selected mindfulness programs.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Implantation of the Ovum
Koji Yoshinaga
Harvard University Press, 1976

The exact process by which the fertilized mammalian ovum becomes implanted upon the uterine surface remains something of a mystery, and yet successful reproduction depends upon it. Two methods of contraception—the intrauterine device and the “morning-after pill”—are thought to be effective because they disrupt or prevent the process of implantation, but the biological basis of their effect is still imperfectly understood.

This book brings together authoritative accounts by leaders in the field of reproductive biology, researchers who have closely investigated implantation. The subject is approached from several angles: biochemical, endocrinological, pharmacological, anatomic, and immunological. A review of recent studies on implantation serves to put the individual reports in context. This book provides a needed perspective on an important area of reproduction research.

[more]

front cover of Importing Care, Faithful Service
Importing Care, Faithful Service
Filipino and Indian American Nurses at a Veterans Hospital
Stephen M. Cherry
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Every year thousands of foreign-born Filipino and Indian nurses immigrate to the United States. Despite being well trained and desperately needed, they enter the country at a time, not unlike the past, when the American social and political climate is once again increasingly unwelcoming to them as immigrants. Drawing on rich ethnographic and survey data, collected over a four-year period, this study explores the role Catholicism plays in shaping the professional and community lives of foreign-born Filipino and Indian American nurses in the face of these challenges, while working at a Veterans hospital. Their stories provide unique insights into the often-unseen roles race, religion and gender play in the daily lives of new immigrants employed in American healthcare. In many ways, these nurses find themselves foreign in more ways than just their nativity. Seeing nursing as a religious calling, they care for their patients, both at the hospital and in the wider community, with a sense of divine purpose but must also confront the cultural tensions and disconnects between how they were raised and trained in another country and the legal separation of church and state. How they cope with and engage these tensions and disconnects plays an important role in not only shaping how they see themselves as Catholic nurses but their place in the new American story.
 
[more]

front cover of Impotence
Impotence
A Cultural History
Angus McLaren
University of Chicago Press, 2007

As anyone who has watched television in recent years can attest, we live in the age of Viagra. From Bob Dole to Mike Ditka to late-night comedians, our culture has been engaged in one long, frank, and very public talk about impotence—and our newfound pharmaceutical solutions. But as Angus McLaren shows us in Impotence, the first cultural history of the subject, the failure of men to rise to the occasion has been a recurrent topic since the dawn of human culture.

Drawing on a dazzling range of sources from across centuries, McLaren demonstrates how male sexuality was constructed around the idea of potency, from times past when it was essential for the purpose of siring children, to today, when successful sex is viewed as a component of a healthy emotional life. Along the way, Impotence enlightens and fascinates with tales of sexual failure and its remedies—for example, had Ditka lived in ancient Mesopotamia, he might have recited spells while eating roots and plants rather than pills—and explanations, which over the years have included witchcraft, shell-shock, masturbation, feminism, and the Oedipal complex. McLaren also explores the surprising political and social effects of impotence, from the revolutionary unrest fueled by Louis XVI’s failure to consummate his marriage to the boost given the fledgling American republic by George Washington’s failure to found a dynasty. Each age, McLaren shows, turns impotence to its own purposes, using it to help define what is normal and healthy for men, their relationships, and society.

From marraige manuals to metrosexuals, from Renaissance Italy to Hollywood movies, Impotence is a serious but highly entertaining examination of a problem that humanity has simultaneously regarded as life’s greatest tragedy and its greatest joke.

[more]

front cover of Improving Dementia Long-Term Care
Improving Dementia Long-Term Care
A Policy Blueprint
Regina A. Shih
RAND Corporation, 2014
In 2010, 15 percent of Americans older than age 70 had dementia. By 2050, the number of new dementia cases among those 65 and older is expected to double. This blueprint outlines policy options to help decisionmakers improve dementia long-term services and supports (LTSS) by promoting earlier detection, improving access to LTSS, promoting person- and caregiver-centered care, supporting caregivers, and reducing dementia LTSS costs.
[more]

front cover of Improvising Medicine
Improvising Medicine
An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic
Julie Livingston
Duke University Press, 2012
In Improvising Medicine, Julie Livingston tells the story of Botswana's only dedicated cancer ward, located in its capital city of Gaborone. This affecting ethnography follows patients, their relatives, and ward staff as a cancer epidemic emerged in Botswana. The epidemic is part of an ongoing surge in cancers across the global south; the stories of Botswana's oncology ward dramatize the human stakes and intellectual and institutional challenges of an epidemic that will shape the future of global health. They convey the contingencies of high-tech medicine in a hospital where vital machines are often broken, drugs go in and out of stock, and bed-space is always at a premium. They also reveal cancer as something that happens between people. Serious illness, care, pain, disfigurement, and even death emerge as deeply social experiences. Livingston describes the cancer ward in terms of the bureaucracy, vulnerability, power, biomedical science, mortality, and hope that shape contemporary experience in southern Africa. Her ethnography is a profound reflection on the social orchestration of hope and futility in an African hospital, the politics and economics of healthcare in Africa, and palliation and disfigurement across the global south.
[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
In Changing Times
Gay Men and Lesbians Encounter HIV/AIDS
Edited by Martin P. Levine, Peter M. Nardi, and John H. Gagnon
University of Chicago Press, 1997
The HIV/AIDS epidemic has been a major catastrophe for gay communities. In less than two decades, the disease has profoundly changed the lives of gay men and lesbians. Not just a biological and viral agent, HIV has become an opportunistic social invader, reshaping communities and the distribution of wealth, altering the social careers of gay professionals and the patterns of entry into gay and lesbian life, and giving birth to groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation.

The distinguished contributors to this volume discuss the ways HIV/AIDS has changed collective and individual identities, as well as lives, of gay men and lesbians, and how these alterations have changed our perceptions of the epidemic. They cover such topics as the impact of the epidemic on small towns, cultural barriers to AIDS prevention, gay youth and intergenerational relations, and the roles of lesbians in AIDS organizations. This collection provides compelling insights into the new communities among gay men and lesbians and the new kinds of identities and relationships that are emerging from the social and cultural ferment engendered by HIV/AIDS.

Contributors include Barry D. Adam, Lourdes Arguelles, Rafael Miguel Diaz, John H. Gagnon, Gilbert Herdt, Gregory M. Herek, Nan D. Hunter, Peter M. Nardi, John L. Peterson, Anne Rivero, Gayle S. Rubin, Beth E. Schneider, and Nancy E. Stoller.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
In Search of Safety
Chemicals and Cancer Risk
John D. Graham, Laura C. Green, and Marc J. Roberts
Harvard University Press, 1988

Most public controversies about the effects of chemicals on human health revolve around the risk of cancer—hardly surprising, considering that it is the second leading cause of death in the United States. People are concerned about the dangers of carcinogens in air, water, and food, and they expect their representatives in government to protect them from such hazards. On the other hand, the economic costs of eliminating every suspected carcinogen from the environment would cause tremendous economic hardship. How should policymakers use science to help strike a balance between the benefits of lowering the risk of cancer and the economic costs of regulation?

In this important book the authors squarely address the complex interaction of science and regulatory policy. They begin by clarifying the scientific issues that are central to regulatory decisions, then explain how and why scientists can honestly disagree about these issues. They demonstrate with two cogent case studies: the heated debates about formaldehyde and benzene, both useful but potentially toxic chemicals. By examining how scientists evaluated the risks from these chemicals, and what kinds of legislative, administrative, and judicial decisions emerged from the evaluations, the authors furnish insight into the checks and balances of health-risk regulation.

They point out that overselling science in this context is harmful to both science and democracy. Their final chapter proposes creative methods for constructing a bridge between the scientist and the regulator that will be invaluable to anyone concerned about health risks.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
In Support of Families
Michael Yogman
Harvard University Press, 1986

Families today are experiencing untold pressures and are expected to shoulder enormous burdens at a time when resources for support are becoming ever scarcer. This important book examines the effects of stress on both children and parents and explores various strategies for coping.

The authors—experts in child health and development and in business and social policy—emphasize that the problems of the family and of its members cannot be considered individually. They view the family as a dynamic system whose health is vitally related to its internal relationships and its interactions with other social networks. Stress in this context can be either a positive or a negative influence on the family’s effectiveness in raising children, depending on the personal and public resources available.

The strength of the book lies in its integrated approach to a many-sided problem. The authors provide reviews of research, clinical applications, and theoretical discussions, including several frameworks for understanding the constellation of factors within the family that affect children’s development. They examine specific situations that can present families with formidable challenges: unemployment, divorce, two-career families, single parenthood,teenage pregnancy, demands from the workplace. Some of these situations are traumatic but brief; others, such as chronic illness, require long-term coping strategies. The authors show the similarities that underlie these stressful situations—how they can affect the fabric of family life and the development of the young child.

The emphasis throughout the book is on policy implications: the urgent need for more enlightened and supportive corporate and government involvement. Unless we make the well-being of the family a priority, the number of children in adverse situations will continue to increase. This book will serve as an indispensable guide to psychologists, pediatricians, psychiatrists, educators, business executives, and government officials.

[more]

logo for University of Minnesota Press
In the Company of Grace
A Veterinarian's Memoir of Trauma and Healing
Jody Lulich
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

The son of a Black mother and white father overcomes family trauma to find the courage of compassion in veterinary practice

Rising to accept a prestigious award, Jody Lulich wondered what to say. Explain how he’d been attracted to veterinary medicine? Describe how caring for helpless, voiceless animals in his own shame and pain provided a lifeline, a chance to heal himself as well? Lulich tells his story in In the Company of Grace, a memoir about finding courage in compassion and strength in healing—and power in finally confronting the darkness of his youth.

Lulich’s white father and Black mother met at a civil rights rally, but love was no defense against their personal demons. His mother’s suicide, in his presence when he was nine years old, and his sometimes brutal father’s subsequent withdrawal set Lulich on a course from the South Side of Chicago to the Tuskegee School of Veterinary Medicine in Alabama to an endowed chair at the University of Minnesota, forever searching for the approval and affection that success could not deliver. Though shadowed by troubling secrets, his memoir also features scenes of surprising light and promise—of the neighbors who take him in, a brother’s unlikely effort to save Christmas, his mother’s memories of the family’s charmed early days, bright moments (and many curious details) of veterinary practice. Most consequentially, at Tuskegee Lulich rents a room in the home of a seventy-five-year-old Black woman named Grace, whose wholehearted adoption of him—and her own stories of the Jim Crow era—finally gives him a sense of belonging and possibility.

Completing his book amid the furor over George Floyd’s murder, Lulich reflects on all the ways that race has shaped his life. In the Company of Grace is a moving testament to the power of compassion in the face of seemingly overwhelming circumstances.

[more]

front cover of In the Public Interest
In the Public Interest
Medical Licensing and the Disciplinary Process
Horowitz, Ruth
Rutgers University Press, 2012

Winner of the American Sociological Association Sociology of Law Section 2013 Outstanding Book Award

How do we know when physicians practice medicine safely? Can we trust doctors to discipline their own? What is a proper role of experts in a democracy? In the Public Interest raises these provocative questions, using medical licensing and discipline to advocate for a needed overhaul of how we decide public good in a society dominated by private interest groups. Throughout the twentieth century, American physicians built a powerful profession, but their drive toward professional autonomy has made outside observers increasingly concerned about physicians’ ability to separate their own interests from those of the general public.

Ruth Horowitz traces the history of medical licensure and the mechanisms that democratic societies have developed to certify doctors to deliver critical services. Combining her skills as a public member of medical licensing boards and as an ethnographer, Horowitz illuminates the workings of the crucial public institutions charged with maintaining public safety. She demonstrates the complex agendas different actors bring to board deliberations, the variations in the board authority across the country, the unevenly distributed institutional resources available to board members, and the difficulties non-physician members face as they struggle to balance interests of the parties involved.

In the Public Interest suggests new procedures, resource allocation, and educational initiatives to increase physician oversight. Horowitz makes the case for regulations modeled after deliberative democracy that promise to open debates to the general public and allow public members to take a more active part in the decision-making process that affects vital community interests.

[more]

front cover of In the Shadow of Diagnosis
In the Shadow of Diagnosis
Psychiatric Power and Queer Life
Regina Kunzel
University of Chicago Press, 2024
A look at the history of psychiatry’s foundational impact on the lives of queer and gender-variant people.
 
In the mid-twentieth century, American psychiatrists proclaimed homosexuality a mental disorder, one that was treatable and amenable to cure.  Drawing on a collection of previously unexamined case files from St. Elizabeths Hospital, In the Shadow of Diagnosis explores the encounter between psychiatry and queer and gender-variant people in the mid- to late-twentieth-century United States. It examines psychiatrists’ investments in understanding homosexuality as a dire psychiatric condition, a judgment that garnered them tremendous power and authority at a time that historians have characterized as psychiatry’s “golden age.” That stigmatizing diagnosis made a deep and lasting impact, too, on queer people, shaping gay life and politics in indelible ways. In the Shadow of Diagnosis helps us understand the adhesive and ongoing connection between queerness and sickness.
 
[more]

front cover of In the Shadow of Diagnosis
In the Shadow of Diagnosis
Psychiatric Power and Queer Life
Regina Kunzel
University of Chicago Press, 2024
This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

A look at the history of psychiatry’s foundational impact on the lives of queer and gender-variant people.

 
In the mid-twentieth century, American psychiatrists proclaimed homosexuality a mental disorder, one that was treatable and amenable to cure.  Drawing on a collection of previously unexamined case files from St. Elizabeths Hospital, In the Shadow of Diagnosis explores the encounter between psychiatry and queer and gender-variant people in the mid- to late-twentieth-century United States. It examines psychiatrists’ investments in understanding homosexuality as a dire psychiatric condition, a judgment that garnered them tremendous power and authority at a time that historians have characterized as psychiatry’s “golden age.” That stigmatizing diagnosis made a deep and lasting impact, too, on queer people, shaping gay life and politics in indelible ways. In the Shadow of Diagnosis helps us understand the adhesive and ongoing connection between queerness and sickness.
 
[more]

front cover of Inclusion
Inclusion
The Politics of Difference in Medical Research
Steven Epstein
University of Chicago Press, 2007

With Inclusion, Steven Epstein argues that strategies to achieve diversity in medical research mask deeper problems, ones that might require a different approach and different solutions.

Formal concern with this issue, Epstein shows, is a fairly recent phenomenon. Until the mid-1980s, scientists often studied groups of white, middle-aged men—and assumed that conclusions drawn from studying them would apply to the rest of the population. But struggles involving advocacy groups, experts, and Congress led to reforms that forced researchers to diversify the population from which they drew for clinical research. While the prominence of these inclusive practices has offered hope to traditionally underserved groups, Epstein argues that it has drawn attention away from the tremendous inequalities in health that are rooted not in biology but in society.

“Epstein’s use of theory to demonstrate how public policies in the health profession are shaped makes this book relevant for many academic disciplines. . . . Highly recommended.”—Choice

“A masterful comprehensive overview of a wide terrain.”—Troy Duster, Biosocieties

[more]

front cover of Incommunicable
Incommunicable
Toward Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine
Charles L. Briggs
Duke University Press, 2024
In Incommunicable, Charles L. Briggs examines the long-standing presumptions that medical discourse translates easily across geographic, racial, and class boundaries. Bringing linguistic and medical anthropology into conversation with Black and decolonial theory, he theorizes the failure in health communication as incommunicability, which negatively affects all patients, doctors, and healthcare providers. Briggs draws on W. E. B. Du Bois and the work of three philosopher-physicians—John Locke, Frantz Fanon, and Georges Canguilhem—to show how cultural models of communication and health have historically racialized people of color as being incapable of communicating rationally and understanding biomedical concepts. He outlines incommunicability through a study of COVID-19 discourse, in which health professionals defined the disease based on scientific medical knowledge in ways that reduced varieties of nonprofessional knowledge about COVID-19 to “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories.” This dismissal of nonprofessional knowledge led to a failure of communication that eroded trust in medical expertise. Building on efforts by social movements and coalitions of health professionals and patients to craft more just and equitable futures, Briggs helps imagine health systems and healthcare discourses beyond the oppressive weight of communicability and the stigma of incommunicability.
[more]

front cover of Incurable and Intolerable
Incurable and Intolerable
Chronic Disease and Slow Death in Nineteenth-Century France
Jason Szabo
Rutgers University Press, 2009
Terminal illness and the pain and anguish it brings are experiences that have touched millions of people in the past and continue to shape our experience of the present. Hospital machines that artificially support life and monitor vital signs beg the question: Is there not anything that medical science can offer as solace?

Incurable and Intolerable looks at the history of incurable illness from a variety of perspectives, including those of doctors, patients, families, religious counsel, and policy makers. This compellingly documented and well-written history illuminates the physical, emotional, social, and existential consequences of chronic disease and terminal illness, and offers an original look at the world of palliative medicine, politics, religion, and charity. Revealing the ways in which history can shed new light on contemporary thinking, Jason Szabo encourages a more careful scrutiny of today's attitudes, policies, and practices surrounding "imminent death" and its effects on society.

[more]

front cover of Indigenous Communalism
Indigenous Communalism
Belonging, Healthy Communities, and Decolonizing the Collective
Carolyn Smith-Morris
Rutgers University Press, 2020
From a grandmother’s inter-generational care to the strategic and slow consensus work of elected tribal leaders, Indigenous community builders perform the daily work of culture and communalism. Indigenous Communalism conveys age-old lessons about culture, communalism, and the universal tension between the individual and the collective. It is also a critical ethnography challenging the moral and cultural assumptions of a hyper-individualist, twenty-first century global society.
 
Told in vibrant detail, the narrative of the book conveys the importance of communalism as a value system present in all human groups and one at the center of Indigenous survival. Carolyn Smith-Morris draws on her work among the Akimel O'odham and the Wiradjuri to show how communal work and culture help these communities form distinctive Indigenous bonds. The results are not only a rich study of Indigenous relational lifeways, but a serious inquiry to the continuing acculturative atmosphere that Indigenous communities struggle to resist. Recognizing both positive and negative sides to the issue, she asks whether there is a global Indigenous communalism. And if so, what lessons does it teach about healthy communities, the universal human need for belonging, and the potential for the collective to do good?
 
[more]

front cover of Indigenous Health and Justice
Indigenous Health and Justice
Edited by Karen Jarratt-Snider and Marianne O. Nielsen
University of Arizona Press, 2024
Indigenous communities are practicing de facto sovereignty to resolve public health issues that are a consequence of settler colonialism. This work delves into health and justice through a range of topics and examples and demonstrates the resilience of Indigenous communities.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Infant, Perinatal, Maternal, and Childhood Mortality in the United States
Sam Shapiro, Edward R. Schlesinger, and Robert E. L. Nesbitt, Jr.
Harvard University Press
In this volume, the authors use data from the U.S. Census and various specialized studies to analyze trends in infant, maternal, and childhood mortality in the United States and to provide comparisons with other countries. They discuss such variables as sex, cause of death, race, and geography, and, in the case of infant mortality, birth order, age, and prior pregnancy history of mother.
[more]


front cover of Infectious Disease
Infectious Disease
A Scientific American Reader
Edited by Scientific American
University of Chicago Press, 2008
The international public health scare that resulted last year when a man infected with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis flew overseas from the United States and back illustrates both the fear and the potential impact of highly infectious diseases in a global age. At a time when scientists warn of the potential for an influenza epidemic to rival the deadly outbreak of 1919 and newspapers feature alarming headlines about incidences of mad cow disease, infectious disease will be a critical area of concern and scientific study in the twenty-first century.     
Infectious Disease collects thirty of the most exciting, innovative, and significant articles on communicable illness published inthe pages of ScientificAmerican magazine since 1993. With sections devoted to viral infections, infectious disease, the immune system, and global management and treatment issues, Infectious Disease provides general readers and students with an excellent overview of recent research in the field. Roger I. Glass discusses a potential vaccine for the rotavirus—a leading cause of severe childhood diarrhea world wide and frequent killer of young children in developing nations. Jeffery K. Taubenberger and colleagues investigate the virulent strain of influenza that killed up to 40 million people in 1919 to suggest treatments and recommend preventative measures. And Paul R. Epstein looks into whether global warming could be harmful to our health, untangling research that suggests that many diseases will flourish as Earth’s atmosphere heats up.      
The prominence of disease in the ecology and evolution of human society has spurred investment in research and technology development, and, as a consequence, the topic is much discussed in the general and scientific media. Infectious Disease is the essential sourcebook for anyone looking for the solid science and compelling narrative behind the stories that make headlines.
[more]

front cover of Influenza
Influenza
A Century of Science and Public Health Response
George Dehner
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012

In 1976, the outbreak of a new strain of swine flu at the Fort Dix, New Jersey, army base prompted an unprecedented inoculation campaign. Some forty-two million Americans were vaccinated as the National Influenza Immunization Program hastened to prevent a pandemic, while the World Health Organization (WHO) took a wait-and-see approach. Fortunately, the virus did not spread, and only one death occurred. But instead of being lauded, American actions were subsequently denounced as a “fiasco” and instigator of mass panic.
      In Influenza, George Dehner examines the wide disparity in national and international responses to influenza pandemics, from the Russian flu of 1889 to the swine flu outbreak in 2009. He chronicles the technological and institutional progress made along the way and shows how these developments can shape an effective future policy.
      Early pandemic response relied on methods of quarantine and individual scientific research. In the aftermath of World War II, a consensus for cooperation and shared resources led to the creation of the WHO, under the auspices of the United Nations. Today, the WHO maintains a large and proactive role in responding to influenza outbreaks. International pandemic response, however, is only as strong as its weakest national link—most recently evidenced in the failed early detection of the 2009 swine flu in Mexico and the delayed reporting of the 2002 SARS outbreak in China.
      As Dehner’s study contends, the hard lessons of the past highlight the need for a coordinated early warning system with full disclosure, shared technologies, and robust manufacturing capabilities. Until the “national” aspect can be removed from the international equation, responses will be hampered, and a threat to an individual remains a threat to all.

[more]

front cover of Influenza and Inequality
Influenza and Inequality
One Town's Tragic Response to the Great Epidemic of 1918
Patricia J. Fanning
University of Massachusetts Press, 2010
The influenza epidemic of 1918 was one of the worst medical disasters in human history, taking close to thirty million lives worldwide in less than a year, including more than 500,000 in the United States. What made this pandemic even more frightening was the fact that it occurred when death rates for most common infectious diseases were diminishing. Still, an epidemic is not merely a medical crisis; it has sociological, psychological, and political dimensions as well. In Influenza and Inequality, Patricia J. Fanning examines these other dimensions and brings to life this terrible episode of epidemic disease by tracing its path through the town of Norwood, Massachusetts.

By 1918, Norwood was a small, ethnically diverse, industrialized, and stratified community. Ink, printing, and tanning factories were owned by wealthy families who lived privileged lives. These industries attracted immigrant laborers who made their homes in several ethnic neighborhoods and endured prejudice and discrimination at the hands of native residents. When the epidemic struck, the immigrant neighborhoods were most affected; a fact that played a significant role in the town's response—with tragic results.

This close analysis of one town's struggle illuminates how even well-intentioned elite groups may adopt and implement strategies that can exacerbate rather than relieve a medical crisis. It is a cautionary tale that demonstrates how social behavior can be a fundamental predictor of the epidemic curve, a community's response to crisis, and the consequences of those actions.
[more]

logo for Georgetown University Press
Informed Consent
Patient Autonomy and Clinician Beneficence within Health Care, Second Edition
Stephen Wear
Georgetown University Press, 1998

Wear develops an efficient and flexible model of informed consent that accommodates both clinical realities and legal and ethical imperatives. In this second edition, he has expanded his examination of the larger process within which informed consent takes place and his discussion of the clinician's need for a wide range of discretion.

[more]

logo for Georgetown University Press
Inquiries in Bioethics
Stephen G. Post
Georgetown University Press, 1993

The biological revolution, with its attendant technological powers to alter nature and human nature, demands fundamental and cautionary reflection on questions of the highest ethical importance. In this thoughtful book on contemporary issues in bioethics, Stephen G. Post explores nine major topics ranging from birth and adolescence to aging and death. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Post clearly illuminates the issues, probes the ethical alternatives, and examines the cultural changes that shape current presuppositions about the right and good. This book will be of interest to scholars in bioethics, philosophy, and religious studies; health-care professionals; and the general reader concerned with these pressing questions of life and death.

[more]

front cover of Insourced
Insourced
How Importing Jobs Impacts the Healthcare Crisis Here and Abroad
Dr. Kate Tulenko
Dartmouth College Press, 2012
For years, opponents of outsourcing have argued that offshoring American jobs destroys our local industries, lays waste to American job creation, and gives foreigners the good jobs and income that would otherwise remain on our shores. Yet few Americans realize that a parallel dynamic is occurring in the healthcare sector—previously one of the most consistent sources of stable, dependable living-wage jobs in the entire nation. Instead of outsourcing high-paying jobs overseas—as the manufacturing and service sectors do—hospitals and other healthcare companies insource healthcare labor from developing countries, giving the jobs to people who are willing to accept lower pay and worse working conditions than U.S. healthcare workers. As Dr. Tulenko shows, insourcing has caused tens of thousands of high-paying local jobs in the healthcare sector to effectively vanish from the reach of U.S. citizens, weakened the healthcare systems of developing nations, and constricted the U.S. health professional education system. She warns Americans about what she’s seeing—a stunning story they’re scarcely aware of, which impacts all of us directly and measurably—and describes how to create better American health professional education, more high-paying healthcare jobs, and improved health for the poor in the developing world.
[more]

front cover of Institutional Change and Healthcare Organizations
Institutional Change and Healthcare Organizations
From Professional Dominance to Managed Care
W. Richard Scott, Martin Ruef, Peter J. Mendel, and Carol A. Caronna
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Few large institutions have changed as fully and dramatically as the U.S. healthcare system since World War II. Compared to the 1930s, healthcare now incorporates a variety of new technologies, service-delivery arrangements, financing mechanisms, and underlying sets of organizing principles.

This book examines the transformations that have occurred in medical care systems in the San Francisco Bay area since 1945. The authors describe these changes in detail and relate them to both the sociodemographic trends in the Bay Area and to shifts in regulatory systems and policy environments at local, state, and national levels. But this is more than a social history; the authors employ a variety of theoretical perspectives—including strategic management, population ecology, and institutional theory—to examine five types of healthcare organizations through quantitative data analysis and illustrative case studies.

Providing a thorough account of changes for one of the nation's leading metropolitan areas in health service innovation, this book is a landmark in the theory of organizations and in the history of healthcare systems.
[more]

logo for Michigan Publishing Services
Integrating Family Planning Training into Medical Education
A Case Study of St. Paul's Hospital Millennium Medical College
Lia T. Gebremedhin
Michigan Publishing Services, 2017
This case study chronicles the integration of pre-service training in contraception and comprehensive abortion care into the medical school and OBGYN residency training program at St. Paul’s Hospital Millennium Medical College (SPHMMC) through an authentic partnership with the University of Michigan. The case study showcases the key elements that were crucial in the successful implementation of the SPHMMC program, which has now become mainstream and has been emulated in eight other medical schools in Ethiopia through the University of Michigan’s Center for International Reproductive Health Training (CIRHT).
 
The innovative approach, founded on the values of sustainable capacity building through academic partnership and centered on improving access to dignified women’s reproductive health care through effective pre-service training, has the potential for expansion to other countries with high rates of maternal mortality and morbidity. In this case study, we spell out the best practices, which we hope will inspire academic medical centers in the Global South, global health departments/centers internationally, and the reproductive health community at large.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Integrity of the Body
A Discussion of Modern Immunological Ideas
F. M. Burnet
Harvard University Press

Geneticists and biochemists, particularly, have realized the special potentialities of antibodies as biologically labeled proteins that help to throw light on the process whereby genetic information carried in the chromosomes is eventually manifested in the synthesis of the proteins needed for the functioning of the organism. There are in addition many specialized applications of immunology in the other biological sciences.

F. M. Burnet describes with characteristic vividness the kinds of problems with which immunology is concerned today and the methods by which it seeks answers to them. Although he gives particular emphasis to the clonal-selection theory of immunity, of which he is the originator, he frankly says that “because it is so inherently simple, it is probably wrong.” He explains other theories of immunity as well. He discusses both nonmedical and medical applications of immunology and devotes several chapters to allergic disease and autoimmune disease. He concludes with some personal speculations into the deeper problems of biology—for instance, a somatic mutation theory of aging, in which immunology may be expected eventually to be of service.

[more]

front cover of Intensive Care
Intensive Care
Medical Ethics and the Medical Profession
Robert Zussman
University of Chicago Press, 1992
In riveting case studies, Robert Zussman describes how medical decisions in ICUs are considered and reconsidered, made and remade, negotiated and renegotiated. He concentrates on the practice of medical ethics, on the ways in which right and wrong are interpreted and used in the ward—how definitions of right and wrong emerge from the social situations of patients, families, doctors, and nurses and from the workings of hospitals and the courts.

His book is a portrait of the way careful planning is undermined by the unpredictability of illness and the persistence of self-interest, by high principle and curious compromise.
[more]

front cover of Interest Groups and Health Care Reform across the United States
Interest Groups and Health Care Reform across the United States
Virginia Gray, David Lowery, and Jennifer K. Benz
Georgetown University Press, 2013

Universal health care was on the national political agenda for nearly a hundred years until a comprehensive (but not universal) health care reform bill supported by President Obama passed in 2010. The most common explanation for the failure of past reform efforts is that special interests were continually able to block reform by lobbying lawmakers. Yet, beginning in the 1970s, accelerating with the failure of the Clinton health care plan, and continuing through the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, health policy reform was alive and well at the state level.

Interest Groups and Health Care Reform across the United States assesses the impact of interest groups to determine if collectively they are capable of shaping policy in their own interests or whether they influence policy only at the margins. What can this tell us about the true power of interest groups in this policy arena? The fact that state governments took action in health policy in spite of opposing interests, where the national government could not, offers a compelling puzzle that will be of special interest to scholars and students of public policy, health policy, and state politics.

[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
International Annals of Adolescent Psychiatry, Volume 2
Psychosis and Psychotic Functioning
Edited by Allan Z. Schwartzberg
University of Chicago Press, 1992

front cover of International Surrogacy as Disruptive Industry in Southeast Asia
International Surrogacy as Disruptive Industry in Southeast Asia
Whittaker, Andrea
Rutgers University Press, 2019
During the last two decades, a new form of trade in commercial surrogacy grew across Asia. Starting in India, a “disruptive” model of surrogacy offered mass availability, rapid accessibility, and created new demands for surrogacy services from people who could not afford or access surrogacy elsewhere.
 
In International Surrogacy as Disruptive Industry in Southeast Asia, Andrea Whittaker traces the development of this industry and its movement across Southeast Asia following a sequence of governmental bans in India, Nepal, Thailand, and Cambodia. Through a case study of the industry in Thailand, the book offers a nuanced and sympathetic examination of the industry from the perspectives of the people involved in it: surrogates, intended parents, and facilitators. The industry offers intended parents the opportunity to form much desired families, but also creates vulnerabilities for all people involved. These vulnerabilities became evident in cases of trafficking, exploitation, and criminality that emerged in southeast Asia, leading to greater scrutiny on the industry as a whole. Yet the trade continues in new flexible hybrid forms, involving the circulation of reproductive gametes, embryos, surrogates, and ova donors across international borders to circumvent regulations. The book demonstrates the need for new forms of regulation to protect those involved in international surrogacy arrangements.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Interrogations, Forced Feedings, and the Role of Health Professionals
New Perspectives on International Human Rights, Humanitarian Law, and Ethics
Ryan Goodman and Mindy Jane Roseman
Harvard University Press

The involvement of health professionals in human rights and humanitarian law violations has again become a live issue as a consequence of the U.S. prosecution of conflicts with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Iraq. Health professionals—including M.D.s trained in psychiatry and Ph.D.s trained in behavioral psychology—have reportedly advised and assisted in coercive interrogation. Health professionals have also been involved in forced feedings. Such practices would not be unique to the United States nor the most extreme forms of abuse in the world. The direct involvement of medical professionals in torture, covering up extrajudicial killings, and other extreme conduct is a phenomenon common to many societies and periods of national crisis. Indeed, the widespread and repeated nature of this problem has led to the development of important legal and ethical codes on the subject. Those codes, however, are notoriously insufficient in many cases. A reexamination of the international norms, as developed in human rights law, humanitarian law, and professional ethics can shed light on these issues. However, in addition to those instruments, the struggle to end such violations requires understanding human behavior and the role of formal and informal institutional pressures.

In this volume, a wide range of prominent practitioners and scholars explore these issues. Their insights provide significant potential for reforming institutions to assist health professionals maintain their legal and ethical obligations in times of national crisis.

[more]

front cover of Into Africa
Into Africa
A Transnational History of Catholic Medical Missions and Social Change
Wall, Barbra Mann
Rutgers University Press, 2015
Winner of the 2016 Lavinia Dock Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing

 Awarded first place in the 2016 American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Award in the History and Public Policy category


The most dramatic growth of Christianity in the late twentieth century has occurred in Africa, where Catholic missions have played major roles. But these missions did more than simply convert Africans. Catholic sisters became heavily involved in the Church’s health services and eventually in relief and social justice efforts. In Into Africa, Barbra Mann Wall offers a transnational history that reveals how Catholic medical and nursing sisters established relationships between local and international groups, sparking an exchange of ideas that crossed national, religious, gender, and political boundaries.
 
Both a nurse and a historian, Wall explores this intersection of religion, medicine, gender, race, and politics in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on the years following World War II, a period when European colonial rule was ending and Africans were building new governments, health care institutions, and education systems. She focuses specifically on hospitals, clinics, and schools of nursing in Ghana and Uganda run by the Medical Mission Sisters of Philadelphia; in Nigeria and Uganda by the Irish Medical Missionaries of Mary; in Tanzania by the Maryknoll Sisters of New York; and in Nigeria by a local Nigerian congregation. Wall shows how, although initially somewhat ethnocentric, the sisters gradually developed a deeper understanding of the diverse populations they served. In the process, their medical and nursing work intersected with critical social, political, and cultural debates that continue in Africa today: debates about the role of women in their local societies, the relationship of women to the nursing and medical professions and to the Catholic Church, the obligations countries have to provide care for their citizens, and the role of women in human rights.
 
A groundbreaking contribution to the study of globalization and medicine, Into Africa highlights the importance of transnational partnerships, using the stories of these nuns to enhance the understanding of medical mission work and global change.
[more]

front cover of Into Our Own Hands
Into Our Own Hands
The Women's Health Movement in the United States, 1969–1990
Morgen, Sandra
Rutgers University Press, 2002

Recent history has witnessed a revolution in womens health care. Beginning in the late 1960s, women in communities across the United States challenged medical and male control over womens health. Few people today realize the extent to which these grassroots efforts shifted power and responsibility from the medical establishment into womens hands as health care consumers, providers, and advocates.

Into Our Own Hands traces the womens health care movement in the United States. Richly documented, this study is based on more than a decade of research, including interviews with leading activists; documentary material from feminist health clinics and advocacy organizations; a survey of womens health movement organizations in the early 1990s; and ethnographic fieldwork. Sandra Morgen focuses on the clinics born from this movement, as well as how the movements encounters with organized medicine, the state, and ascendant neoconservative and neoliberal political forces of the 1970s to the1980s shaped the confrontations and accomplishments in womens health care. The book also explores the impact of political struggles over race and class within the movement organizations.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Intrinsic Factors
William Bosworth Castle and the Development of Hematology and Clinical Investigation at Boston City Hospital
Anand B. Karnad
Harvard University Press

Dr. W. B. Castle (1897–1990), who played a major role in the emergence of hematology as a scientific discipline in the first half of this century, was instrumental in establishing the worldwide reputation of the Thorndike Memorial Laboratory and the Harvard Medical Unit at Boston City Hospital. In the first comprehensive biography of Castle, Anand Karnad highlights the golden age of medicine and hematology in Boston. Castle’s early experiments solved the puzzle of pernicious anemia and were the building blocks for a series of experiments on that disease that stand as one of the finest examples of clinical research ever conducted.

Castle and his group also made pioneering contributions to hemoglobin physiology, mechanisms of hemolysis, splenic function, and sickle cell anemia. Under his leadership, the Thorndike Memorial Laboratory attracted the best and the brightest talent, many of whom are present-day leaders in the world of medicine and science. Intrinsic Factors is the story of Castle’s life and work.

[more]

logo for Georgetown University Press
Introduction to Jewish and Catholic Bioethics
A Comparative Analysis
Aaron L. Mackler
Georgetown University Press, 2003

Leavened with compassion, common sense, and a readable style, this introduction to complicated bioethical issues from both Jewish and Catholic perspectives is as informative as it is undaunting. Aaron Mackler takes the reader through methodology in Roman Catholic moral theology and compares and contrasts it with methodology as it is practiced in Jewish ethics. He then skillfully wends his way through many topics foremost on the contemporary ethical agenda for both Jewish and Catholic ethicists: euthanasia and assisted suicide, end-of-life decisions, abortion, in vitro fertilization, and the ever-growing problem of justice regarding access to health care and medical resources. A concluding chapter summarizes general tendencies in the comparison of the two traditions, and addresses the significance of convergence and divergence between these traditions for moral thinkers within each faith community, and generally in western democracies such as the United States.

As Mackler overviews these issues, he points out the divergences and the commonalities between the two traditions—clarifying each position and outlining the structure of thinking that supports them. At the heart of both Catholic and Jewish perspectives on bioethics is a life-affirming core, and while there may be differences in the "why" of those ethical divergences, and in the "how" each arrived at varying—or the same—conclusions, both traditions, in the words of James McCartney as quoted in the introduction, "are guided by the principle that life is precious; that we are bidden to preserve and guard our health; that we are bidden to intervene in nature to raise the human estate; and that our lives are not our own, but are part of the legacy bequeathed to us by the Creator." This book has been carefully crafted in that spirit.

[more]

front cover of Intuition in Medicine
Intuition in Medicine
A Philosophical Defense of Clinical Reasoning
Hillel D. Braude
University of Chicago Press, 2012

Intuition is central to discussions about the nature of scientific and philosophical reasoning and what it means to be human. In this bold and timely book, Hillel D. Braude marshals his dual training as a physician and philosopher to examine the place of intuition in medicine.

Rather than defining and using a single concept of intuition—philosophical, practical, or neuroscientific—Braude here examines intuition as it occurs at different levels and in different contexts of clinical reasoning. He argues that not only does intuition provide the bridge between medical reasoning and moral reasoning, but that it also links the epistemological, ontological, and ethical foundations of clinical decision making. In presenting his case, Braude takes readers on a journey through Aristotle’s Ethics—highlighting the significance of practical reasoning in relation to theoretical reasoning and the potential bridge between them—then through current debates between regulators and clinicians on evidence-based medicine, and finally applies the philosophical perspectives of Reichenbach, Popper, and Peirce to analyze the intuitive support for clinical equipoise, a key concept in research ethics. Through his phenomenological study of intuition Braude aims to demonstrate that ethical responsibility for the other lies at the heart of clinical judgment.
 
Braude’s original approach advances medical ethics by using philosophical rigor and history to analyze the tacit underpinnings of clinical reasoning and to introduce clear conceptual distinctions that simultaneously affirm and exacerbate the tension between ethical theory and practice. His study will be welcomed not only by philosophers but also by clinicians eager to justify how they use moral intuitions, and anyone interested in medical decision making.
[more]

front cover of Invasion of the Body
Invasion of the Body
Revolutions in Surgery
Nicholas L. Tilney
Harvard University Press, 2011

In 1913, the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston admitted its first patient, Mary Agnes Turner, who suffered from varicose veins in her legs. The surgical treatment she received, under ether anesthesia, was the most advanced available at the time. At the same hospital fifty years later, Nicholas Tilney—then a second-year resident—assisted in the repair of a large aortic aneurysm. The cutting-edge diagnostic tools he used to evaluate the patient’s condition would soon be eclipsed by yet more sophisticated apparatus, including minimally invasive approaches and state-of-the-art imaging technology, which Tilney would draw on in pioneering organ transplant surgery and becoming one of its most distinguished practitioners.

In Invasion of the Body, Tilney tells the story of modern surgery and the revolutions that have transformed the field: anesthesia, prevention of infection, professional standards of competency, pharmaceutical advances, and the present turmoil in medical education and health care reform. Tilney uses as his stage the famous Boston teaching hospital where he completed his residency and went on to practice (now called Brigham and Women's). His cast of characters includes clinicians, support staff, trainees, patients, families, and various applied scientists who push the revolutions forward.

While lauding the innovations that have brought surgeons' capabilities to heights undreamed of even a few decades ago, Tilney also previews a challenging future, as new capacities to prolong life and restore health run headlong into unsustainable costs. The authoritative voice he brings to the ancient tradition of surgical invasion will be welcomed by patients, practitioners, and policymakers alike.

[more]

front cover of Inventing Pollution
Inventing Pollution
Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800
Peter Thorsheim
Ohio University Press, 2006

Britain's supremacy in the nineteenth century depended in large part on its vast deposits of coal. This coal not only powered steam engines in factories, ships, and railway locomotives but also warmed homes and cooked food. As coal consumption skyrocketed, the air in Britain's cities and towns became filled with ever-greater and denser clouds of smoke.

In this far-reaching study, Peter Thorsheim explains that, for much of the nineteenth century, few people in Britain even considered coal smoke to be pollution. To them, pollution meant miasma: invisible gases generated by decomposing plant and animal matter. Far from viewing coal smoke as pollution, most people considered smoke to be a valuable disinfectant, for its carbon and sulfur were thought capable of rendering miasma harmless.

Inventing Pollution examines the radically new understanding of pollution that emerged in the late nineteenth century, one that centered not on organic decay but on coal combustion. This change, as Peter Thorsheim argues, gave birth to the smoke-abatement movement and to new ways of thinking about the relationships among humanity, technology, and the environment.

[more]

front cover of The Invention of Madness
The Invention of Madness
State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China
Emily Baum
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Throughout most of history, in China the insane were kept within the home and treated by healers who claimed no specialized knowledge of their condition. In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, psychiatric ideas and institutions began to influence longstanding beliefs about the proper treatment for the mentally ill. In The Invention of Madness, Emily Baum traces a genealogy of insanity from the turn of the century to the onset of war with Japan in 1937, revealing the complex and convoluted ways in which “madness” was transformed in the Chinese imagination into “mental illness.”

Focusing on typically marginalized historical actors, including municipal functionaries and the urban poor, The Invention of Madness shifts our attention from the elite desire for modern medical care to the ways in which psychiatric discourses were implemented and redeployed in the midst of everyday life. New meanings and practices of madness, Baum argues, were not just imposed on the Beijing public but continuously invented by a range of people in ways that reflected their own needs and interests. Exhaustively researched and theoretically informed, The Invention of Madness is an innovative contribution to medical history, urban studies, and the social history of twentieth-century China.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Pneumonia by R. Heffron, Introduction by Maxwell Finland. The Biology of Pneumococcus by B. White, New Foreword by Robert Austin
Roderick Heffron and Benjamin White
Harvard University Press, 1979

The search for effective immunization against pneumonia was a principal avenue of investigation before the advent of The search for effective immunization against pneumonia was a principal avenue of investigation before the advent of antibiotics made such an effort appear unnecessary. Recently, however, the limitations of antibiotic therapy have become increasingly evident, and interest has been renewed in many of the threads of research which have all but lain dormant since the 1930s. In 1978, a pneumococcal vaccine was licensed by the F.D.A., merely as evidence of a renaissance in pneumococcal research which is now taking place. We are pleased to be reissuing two classic volumes which provide a unique repository of data amassed prior to the time when penicillin precluded further exhaustive observation of the unmodified infection.

Heffron’s Pneumonia is a compilation and analysis of all aspects of pneumococcal disease, including the distribution of pneumococcal types, the pathology of pneumonia, its epidemiology, symptoms, signs, complications, diagnosis, prognosis, and immunology. With a complete cross-reference index and an extensive bibliography, Heffron’s book is still the definitive work on pneumococcal infections.

White’s Biology of Pneumococcus contains the wealth of information acquired in the first six decades following the discovery of the pneumococcus. With a bibliography drawing together some 1593 papers, White’s volume is of unquestionable significance as a historical record and the basis for further study.

[more]

front cover of Irish Fever
Irish Fever
An Archaeology of Illness, Injury, and Healing in New York City, 1845–1875
Meredith Linn
University of Tennessee Press, 2024
During the Potato Famine of the nineteenth century, about one million Irish people perished from starvation and disease, while more than two million fled the country in fear and desperation, with some 850,000 landing in New York City. After a difficult journey, many found themselves impoverished, taking dangerous jobs, and battling miserable living conditions in an unfamiliar urban landscape. These circumstances resulted in high rates of illness, injury, and death compared with other immigrant groups and native-born Americans.

In this profound study, Meredith B. Linn explores three kinds of afflictions—typhus fever, tuberculosis, and work-related injuries—that disproportionately affected Irish immigrants, tracing how existing medical ideas and technologies intersected with American prejudices to further conspire against this once culturally distinct group. Linn makes a compelling case for how Americans’ interpretations of the visible bodily changes wrought by typhus fever and injuries contributed to essentializing and dehumanizing biases against these new immigrants, while tuberculosis—with its symptoms of fatigue, pallor, and emaciation—enabled Americans to see individuals beyond stereotypes and to recognize the equal humanity of the Irish.

Drawing upon extensive archaeological records, folkloric sources, and historical documents, Linn presents what she terms a “visceral historical archaeology”—a perspective rooted in historical archaeology and medical anthropology—to illuminate the experiences of these immigrants. She investigates their health-related ideas and practices and reveals their efforts to heal themselves using popular remedies from Ireland and several new American commodities. Laden with heartrending stories from real working-class Irish and their American doctors, this richly illustrated book provides new perspectives about urban experience in the context of the Irish diaspora and invites contemplation about how illness, injury, and healing have affected the lives and reception of newcomers to the US.
 
[more]

logo for University of Manitoba Press
The Iron Rose
The Extraordinary Life of Charlotte Ross, MD
Fred Edge
University of Manitoba Press, 1992

front cover of Is Social Security Broke?
Is Social Security Broke?
A Cartoon Guide to the Issues
Barbara R. Bergmann and Jim Bush
University of Michigan Press, 2000
A funny, smart, and engaging book on Social Security? You bet! Let Bill and Betty Boomer, their parents Ed and Ethel Elderly, and the young married Steve and Sue Sprout take you through the thickets of this thorny issue. You will come to understand why people are so worried about Social Security, how it operates, how we can keep it going, the problems we would face under a privatized system, and why Americans have always chosen to shore up this important program. You will learn about the system and the current debates surrounding it--and find yourself enjoying it at the same time.
Barbara R. Bergmann is Professor Emerita, University of Maryland and The American University. Jim Bush is the editorial cartoonist for the Providence Journal.
[more]

front cover of Ischemic Stroke
Ischemic Stroke
Diagnosis and Treatment
Martin-Schild, Sheryl
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Stroke is the fifth leading cause of death in the United States and is a leading cause of adult disability and discharge from hospitals to chronic care facilities. Despite the frequency and morbidity of stroke, there is a relative paucity of “stroke experts,” such as vascular neurologists and neurocritical care physicians, to care for these patients. Clinical research in the diagnosis and treatment of stroke has grown exponentially over the past two decades resulting in a great deal of new clinical information for attending physicians to absorb. Grounded in cutting-edge and evidence-based strategies, Ischemic Stroke closes the gap in stroke care by providing a cogent and intuitive guide for all physicians caring for stroke patients.

Key topics explored cover all elements of stroke care, including examinations of: emergent evaluation of the suspected stroke patient, clinical signs and symptoms of stroke, mechanisms of ischemic stroke, neuroimaging, cardiac-based evaluation, thrombolytic therapy, endovascular therapy, critical care management, rehabilitation, cardiac arrhythmias, and structural heart disease.
 
[more]

front cover of Islamically Integrated Psychotherapy
Islamically Integrated Psychotherapy
Uniting Faith and Professional Practice
Carrie York Al-Karam
Templeton Press, 2018

Integrating the Islamic faith with modern psychotherapy is at the forefront of the spiritually integrated psychotherapy movement. To bring this work to wider attention and to promote its continuation, Dr. Carrie York Al-Karam has brought together the present volume of nine essays, each of which is written by a Muslim clinician who practices Islamically integrated psychotherapy (IIP)—a modern approach that unites the teachings, principles, and interventions of the faith with Western therapeutic approaches.

As delineated in the Introduction, IIP has emerged from a variety of domains including the psychology of religion and spirituality, multicultural psychology and counseling, transpersonal psychology, Muslim Mental Health, and Islamic Psychology. The individual chapters then describe a variety of ways IIP is practiced by Muslim clinicians in their service provision with Muslim clients.

The contributors discuss a wide range of topics, such as how Islam can be viewed as a system for psychological wellbeing, or a “science of the soul”; what marital counseling can look like from an Islamically-integrated perspective; Prophet Mohammed as a psycho-spiritual exemplar in a new approach called The HEART Method; the use of Quranic stories in family therapy; as well as using Islamic teachings when working with Muslim children and adolescents.

A description of the various approaches is supplemented with discussions of their theoretical underpinnings as well as research-based recommendations for advancing clinical application. What emerges is a vital resource for Muslim and non-Muslim clinicians alike as well as the lay Muslim reader wanting to know more about how the Islamic faith and psychotherapy are engaging with each other in a modern clinical context.

[more]

front cover of It's Not Your Fault!
It's Not Your Fault!
Strategies for Solving Toilet Training and Bedwetting Problems
Joseph Barone, M.D.
Rutgers University Press, 2015
Millions of children over the age of five wet their beds every night. Many parents think they must be doing something wrong when their five-year-old is still in diapers while their friends’ children are perfectly trained by eighteen months of age. This undoubtedly is a very embarrassing and frustrating problem for both the parent and child, and can interfere with family dynamics and a child’s ability to enjoy ordinary social situations.  

It’s Not Your Fault! offers evidence-based strategies for parents who need assistance with toilet training and helping their child with urinary control issues. Dr. Joseph Barone, M.D., provides proven techniques that bring bedwetting to a happy conclusion. Frequently, parents are misguided by bad advice from friends, TV talk shows, the Internet, or parenting books. With many years of clinical experience, Dr. Barone shares valuable, practical information for parents to guide them through the basics of toilet training and bedwetting, and presents management plans to resolve any difficulties that occur. A comprehensive guide, this book covers everything parents need to know about normal toilet training and bedwetting, as well as step-by-step solutions based on testing and research in a real-world setting to help children suffering from delayed toilet training, bed wetting, and daytime urinary wetting.

It’s Not Your Fault! provides hope and guidance to those desperate to help their children overcome urinary control and toilet training problems. Dr. Barone sets parents on a course that makes things better for both themselves and their children.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter