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Mad Dogs and Meerkats
A History of Resurgent Rabies in Southern Africa
Karen Brown
Ohio University Press, 2011

Through the ages, rabies has exemplified the danger of diseases that transfer from wild animals to humans and their domestic stock. In South Africa, rabies has been on the rise since the latter part of the twentieth century despite the availability of postexposure vaccines and regular inoculation campaigns for dogs.

In Mad Dogs and Meerkats: A History of Resurgent Rabies in Southern Africa, Karen Brown links the increase of rabies to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Her study shows that the most afflicted regions of South Africa have seen a dangerous rise in feral dog populations as people lack the education, means, or will to care for their pets or take them to inoculation centers. Most victims are poor black children. Ineffective disease control, which in part depends on management policies in neighboring states and the diminished medical and veterinary infrastructures in Zimbabwe, has exacerbated the problem.

This highly readable book is the first study of rabies in Africa, tracing its history in South Africa and neighboring states from 1800 to the present and showing how environmental and economic changes brought about by European colonialism and global trade have had long-term effects.

Mad Dogs and Meerkats is recommended for public health policy makers and anyone interested in human-animal relations and how societies and governments have reacted to one of the world’s most feared diseases.

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Made to Hear
Cochlear Implants and Raising Deaf Children
Laura Mauldin
University of Minnesota Press, 2016

A mother whose child has had a cochlear implant tells Laura Mauldin why enrollment in the sign language program at her daughter’s school is plummeting: “The majority of parents want their kids to talk.” Some parents, however, feel very differently, because “curing” deafness with cochlear implants is uncertain, difficult, and freighted with judgment about what is normal, acceptable, and right. Made to Hear sensitively and thoroughly considers the structure and culture of the systems we have built to make deaf children hear.

Based on accounts of and interviews with families who adopt the cochlear implant for their deaf children, this book describes the experiences of mothers as they navigate the health care system, their interactions with the professionals who work with them, and the influence of neuroscience on the process. Though Mauldin explains the politics surrounding the issue, her focus is not on the controversy of whether to have a cochlear implant but on the long-term, multiyear undertaking of implantation. Her study provides a nuanced view of a social context in which science, technology, and medicine are trusted to vanquish disability—and in which mothers are expected to use these tools. Made to Hear reveals that implantation has the central goal of controlling the development of the deaf child’s brain by boosting synapses for spoken language and inhibiting those for sign language, placing the politics of neuroscience front and center.

Examining the consequences of cochlear implant technology for professionals and parents of deaf children, Made to Hear shows how certain neuroscientific claims about neuroplasticity, deafness, and language are deployed to encourage compliance with medical technology.


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Madness and Enterprise
Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and the Emergence of Pathological Value
Nima Bassiri
University of Chicago Press, 2024
Uncovers a powerful relationship between pathology and money: beginning in the nineteenth century, the severity of mental illness was measured against a patient’s economic productivity.
 
Madness and Enterprise reveals the economic norms embedded within psychiatric thinking about mental illness in the North Atlantic world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, various forms of madness were subjected to a style of psychiatric reasoning that was preoccupied with money. Psychiatrists across Western Europe and the United States attributed financial and even moral value to an array of pathological conditions, such that some mental disorders were seen as financial assets and others as economic liabilities. By turning to economic conduct and asking whether potential patients appeared capable of managing their financial affairs or even generating wealth, psychiatrists could often bypass diagnostic uncertainties about a person’s mental state.

Through an exploration of the intertwined histories of psychiatry and economic thought, Nima Bassiri shows how this relationship transformed the very idea of value in the modern North Atlantic, as the most common forms of social valuation—moral value, medical value, and economic value—were rendered equivalent and interchangeable. If what was good and what was healthy were increasingly conflated with what was remunerative (and vice versa), then a conceptual space opened through which madness itself could be converted into an economic form and subsequently redeemed—and even revered.
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Magnesium and Man
Warren E. C. Wacker
Harvard University Press, 1980
Magnesium and Man provides the physician with a brief yet comprehensive overview of magnesium as a biochemical agent in human metabolism and disease. The first half of the book introduces techniques of measurement as well as the role of magnesium in normal biochemistry and physiology. The remaining chapters discuss magnesium squarely in the context of human disease: neonatal deficiency, thyroid disease, kidney disease, malignant osteolytic disease, alcoholism, and cirrhosis. Written by a clinician who is also a dominant figure in magnesium research, this book greatly advances communication between laboratory and clinic and will be essential reading for anyone involved in patient care.
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The Maintenance Crew for the Human Machinery
Ligteringen
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
The book, written as a doctoral thesis, examines the development of the personnel function in labour organisations. Starting from a history of personnel management in the Netherlands during the second half of the 20th century, it analyses the structural transformation in the societal-economic environment from which originate far-reaching changes in employee relations.
The transformation from the post-war model of guided capitalism towards its neo-liberal variety has serious consequences for intra-organisational power relations which result in a one-sided articulation of interests. This erodes the moral fabric of the labour organisation as a social institution. In this context special attention is paid to the wide-spread erosion of corporate ethics in the 21st century.
The intensification of the labour process - a consistent phenomenon in industrial capitalism ­ has got a new impulse, due to the lack of countervailing power within an eroding system of labour relations as well as to superior production techniques and technologies.
These tendencies have a deteriorating effect on the substance of the personnel discipline, ending up in a loss of function.
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Making Americans Healthier
Social and Economic Policy as Health Policy
Robert F. Schoeni
Russell Sage Foundation, 2008
The United States spends billions of dollars annually on social and economic policies aimed at improving the lives of its citizens, but the health consequences associated with these policies are rarely considered. In Making Americans Healthier, a group of multidisciplinary experts shows how social and economic policies seemingly unrelated to medical well-being have dramatic consequences for the health of the American people. Most previous research concerning problems with health and healthcare in the United States has focused narrowly on issues of medical care and insurance coverage, but Making Americans Healthier demonstrates the important health consequences that policymakers overlook in traditional cost-benefit evaluations of social policy. The contributors examine six critical policy areas: civil rights, education, income support, employment, welfare, and neighborhood and housing. Among the important findings in this book, David Cutler and Adriana Lleras-Muney document the robust relationship between educational attainment and health, and estimate that the health benefits of education may exceed even the well-documented financial returns of education. Pamela Herd, James House, and Robert Schoeni discover notable health benefits associated with the Supplemental Security Income Program, which provides financial support for elderly and disabled Americans. George Kaplan, Nalini Ranjit, and Sarah Burgard document a large and unanticipated improvement in the health of African-American women following the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Making Americans Healthier presents ground-breaking evidence that the health impact of many social policies is substantial. The important findings in this book pave the way for promising new avenues for intervention and convincingly demonstrate that ultimately social and economic policy is health policy. A Volume in the National Poverty Center Series on Poverty and Public Policy
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Making and Unmaking Public Health in Africa
Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives
Ruth J. Prince
Ohio University Press, 2013
“This volume contributes significantly to the rapidly developing scholarship of public health and global health in African contexts, considered either as a collection of excellent chapters or taken as the sum of its parts…” —Social History of Medicine

This volume explores how medical professionals and patients, government officials, and ordinary citizens approach questions of public health as they navigate contemporary landscapes of NGOs and transnational projects, faltering state services, and expanding privatization. Its contributors analyze the relations between the public and the private providers of public health, from the state to new global biopolitical formations of political institutions, markets, human populations, and health. Tensions and ambiguities animate these complex relationships, suggesting that the question of what public health actually is in Africa cannot be taken for granted. Offering historical and ethnographic analyses, the volume develops an anthropology of public health in Africa.

Contributors: P. Wenzel Geissler; Murray Last; Rebecca Marsland; Lotte Meinert; Benson A. Mulemi;  Ruth J. Prince; and Noemi Tousignant.

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Making Contact
Uses of Language in Psychotherapy
Leston Havens
Harvard University Press, 1986

Since 1955, moving from early work in psychopharmacology to studies of clinical method and the psychiatric schools, Leston Havens has been working toward a general theory of therapy. It often seems that twentieth-century psychiatry, sect-ridden, is a Tower of Babel, as Havens once characterized it. This book is the distillation of long years of thought and practice, a bold yet modest attempt to delineate an “integrated psychotherapy.”

The boldness of this effort lies in its author’s willingness to recognize the best that each school has to offer, to describe it cogently, and to integrate it into a full response to today’s new kind of patient. Descriptive or medical psychiatry, psychoanalysis, interpersonal or behavioristic psychiatry, empathic or existential therapy-viewed in metaphors, respectively, of perceiving, thinking, managing, feeling-all have useful contributions to make to contemporary methods of treatment. But how? Havens’s modest answer is through appropriate language, and he demonstrates exactly what he means: when to ask questions, when to direct or draw back, when to sympathize.

Practitioners now must deal with less dramatic, but more stubborn, problems of character and situation; lack of purpose, isolation, submissiveness, invasiveness, deep yet vague dissatisfaction. Some kind of human presence must be discovered in the patient, and Havens gives concrete, absorbing examples of ways of “speaking to absence,” of making contact. The emphasis is on verbal technique, but the underlying broad, humane intent is everywhere evident. It is no less than to transform passivity, by means of disciplined therapeutic concern, into a state of being Human.

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Making Health Care Whole
Integrating Spirituality into Patient Care
Christina Puchalski
Templeton Press, 2021

In the last fifteen years, the field of palliative care has experienced a surge in interest in spirituality as an important aspect of caring for seriously ill and dying patients. While spirituality has been generally recognized as an essential dimension of palliative care, uniformity of spiritual care practice has been lacking across health care settings due to factors like varying understandings and definitions of spirituality, lack of resources and practical tools, and limited professional education and training in spiritual care.

In order to address these shortcomings, more than forty spiritual and palliative care experts gathered for a national conference to discuss guidelines for incorporating spirituality into palliative care. Their consensus findings form the basis of Making Health Care Whole. This important new resource provides much-needed definitions and charts a common language for addressing spiritual care across the disciplines of medicine, nursing, social work, chaplaincy, psychology, and other groups. It presents models of spiritual care that are broad and inclusive, and provides tools for screening, assessment, care planning, and interventions. This book also advocates a team approach to spiritual care, and specifies the roles of each professional on the team.
 
Serving as both a scholarly review of the field as well as a practical resource with specific recommendations to improve spiritual care in clinical practice, Making Health Care Whole will benefit hospices and palliative care programs in hospitals, home care services, and long-term care services. It will also be a valuable addition to the curriculum at seminaries, schools of theology, and medical and nursing schools.
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Making Medical Doctors
Science and Medicine at Vanderbilt since Flexner
Timothy C. Jacobson
University of Alabama Press, 1987
A study of the union of science and medicine in a particularly illustrative institutional setting
 
Making Medical Doctors is not a conventional institutional history, but rather a study of the union of science and medicine in a particularly illustrative institutional setting. Its general subject is the institution where science and medicine most dramatically came together: the modern medical school and medical center. Its particular subject is the medical school and center of Vanderbilt University, which was rebuilt in the 1920s as a model for medical education and research. Making Medical Doctors also explores the intellectual and financial sources of institutional development: the worlds of Abraham Flexner, Frederick T. Gates, and Henry S. Pritchett, three foundation masters of the early 20th century. It examines closely the vanished medical world of that generation of doctors who reached the height of their influence in the period between the two world wars and describes how they actually did medicine, surgery, and science.
 
The convergence of science and medicine in the 19th and 20th centuries produced what we know today as modern medicine. The balance of power and interdependence between science and medicine have changed vastly from the 1920s and 1930s, as Vanderbilt’s story clearly illustrates.
 
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The Making of Man-Midwifery
Childbirth in England, 1660-1770
Adrian Wilson
Harvard University Press, 1995

In England in the seventeenth century, childbirth was the province of women. The midwife ran the birth, helped by female "gossips"; men, including the doctors of the day, were excluded both from the delivery and from the subsequent month of lying-in.

But in the eighteenth century there emerged a new practitioner: the "man-midwife" who acted in lieu of a midwife and delivered normal births. By the late eighteenth century, men-midwives had achieved a permanent place in the management of childbirth, especially in the most lucrative spheres of practice.

Why did women desert the traditional midwife? How was it that a domain of female control and collective solidarity became instead a region of male medical practice? What had broken down the barrier that had formerly excluded the male practitioner from the management of birth?

This confident and authoritative work explores and explains a remarkable transformation--a shift not just in medical practices but in gender relations. Exploring the sociocultural dimensions of childbirth, Wilson argues with great skill that it was not the desires of medical men but the choices of mothers that summoned man-midwifery into being.

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The Making of Modern Medicine
Turning Points in the Treatment of Disease
Michael Bliss
University of Chicago Press, 2011

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, we have become accustomed to medical breakthroughs and conditioned to assume that, regardless of illnesses, doctors almost certainly will be able to help—not just by diagnosing us and alleviating our pain, but by actually treating or even curing diseases, and significantly improving our lives. 

For most of human history, however, that was far from the case, as veteran medical historian Michael Bliss explains in The Making of Modern Medicine. Focusing on a few key moments in the transformation of medical care, Bliss reveals the way that new discoveries and new approaches led doctors and patients alike to discard fatalism and their traditional religious acceptance of suffering in favor of a new faith in health care and in the capacity of doctors to treat disease. He takes readers in his account to three turning points—a devastating smallpox outbreak in Montreal in 1885, the founding of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Medical School, and the discovery of insulin—and recounts the lives of three crucial figures—researcher Frederick Banting, surgeon Harvey Cushing, and physician William Osler—turning medical history into a fascinating story of dedication and discovery.

Compact and compelling, this searching history vividly depicts and explains the emergence of modern medicine—and, in a provocative epilogue, outlines the paradoxes and confusions underlying our contemporary understanding of disease, death, and life itself. 

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The Making of the Unborn Patient
A Social Anatomy of Fetal Surgery
Casper, Monica J
Rutgers University Press, 1998
Winner of the 1998 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems

It is now possible for physicians to recognize that a pregnant woman's fetus is facing life-threatening problems, perform surgery on the fetus, and if it survives, return it to the woman's uterus to finish gestation. Although fetal surgery has existed in various forms for three decades, it is only just beginning to capture the public's imagination. These still largely experimental procedures raise all types of medical, political and ethical questions. Who is the patient? What are the technical difficulties involved in fetal surgery? How do reproductive politics seep into the operating room, and how do medical definitions and meanings flow out of medicine and into other social spheres? How are ethical issues defined in this practice and who defines them? Is fetal surgery the kind of medicine we want? What is involved in reframing fetal surgery as a women's health issue, rather than simply a pediatric concern? In this ethnographic study of the social, cultural and historical aspects of fetal surgery, Monica Casper addresses these questions. The Making of the Unborn Patient examines two important and connected events of the second half of the 20th century: the emergence of fetal surgery as a new medical specialty and the debut of the unborn patient.
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Making Room in the Clinic
Nurse Practitioners and the Evolution of Modern Health Care
Fairman, Julie
Rutgers University Press, 2009
In Making Room in the Clinic, Julie Fairman examines the context in which the nurse practitioner movement emerged, how large political and social movements influenced it, and how it contributed to the changing definition of medical care. Drawing on primary source material, including interviews with key figures in the movement, Fairman describes how this evolution helped create an influential foundation for health policies that emerged at the end of the twentieth century, including health maintenance organizations, a renewed interest in health awareness and disease prevention, and consumer-based services.
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Making Sense of Advance Directives
revised edition
Nancy M.P. King
Georgetown University Press, 1996

Advance directives—such as living wills and health care proxies—are documents intended to declare and preserve the health care choices of patients if they become unable to make their own decisions. This book provides a comprehensive overview of advance directives and clear, practical directions for writing and interpreting them.

Nancy M.P. King provides a legal, philosophical, and historical analysis of the moral and legal force of advance directives. She explains the types and models of advance directives currently in use and offers guidelines for individuals seeking to write, read, and use directives to promote individuals' health care choices within the laws of their own states.

King emphasizes that advance directives are not orders given by patients to their doctors; instead, they are documents that invite conversation between doctors and patients about health care decisions of great importance. The purpose of advance directives is to support patients' health care choices, and the book promotes a thoughtful use of advance directives that is best calculated to achieve that purpose, whatever form individual advance directives may take.

This new edition has been updated to reflect the many changes in advance directive statutes since 1991, including expanded discussions of health care proxy statutes, the impact of the Patient Self-Determination Act and the Supreme Court's Cruzan decision. King also has extended her analysis of the implications for advance directives of managed care, resource allocation, resource scarcity, and the debate over futile treatment at the end of life.

Making Sense of Advance Directives is a valuable handbook for patients, health care providers and administrators, patient counselors, lawyers, policymakers, and any individual interested in advance directives.

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Making the American Mouth
Dentists and Public Health in the Twentieth Century
Picard, Alyssa
Rutgers University Press, 2009
Why are Americans so uniquely obsessed with teeth? Brilliantly white, straight teeth?

Making the American Mouth is at once a history of United States dentistry and a study of a billion-dollar industry. Alyssa Picard chronicles the forces that limited Americans' access to dental care in the early twentieth century and the ways dentists worked to expand that access--and improve the public image of their profession. Comprehensive in scope, this work describes how dentists' early public health commitments withered under the strain of fights over fluoride, mid-century social movements for racial and gender equity, and pressure to insure dental costs. It explains how dentists came to promote cosmetic services, and why Americans were so eager to purchase them. As we move into the twentyfirst century, dentists' success in shaping their industry means that for many, the perfect American smile will remain a distant--though tantalizing--dream.
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Making the Cut
How Cosmetic Surgery is Transforming Our Lives
Anthony Elliott
Reaktion Books, 2008
From London to New York, Madrid to Melbourne, Singapore to Tehran, the demand for cosmetic surgery is soaring. Botox injections, collagen fillers, breast implants, microdermabrasion, mini face-lifts: extreme reinvention is all the rage. For better or worse, ours is the era of cosmetic surgical culture.
 
In this captivating book, which draws upon research conducted in Europe, America and Australasia, social commentator Anthony Elliott investigates the rise and rise of cosmetic surgery, lucidly reviewing recent developments in celebrity culture and the consumer industries, which many argue are responsible for the popularity of cosmetic and surgical forms of extreme reinvention. Yet it is not just cultural forces advancing the makeover industries: Elliott shows that cosmetic surgical culture has become increasingly global in our own time as a result of major institutional changes dominating public life in Western societies. He provocatively argues that personal vulnerabilities have reached the point where people turn to surgical culture in an effort to reinvent themselves and improve their life prospects
 
Making the Cut paints a disturbing social portrait of a global culture held in thrall to immediacy, where cosmetic surgical enhancements of the body are fundamental to new forms of self-design and self-improvement.
 
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Making Their Days Happen
Paid Personal Assistance Services Supporting People with Disability Living in Their Homes and Communities
Lisa I. Iezzoni
Temple University Press, 2022

Most Americans—even those with significant disability—want to live in their homes and communities. Unpaid family members or friends often work as “informal” caregivers, helping those who need assistance— and many feel they have no option but to serve. In contrast, paid personal assistance services workers (PAS) provide a lifeline to those consumers with complex needs and limited social networks. However, there is a crisis looming in the increasing needs for paid PAS and the limited available PAS workforce.

Making Their Days Happen explores disability, health, and civil rights, along with relevant federal and state labor policies related to personal assistance services. Lisa Iezzoni addresses the legal context of paid PAS as well as financing mechanisms for obtaining home-based personal assistance. She also draws upon interviews she conducted with paid PAS consumers and PAS workers to explore PAS experiences and their perspectives about their work. 

Offering recommendations for improving future experiences of PAS consumers and providers, Iezzoni emphasizes that people with disabilities want to be a part of society, and PAS workers who do this low-wage work find satisfaction in helping them achieve their goals.

[more]

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Making Uncertainty
Tuberculosis, Substance Use, and Pathways to Health in South Africa
Anna Versfeld
Rutgers University Press, 2023
In Cape Town, South Africa, many people with tuberculosis also use substances. This sets up a seemingly impossible problem: People who use substances are at increased risk of tuberculosis disease; and substance use seems to result in erratic behavior that makes successful treatment of people affected by tuberculosis extremely difficult. People affected don’t get healthy, healthcare providers are frustrated, and families seek to balance love and care for those who are ill with self-protection. How are we to understand this? Where does the responsibility for poor health and healing lie? What are the possibilities for an effective healthcare response? Through a close look at lives and care, Making Uncertainty: Tuberculosis, Substance Use, and Pathways to Health shows how patterns of substance use, tuberculosis disease, and their interaction are shaped by history, social context, and political economy. This, in turn, generates new perspectives on what makes poor health, and what good care might look like.
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Maladies of Empire
How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine
Jim Downs
Harvard University Press, 2020

A sweeping global history that looks beyond European urban centers to show how slavery, colonialism, and war propelled the development of modern medicine.

Most stories of medical progress come with ready-made heroes. John Snow traced the origins of London’s 1854 cholera outbreak to a water pump, leading to the birth of epidemiology. Florence Nightingale’s contributions to the care of soldiers in the Crimean War revolutionized medical hygiene, transforming hospitals from crucibles of infection to sanctuaries of recuperation. Yet histories of individual innovators ignore many key sources of medical knowledge, especially when it comes to the science of infectious disease.

Reexamining the foundations of modern medicine, Jim Downs shows that the study of infectious disease depended crucially on the unrecognized contributions of nonconsenting subjects—conscripted soldiers, enslaved people, and subjects of empire. Plantations, slave ships, and battlefields were the laboratories in which physicians came to understand the spread of disease. Military doctors learned about the importance of air quality by monitoring Africans confined to the bottom of slave ships. Statisticians charted cholera outbreaks by surveilling Muslims in British-dominated territories returning from their annual pilgrimage. The field hospitals of the Crimean War and the US Civil War were carefully observed experiments in disease transmission.

The scientific knowledge derived from discarding and exploiting human life is now the basis of our ability to protect humanity from epidemics. Boldly argued and eye-opening, Maladies of Empire gives a full account of the true price of medical progress.

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Maladies of Empire
How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine
Jim Downs
Harvard University Press

Maladies of Empire has a captivating writing style, is exhaustively researched, and is persuasive in argumentation. Jim Downs has written a game-changing book.”—Deirdre Cooper Owens, author of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology

“An eye-popping study of the history of infectious diseases, how they spread, and especially how they have been thwarted by experimentation on the bodies of soldiers, slaves, and colonial subjects…a timely, brilliant book about some of the brutal ironies in the story of medical progress.”—David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass

“Brilliant…Jim Downs uncovers the origins of epidemiology in slavery, colonialism, and war. A most original global history, this book is required reading for historians, medical researchers, and really anyone interested in the origins of modern medicine.”—Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton

“[Sheds] light on the violent foundations of disease control interventions and public health initiatives [and] implores us to address their inequities in the present.”—Ragav Kishore, The Lancet

Most stories of medical progress come with ready-made heroes. John Snow traced the origins of London’s 1854 cholera outbreak to a water pump, leading to the birth of epidemiology. Florence Nightingale’s care of soldiers in the Crimean War revolutionized medical hygiene. Yet focusing on individual innovators ignores many of the darker, unacknowledged sources of medical knowledge.

Reexamining the foundations of modern medicine, Jim Downs shows that the study of infectious disease depended crucially on the unrecognized contributions of conscripted soldiers, enslaved people, and subjects of empire. From Africa and India to the Americas, plantations, slave ships, and battlefields were the laboratories where physicians came to understand the spread of disease. Boldly argued and urgently relevant, Maladies of Empire gives a long overdue account of the true price of medical progress.

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Malaria on the Move
Rural Communities and Public Health in Zimbabwe, 1890-2015
Kundai Manamere
Ohio University Press, 2025
Malaria on the Move explores the socioeconomic aspects of endemic malaria in the southeastern lowveld of Zimbabwe. The book provides a historical analysis of malaria control and eradication programs in Rhodesia and independent Zimbabwe from the late nineteenth century to 2015. Kundai Manamere draws connections between malaria epidemiology and human mobility relating to large- and small-scale farming, labor migration, colonial displacement, war, and rural-to-urban movements. She examines how circular labor migration and rural travel influence the risk of malaria for individuals and communities and shows how migration and travel have spread the disease and impeded control efforts. More important, the book demonstrates that the need to travel for work is an indicator of a local hierarchy of priorities. It reaffirms the urgent need for partners in malaria control to consider local socioeconomic factors in their design and implementation of intervention programs. The inclusion of local contexts, perspectives, and voices in the formulation of national and global public health policies and interventions is critical to addressing public noncooperation. To date, biomedical studies of malaria have outnumbered socioeconomic and political studies of the disease. Manamere advocates for a multipronged approach that goes beyond standard scientific research methods. Such an approach incorporates an understanding of how socioeconomic considerations of recipient communities influence malaria epidemiology, local perceptions of the disease, and responses to interventions. This context is particularly important for understanding why malaria has remained a global health challenge and why so many interventions have failed. Scientifically, malaria is a disease of the landscape, and its ecological complexity poses challenges to its eradication. Yet, biological and ecological landscapes are not exclusive factors in the spread of disease; as Manamere demonstrates, the socioeconomic environment is equally important.
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Malignant Growth
Creating the Modern Cancer Research Establishment, 1875–1915
Alan I Marcus
University of Alabama Press, 2018
An examination of the first attempt to conquer cancer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
 
In Malignant Growth: Creating the Modern Cancer Research Establishment, 1875–1915, Alan I Marcus explores a relatively understudied period in the history of cancer by providing a careful investigation of the first public crusade to determine the cause of cancer. The search for cancer’s cause during the heady era of bacteriology was colored by the Germ Theory of Disease. Researchers had demonstrated in malady after malady that each disease was the result of a singular and specific pathogenic agent. That model led investigators to optimistically conclude that they would soon find the cause of what was termed the “emperor of all maladies,” cases of which were apparently increasing at a prodigious rate worldwide.
 
In this accessible history of science and medicine, Marcus exposes the complex story of the efforts made from 1875 through 1915 to first conquer and, failing that, to control cancer—a dual approach that remains in force to this day. He reveals the messiness of real-time scientific research, tracing the repeated lurches of promise, discoveries of hope, and the inevitable despair that always followed. Other barriers existed to the research, such as inconsistency in test standards and inter-laboratory competition and mistrust. Researchers approached cancer from such disparate specialties as clinical medicine, zoology, botany, chemistry, nutrition, bacteriology, pathology, and microbiology. Although they came from diverse fields, each steadfastly maintained that cancer operated in an analogous fashion to other bacteriological diseases.
 
Virtually every country and a slew of various clinicians and investigators waged this first war on cancer, operating in remarkably diverse scientific venues. Cancer laboratories and hospitals, as well as organizations like the American Cancer Society, were born out of this first offensive on cancer. Even as cancer continues to proliferate today, these institutions that initially formed to defeat cancer more than a hundred years ago persist and continue to expand.
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Mama Might Be Better Off Dead
The Failure of Health Care in Urban America
Laurie Kaye Abraham
University of Chicago Press, 1994
North Lawndale, a neighborhood that lies in the shadows of Chicago’s Loop, is surrounded by some of the city’s finest medical facilities, Yet, it is one of the sickest, most medically underserved communities in the country.

Mama Might Be Better Off Dead immerses readers in the lives of four generations of a poor, African-American family in the neighborhood, who are beset with the devastating illnesses that are all too common in America’s inner-cities. Headed by Jackie Banes, who oversees the care of a diabetic grandmother, a husband on kidney dialysis, an ailing father, and three children, the Banes family contends with countless medical crises. From visits to emergency rooms and dialysis units, to trials with home care, to struggles for Medicaid eligibility, Laurie Kaye Abraham chronicles their access—or more often, lack thereof—to medical care. Told sympathetically but without sentimentality, their story reveals an inadequate health care system that is further undermined by the direct and indirect effects of poverty.

Both disturbing and illuminating, Mama Might Be Better Off Dead is an unsettling, profound look at the human face of health care in America. Published to great acclaim in 1993, the book in this new edition includes an incisive foreword by David Ansell, a physician who worked at Mt. Sinai Hospital, where much of the Banes family’s narrative unfolds.

 
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Mama Might Be Better Off Dead
The Failure of Health Care in Urban America
Laurie Kaye Abraham
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Mama Might Be Better Off Dead is an unsettling, profound look at the human face of health care. Both disturbing and illuminating, it immerses readers in the lives of four generations of a poor, African-American family beset with the devastating illnesses that are all too common in America's inner-cities.

The story takes place in North Lawndale, a neighborhood that lies in the shadows of Chicago's Loop. Although surrounded by some of the city's finest medical facilities, North Lawndale is one of the sickest, most medically underserved communities in the country. Headed by Jackie Banes, who oversees the care of a diabetic grandmother, a husband on kidney dialysis, an ailing father, and three children, the Banes family contends with countless medical crises. From visits to emergency rooms and dialysis units, to trials with home care, to struggles for Medicaid eligibility, Abraham chronicles their access (or lack of access) to medical care.

Told sympathetically but without sentimentality, their story reveals an inadequate health care system that is further undermined by the direct and indirect effects of poverty. When people are poor, they become sick easily. When people are sick, their families quickly become poorer.

Embedded in the family narrative is a lucid analysis of the gaps, inconsistencies, and inequalities the poor face when they seek health care. This book reveals what health care policies crafted in Washington, D. C. or state capitals look like when they hit the street. It shows how Medicaid and Medicare work and don't work, the Catch-22s of hospital financing in the inner city, the racial politics of organ transplants, the failure of childhood immunization programs, the vexed issues of individual responsibility and institutional paternalism. One observer puts it this way: "Show me the poor woman who finds a way to get everything she's entitled to in the system, and I'll show you a woman who could run General Motors."

Abraham deftly weaves these themes together to make a persuasive case for health care reform while unflinchingly presenting the complexities that will make true reform as difficult as it is necessary. Mama Might Be Better Off Dead is a book with the power to change the way health care is understood in America. For those seeking to learn what our current system of health care promises and what it delivers, it offers a place for the debate to begin.


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Mammals of the Neotropics, Volume 2
The Southern Cone: Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay
Kent H. Redford and John F. Eisenberg
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Mammals of the Neotropics satisfies the need for a comprehensive, up-to-date survey of existing knowledge of South America's terrestrial and marine mammals. No comparable account of South American mammals has ever been published in any language, and this timely work will help encourage the research vital to conservation efforts.

This second of a projected three volumes covers southern South America. The authors discuss the historical biogeography and contemporary habitats of the region and then
provide individual accounts for nearly 360 indigenous species, including information on size, appearance, ecology, behavior, and life history. Range maps, line drawings, and color plates supplement the text. To place the species accounts in a broader context, the authors consider the diversity of animals within each taxonomic group, examine the Neotropical species from a worldwide geographical perspective, and review taxonomic questions and
controversies. Two final chapters deal with the community ecology of mammals and the effects humans have had on the mammalian fauna of the southern cone.

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Mammals of the Neotropics, Volume 3
Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil
John F. Eisenberg and Kent H. Redford
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Despite intense interest in this biologically diverse and ecologically important region, the mammals of South America are still not well known. Filling a large gap in the literature, this volume provides a survey and synthesis of current knowledge of the more than 650 species of land and marine mammals found in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil.

Third in a series that reviewers have described as "state of the art" (Journal of Biogeography) and "invaluable to anyone interested in the mammalian fauna of the Neotropics" (Quarterly Review of Biology), this volume follows the format of its acclaimed predecessors. Chapters present not only up-to-date taxonomic information but also ecological and behavioral characteristics, conservation status, and distribution maps for most species. Numerous illustrations are provided to assist in field and laboratory identification, including exquisite color and black-and-white plates by Fiona Reid. New to this volume are chapters contributed by experts on the mammalian fossil record of this region and on its current biodiversity and biogeography. An appendix summarizes changes to the nomenclature that have altered the scientific names used in the first two volumes.

Volumes 1 and 2 of Mammals of the Neotropics, which are also available, describe the mammals of Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana (volume 1) and Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay (volume 2). The fourth and final volume of this series will cover the mammals of Mexico and Central America.
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Mammography Wars
Analyzing Attention in Cultural and Medical Disputes
Asia Friedman
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Mammography is a routine health screening performed forty million times each year in the United States, yet it remains one of the most deeply contested topics in medicine, with national health care organizations supporting conflicting guidelines. In Mammography Wars, sociologist Asia Friedman examines cultural and medical disagreements over mammography. At issue is whether to screen women under age fifty, which is rooted in deeper questions about early detection and the assumed linear and progressive development of breast cancer. Based on interviews with doctors and scientists, interviews with women ages 40 to 50, and newspaper coverage of mammography, Friedman uses the sociology of attention to map the cognitive structure of the “mammography wars,” offering insights into the entrenched nature of debates over mammography that often get missed when applying a medical lens. Friedman’s analysis also suggests the sociology of attention’s unique potential for analyzing cultural conflicts beyond mammography, and even beyond medicine.
 
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The Man with a Shattered World
The History of a Brain Wound
A. R. Luria
Harvard University Press, 1987

Russian psychologist A. R. Luria presents a compelling portrait of a man’s heroic struggle to regain his mental faculties. A soldier named Zasetsky, wounded in the head at the battle of Smolensk in 1943, suddenly found himself in a frightening world: he could recall his childhood but not his recent past; half his field of vision had been destroyed; he had great difficulty speaking, reading, and writing.

Much of the book consists of excerpts from Zasetsky’s own diaries. Laboriously, he records his memories in order to reestablish his past and to affirm his existence as an intelligent being. Luria’s comments and interpolations provide a valuable distillation of the theory and techniques that guided all of his research. His “digressions” are excellent brief introductions to the topic of brain structure and its relation to higher mental functions.

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The Managed Care Blues and How to Cure Them
Walter A. Zelman and Robert A. Berenson
Georgetown University Press, 1998

Shattering the myths about what’s wrong with managed health care, this penetrating introduction to managed care explains its origins and identifies its real achievements and shortcomings.

Walter A. Zelman and Robert A. Berenson argue that many criticisms of managed care tend to idealize the costly and fragmented insurance system it supplanted, without pinpointing the true inadequacies of today’s managed care. In addition to providing reasoned answers to the most alarmist critiques of managed care, the authors maintain that it has not fulfilled its potential to improve the overall quality of care.

The authors propose thirteen concrete recommendations for raising quality in managed care programs, ranging from enacting additional legal protections and increased disclosure to putting the purchasing power in the hands of those who care most about quality — individuals, rather than employers.

With practical solutions for making managed care better, The Managed Care Blues and How to Cure Them is a bold call for greater consumer protection, knowledge, and power in the health care arena.

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Managing Madness in the Community
The Challenge of Contemporary Mental Health Care
Kerry Michael Dobransky
Rutgers University Press
 While mental illness and mental health care are increasingly recognized and accepted in today’s society, awareness of the most severely mentally ill—as well as those who care for them—is still dominated by stereotypes.  Managing Madness in the Community dispels the myth.  Readers will see how treatment options often depend on the social status, race, and gender of both clients and carers; how ideas in the field of mental health care—conflicting priorities and approaches—actually affect what happens on the ground; and how, amid the competing demands of clients and families, government agencies, bureaucrats and advocates, the fragmented American mental health system really works—or doesn’t.

In the wake of movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Shutter Island, most people picture the severely or chronically mentally ill being treated in cold, remote, and forbidding facilities.  But the reality is very different.  Today the majority of deeply troubled mental patients get treatment in nonprofit community organizations.  And it is to two such organizations in the Midwest that this study looks for answers.  Drawing upon a wealth of unique evidence—fifteen months of ethnographic observations, 91 interviews with clients and workers, and a range of documents—Managing Madness in the Community lays bare the sometimes disturbing nature and effects of our overly complex and disconnected mental health system.

Kerry Michael Dobransky examines the practical strategies organizations and their clients use to manage the often-conflicting demands of a host of constituencies, laws, and regulations.  Bringing to light the challenges confronting patients and staff of the community-based institutions that bear the brunt of caring for the mentally ill, his book provides a useful broad framework that will help researchers and policymakers understand the key forces influencing the mental health services system today.
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Managing Motherhood, Managing Risk
Fertility and Danger in West Central Tanzania
Denise Roth Allen
University of Michigan Press, 2004

In Managing Motherhood, Managing Risk, Denise Roth Allen persuasively argues that development interventions in the Third World often have unintended and unacknowledged consequences. Based on twenty-two months of fieldwork in the Shinyanga Region of west central Tanzania, this rich and engaging ethnography of women's fertility-related experiences highlights the processes by which a set of seemingly well-intentioned international maternal health policy recommendations go awry when implemented at the local level.

An exploration of how threats to maternal health have been defined and addressed at the global, national, and local levels, Managing Motherhood, Managing Risk presents two contrasting, and oftentimes competing, definitions of risk: those that form the basis of international recommendations and national maternal health policies and those that do not. The effect that these contrasting definitions of risk have on women's fertility-related experiences at the local level are explored throughout the book.

This study employs an innovative approach to the analysis of maternal health risk, one that situates rural Tanzanian women's fertility-related experiences within a broader historical and sociocultural context. Beginning with an examination of how maternal health risk was defined and addressed during the early years of British colonial rule in Tanganyika and moving to a discussion of an internationally conceived maternal health initiative that was launched on the world stage in the late 1980s, the author explores the similarities in the language used and solutions proposed by health development experts over time.

This set of "official" maternal health risks is then compared to an alternative set of risks that emerge when attention is focused on women's experiences of pregnancy and childbirth at the local level. Although some of these latter risks are often spoken about as deriving from spiritual or supernatural causes, the case studies presented throughout the second half of the book reveal that the concept of risk in the context of pregnancy and childbirth is much more complex, involving the interplay of spiritual, physical, and economic aspects of everyday life.

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Manhood
The Rise and Fall of the Penis
Mels van Driel
Reaktion Books, 2009
 In Manhood, experienced urologist and sexologist Mels van Driel offers an unprecedented history of the penis—with answers to everything you wanted to know, and even some questions you’d never thought to ask. Investigating the penis and its functions, van Driel’s work ranges from impotence to the speed of ejaculation, and from inguinal hernia to infertility. Psychological factors that have an impact on sexual experience, as well as contemporary phenomena, such as cyber sex, are examined along the way with good humor and much insight.
 
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Manic Minds
Mania's Mad History and Its Neuro-Future
Lisa M. Hermsen
Rutgers University Press, 2012
From its first depictions in ancient medical literature to contemporary depictions in brain imaging, mania has been largely associated with its Greek roots, "to rage." Prior to the nineteenth century, "mania" was used interchangeably with "madness." Although its meanings shifted over time, the word remained layered with the type of madness first-century writers described: rage, fury, frenzy. Even now, the mental illness we know as bipolar disorder describes conditions of extreme irritability, inflated grandiosity, and excessive impulsivity.

Spanning several centuries, Manic Minds traces the multiple ways in which the word "mania" has been used by popular, medical, and academic writers. It reveals why the rhetorical history of the word is key to appreciating descriptions and meanings of the "manic" episode." Lisa M. Hermsen examines the way medical professionals analyzed the manic condition during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and offers the first in-depth analysis of contemporary manic autobiographies: bipolar figures who have written from within the illness itself.
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Manitoba Medicine
A Brief History
Ian Carr
University of Manitoba Press, 1999
For many Canadians, the state of our health care and medical system is at the top of the public agenda. By following the growth and development of modern medicine in one Canadian province, Manitoba Medicine provides an insight into where our present medical system came from and how it developed .Beginning with a description of some early Aboriginal healing practices and of the physicians of the Red River Settlement, Manitoba Medicine follows the struggles in the 1870s to establish what would become the first medical college and the first major hospitals in Western Canada. It chronicles the fight for public health in the 1920s, the development of health insurance and medicare after WWII, and medicine's role in fighting the 1950 Winnipeg Flood and the polio epidemic of the late 1950s. Manitoba Medicine also provides vivid accounts of many of the individuals who built Manitoba's medical system, including early educators like Swale Vincent, pioneering women physicians such as Charlotte Ross, important researchers like Bruce Chown, and colourful private practitioners such as Murrough O'Brien.
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Man-Made Medicine
Women’s Health, Public Policy, and Reform
Kary L. Moss, ed.
Duke University Press, 1996
If not for the reproductive functions of women, would there be anything called women’s health care? A review of medical literature, practice, and policy in this country would suggest that the answer is no. Offering a startling view of the current state of health care for women in the United States and laying the foundation for a new, widely defined women’s medicine, Man-Made Medicine makes an urgent statement about gender bias in the medical establishment and its pernicious effects on the well-being of women and the care they receive.
These essays by physicians, lawyers, activists, and scholars present a rare interdisciplinary approach to a complex set of issues. Gender stereotyping and bias in the collection, analysis, and reporting of scientific data and in the ways health-related news is covered by the media are examined. The exclusion of women from the health care policy-making process and the effect such exclusion has on the determination of priorities among potential areas of research are also explored. With discussions of the plight of specific populations of women whose health care needs are not being sufficiently met—for example, immigrants, prisoners, the mentally ill, or women with HIV/AIDS, disabilities, or reproductive health problems—this book considers matters of race and class within the parameters of gender as it builds a fundamental challenge to the existing health care system. A range of current reform proposals are also evaluated in terms of their potential impact on women.
Suggesting no less than a radical rethinking of women’s medicine, Man-Made Medicine gives essential direction to the discussions that will shape the future of health care in this country. It will be of great interest to a wide audience, including health care advocates, policymakers, scholars, and readers generally concerned with women’s health issues.

Contributors. Ellen Barry, Laurie Beck, Joan Bertin, Janet Calvo, Wendy Chavkin, Kay Dickersin, Abigail English, Elizabeth Fee, Carol Gill, Nancy Krieger, Joyce McConnell, Judy Norsigian, Ann Scales, Susan Stefan, Lauren Schnaper, Catherine Teare

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A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations
Kate L. Turabian evised by John Grossman and Alice Bennett
University of Chicago Press, 1996
For close to sixty years Kate L. Turabian's Manual for Writers has offered comprehensive and detailed guidance to authors of research papers—term papers, theses, and dissertations. Now the editors of The Chicago Manual of Style have revised Turabian's Manual to bring the details of style into conformity with the fourteenth edition of The Chicago Manual. This new edition of Turabian also reflects the way students work today, taking into account the role of personal computers in the preparation and presentation of their papers.

The familiar organization of this popular book remains largely unchanged. Chapter 1 describes the parts of a long formal paper. Chapters 2-5 introduce the mechanics of writing style, from abbreviations to quotations. Chapters 6 and 7 show how to prepare and refer to tables and illustrations. The section on documentation, chapters 8-12, describes two of the most commonly used systems of citation; these chapters provide many examples including guidance on how to cite electronic documents. Chapter 13, on manuscript preparation, shows how to take advantage of word processing software to present the elements of a paper clearly and effectively. Chapter 14 offers more than two dozen sample pages illustrating ways of formatting some of the complex features found in many research papers.

Authoritative, comprehensive, easy to use, and filled with good sense, this new edition will be the standard for yet another generation of students and their teachers.

Kate Turabian (1893-1987) was dissertation secretary at the University of Chicago from 1930 to 1958. This manual and her Student's Guide for Writing College Papers made her name so well known that she has become "part of the folklore of American higher education" (Quill and Scroll).
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Mapping "Race"
Critical Approaches to Health Disparities Research
Gómez, Laura E
Rutgers University Press, 2013
Researchers commonly ask subjects to self-identify their race from a menu of preestablished options. Yet if race is a multidimensional, multilevel social construction, this has profound methodological implications for the sciences and social sciences. Race must inform how we design large-scale data collection and how scientists utilize race in the context of specific research questions. This landmark collection argues for the recognition of those implications for research and suggests ways in which they may be integrated into future scientific endeavors. It concludes on a prescriptive note, providing an arsenal of multidisciplinary, conceptual, and methodological tools for studying race specifically within the context of health inequalities.

Contributors: John A. Garcia, Arline T. Geronimus, Laura E. Gómez, Joseph L. Graves Jr., Janet E. Helms, Derek Kenji Iwamoto, Jonathan Kahn, Jay S. Kaufman, Mai M. Kindaichi, Simon J. Craddock Lee, Nancy López, Ethan H. Mereish, Matthew Miller, Gabriel R. Sanchez, Aliya Saperstein, R. Burciaga Valdez, Vicki D. Ybarra


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Markets and Medicine
The Politics of Health Care Reform in Britain, Germany, and the United States
Susan Giaimo
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Are advanced industrialized countries converging on a market response to reform their systems of social protection? By comparing the health care reform experiences of Britain, Germany, and the United States in the 1990s, Susan Giaimo explores how countries pursue diverse policy responses and how such variations reflect distinctive institutions, actors, and reform politics in each country.
In Britain, the Thatcher government's plan to inject a market into the state-administered national health service resulted in a circumscribed experiment orchestrated from above. In Germany, the Kohl government sought to repair defects in the corporatist arrangement with doctors and insurers, thus limiting the market experiment and designing it to enhance the solidarity of the national health insurance system. In the United States, private market actors foiled Clinton's bid to expand the federal government's role in the private health care system through managed competition and national insurance. But market reform continued, albeit led by private employers and with government officials playing a reactive role. Actors and institutions surrounding the existing health care settlement in each country created particular reform politics that either militated against or fostered the deployment of competition.
The finding that major transformations are occurring in private as well as public systems of social protection suggests that studies of social policy change expand their focus beyond statutory welfare state programs. The book will interest political scientists and policymakers concerned with welfare state reform in advanced industrial societies; social scientists interested in the changing balance among state, market, and societal interests in governance; and health policy researchers, health policymakers, and health care professionals.
Susan Giaimo is an independent scholar. She completed her Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also earned an MSc in Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science, with the Politics and Government of Western Europe as the branch of study. After completing her doctorate, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research Program, University of California at Berkeley, and the Robert Bosch Foundation Scholars Program in Comparative Public Policy and Comparative Institutions, American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, Johns Hopkins University. She taught in the Political Science Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for five years. During that period she won the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics Founder's Prize for "Adapting the Welfare State: The Case of Health Care Reform in Britain, Germany, and the United States," a paper she coauthored with Philip Manow. She has also worked for health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and medical practices in the United States.
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Markets for Cybercrime Tools and Stolen Data
Hackers' Bazaar
Lillian Ablon
RAND Corporation, 2014
Criminal activities in cyberspace are increasingly facilitated by burgeoning black markets. This report characterizes these markets and how they have grown into their current state to provide insight into how their existence can harm the information security environment. Understanding these markets lays the groundwork for exploring options to minimize their potentially harmful influence.
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Marriage and Divorce
A Social and Economic Study, Revised Edition
Hugh Carter and Paul C. Glick
Harvard University Press, 1976

Widely praised as the best available study of its kind, Marriage and Divorce, in a new, revised edition, incorporates recent statistics to bring its treatment up to date. This book is replete with information about factors affecting the stability of marriage, the decision to marry or to divorce, and differences in marriage and divorce patterns among various socioeconomic classes and races. There are, in addition, chapters on people who never marry, on the relationship of marital status and health, on family composition and living arrangements, and on work experience and income of married persons. The new, concluding chapter focuses on developments in the turbulent decade of the sixties and early seventies.

Sociologists, psychologists, marriage counselors, and practitioners in the medical and health fields as well as demographers will find this study invaluable, as will students in these and related areas.

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A Martian Stranded on Earth
Alexander Bogdanov, Blood Transfusions, and Proletarian Science
Nikolai Krementsov
University of Chicago Press, 2011

Much like Vladimir Lenin, his onetime rival for the leadership of the Bolshevik party during its formative years, Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) was a visionary. In two science fiction novels set on Mars, Bogdanov imagined a future in which the workers of the world, liberated from capitalist exploitation, create a “physiological collective” that rejuvenates and unites its members through regular blood exchanges. But Bogdanov was not merely a dreamer. He worked tirelessly to popularize and realize his vision, founding the first research institute devoted to the science of blood transfusion.

           

In A Martian Stranded on Earth, the first broad-based book on Bogdanov in English, Nikolai Krementsov examines Bogdanov’s roles as revolutionary, novelist, and scientist, presenting his protagonist as a coherent thinker who pursued his ideas in a wide range of venues. Through the lens of Bogdanov’s involvement with blood studies on one hand, and of his fictional and philosophical writings on the other, Krementsov offers a nuanced analysis of the interactions between scientific ideas and societal values. 

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Masks, Misinformation, and Making Do
Appalachian Health-Care Workers and the COVID-19 Pandemic
Wendy Welch
Ohio University Press, 2023
The firsthand pandemic experiences of rural health-care providers—who were already burdened when COVID-19 hit—raise questions about the future of public health and health-care delivery. This volume comprises the COVID-19 pandemic experiences of Appalachian health-care workers, including frontline providers, administrators, and educators. The combined narrative reveals how governmental and corporate policies exacerbated the region’s injustices, stymied response efforts, and increased the death toll. Beginning with an overview of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its impact on the body, the essays in the book’s first section provide background material and contextualize the subsequent explosion of telemedicine, the pandemic’s impact on medical education, and its relationship to systemic racism and related disparities in mental health treatment. Next, first-person narratives from diverse perspectives recount the pandemic’s layered stresses, including the scramble for ventilators, masks, and other personal protective equipment the neighbors, friends, and family members who flouted public-health mandates, convinced that COVID-19 was a hoax the added burden the virus leveled on patients whose health was already compromised by cancer, diabetes, or addiction the acute ways the pandemic’s arrival exacerbated interpersonal and systemic racism that Black and other health-care workers of color bear not only the battle against the virus but also the growing suspicion and even physical abuse from patients convinced that doctors and nurses were trying to kill them These visceral, personal experiences of how Appalachian health-care workers responded to the pandemic amid the nation’s deeply polarized political discourse will shape the historical record of this “unprecedented time” and provide a glimpse into the future of rural medicine. Contributors: Lucas Aidukaitis, Clay Anderson, Tammy Bannister, Alli Delp, Lynn Elliott, Monika Holbein, Laura Hungerford, Nikki King, Brittany Landore, Jeffrey J. LeBoeuf, Sojourner Nightingale, Beth O’Connor, Rakesh Patel, Mildred E. Perreault, Melanie B. Richards, Tara Smith, Kathy Osborne Still, Darla Timbo, Kathy Hsu Wibberly
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Matchless Organization
The Confederate Army Medical Department
Guy R. Hasegawa, Foreword by F. Terry Hambrecht
Southern Illinois University Press, 2021
The essential reference about a surprisingly well-organized medical department
 
Despite the many obstacles it had to overcome—including a naval blockade, lack of a strong industrial base, and personnel unaccustomed to military life—the Richmond-based Confederate Army Medical Department developed into a robust organization that nimbly adapted to changing circumstances. In the first book to address the topic, Guy R. Hasegawa describes the organization and management of the Confederate army’s medical department. At its head was Surgeon General Samuel Preston Moore, a talented multitasker with the organizational know-how to put in place qualified medical personnel to care for sick and wounded Confederate soldiers.
 
Hasegawa investigates how political considerations, personalities, and, as the war progressed, the diminishing availability of human and material resources influenced decision-making in the medical department. Amazingly, the surgeon general’s office managed not only to provide care but also to offer educational opportunities to its personnel and collect medical and surgical data for future use, regardless of constant and growing difficulties.
 
During and after the war, the medical department of the Confederate army was consistently praised as being admirably organized and efficient. Although the department was unable to match its Union counterpart in manpower and supplies, Moore’s intelligent management enabled it to help maintain the fighting strength of the Confederate army.
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The Maternal Imprint
The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects
Sarah S. Richardson
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Leading gender and science scholar Sarah S. Richardson charts the untold history of the idea that a woman's health and behavior during pregnancy can have long-term effects on her descendants' health and welfare.

The idea that a woman may leave a biological trace on her gestating offspring has long been a commonplace folk intuition and a matter of scientific intrigue, but the form of that idea has changed dramatically over time. Beginning with the advent of modern genetics at the turn of the twentieth century, biomedical scientists dismissed any notion that a mother—except in cases of extreme deprivation or injury—could alter her offspring’s traits. Consensus asserted that a child’s fate was set by a combination of its genes and post-birth upbringing.  

Over the last fifty years, however, this consensus was dismantled, and today, research on the intrauterine environment and its effects on the fetus is emerging as a robust program of study in medicine, public health, psychology, evolutionary biology, and genomics. Collectively, these sciences argue that a woman’s experiences, behaviors, and physiology can have life-altering effects on offspring development. 

Tracing a genealogy of ideas about heredity and maternal-fetal effects, this book offers a critical analysis of conceptual and ethical issues—in particular, the staggering implications for maternal well-being and reproductive autonomy—provoked by the striking rise of epigenetics and fetal origins science in postgenomic biology today.
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Mathematical Analysis of the Electrical Activity of the Brain
Proceedings of a Symposium Held at the Tenth Congress of the All-Union Physiological Society, Erivan, USSR, October 1964
M. N. Livanov
Harvard University Press
Mathematical analysis of electroencephalographic data provides valuable information about the functional state of the brain, enables improved understanding of complex physiological phenomena, and offers the possibility of facilitating the diagnosis of brain disease. This book is a translation by Dr. John S. Barlow of the proceedings of a symposium, held during the Tenth Congress of the All-Union Physiological Society in the USSR in 1964, on the analysis of experimental and clinical electroencephalographic data by means of mathematical and electronic computing techniques.
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Mathematical Models in the Health Sciences
A Computer-Aided Approach
Eugene Ackerman
University of Minnesota Press, 1979
Mathematical Models in the Health Sciences was first published in 1979.This book, designed especially for use in graduate courses in the health sciences, will be useful also as a reference work for scientists in various disciplines. It provides an introduction to mathematical modeling through the use of selected examples from the health sciences. Where appropriate, computer techniques are discussed and illustrated with examples drawn from studies by the authors and their colleagues. An introductory chapter discusses mathematical models and their roles in biomedical research. The rest of the material is divided in three sections of four chapters each: Deterministic Models, Time Series Analysis, and Information and Simulation. A bibliography accompanies each chapter. In their conclusion the authors place mathematical biology and its techniques in perspective.
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Maya Bonesetters
Manual Healers in a Changing Guatemala
By Servando Z. Hinojosa; Illustrations by Servando G. Hinojosa
University of Texas Press, 2020

Scholarship on Maya healing traditions has focused primarily on the roles of midwives, shamans, herbalists, and diviners. Bonesetters, on the other hand, have been largely excluded from conversations about traditional health practitioners and community health resources. Maya Bonesetters is the first book-length study of bonesetting in Guatemala and situates the manual healing tradition within the current cultural context—one in which a changing medical landscape potentially threatens bonesetters’ work yet presents an opportunity to strengthen its relevance.

Drawing on extensive field research in highland Guatemala, Servando Z. Hinojosa introduces readers to a seldom documented, though nonetheless widespread, variety of healer. This book examines the work of Kaqchikel and Tz’utujiil Maya bonesetters, analyzes how they diagnose and treat injuries, and contrasts the empirical and sacred approaches of various healers. Hinojosa shows how bonesetters are carefully adapting certain biomedical technologies to meet local expectations for care and concludes that, despite pressures and criticisms from the biomedical community, bonesetting remains culturally meaningful and vital to Maya people, even if its future remains uncertain.

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Meaning in Suffering
Caring Practices in the Health Professions
Edited by Nancy Johnston and Alwilda Scholler-Jaquish
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007
     Compelling, timely, and essential reading for healthcare providers, Meaning in Suffering addresses the multiplicity of meanings suffering brings to all it touches: patients, families, health workers, and human science professionals. Examining suffering in writing that is both methodologically rigorous and accessible, the contributors preserve first-hand experiences using narrative ethnography, existential hermeneutics, hermeneutic phenomenology, and traditional ethnography. They offer nuanced insights into suffering as a human condition experienced by persons deserving of dignity, empathy, and understanding. Collectively, these essays demonstrate that understanding the suffering of the "other" reveals something vital about the moral courage required to heal—and stay humane—in the face of suffering.
 
 
Winner, Nursing Research Category, American Journal of Nursing
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A Measure of Malpractice
Medical Injury, Malpractice Litigation, and Patient Compensation
Paul C. Weiler, Howard H. Hiatt, Joseph P. Newhouse, William G. Johnson, Troyen A. Brennan, and Lucian L. Leape
Harvard University Press, 1993

A Measure of Malpractice tells the story and presents the results of the Harvard Medical Practice Study, the largest and most comprehensive investigation ever undertaken of the performance of the medical malpractice system. The Harvard study was commissioned by the government of New York in 1986, in the midst of a malpractice crisis that had driven insurance premiums for surgeons and obstetricians in New York City to nearly $200,000 a year.

The Harvard-based team of doctors, lawyers, economists, and statisticians set out to investigate what was actually happening to patients in hospitals and to doctors in courtrooms, launching a far more informed debate about the future of medical liability in the 1990s. Careful analysis of the medical records of 30,000 patients hospitalized in 1984 showed that approximately one in twenty-five patients suffered a disabling medical injury, one quarter of these as a result of the negligence of a doctor or other provider. After assembling all the malpractice claims filed in New York State since 1975, the authors found that just one in eight patients who had been victims of negligence actually filed a malpractice claim, and more than two-thirds of these claims were filed by the wrong patients.

The study team then interviewed injured patients in the sample to discover the actual financial loss they had experienced: the key finding was that for roughly the same dollar amount now being spent on a tort system that compensates only a handful of victims, it would be possible to fund comprehensive disability insurance for all patients significantly disabled by a medical accident. The authors, who came to the project from very different perspectives about the present malpractice system, are now in agreement about the value of a new model of medical liability. Rather than merely tinker with the current system which fixes primary legal responsibility on individual doctors who can be proved medically negligent, legislatures should encourage health care organizations to take responsibility for the financial losses of all patients injured in their care.

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Measuring and Modeling Health Care Costs
Edited by Ana Aizcorbe, Colin Baker, Ernst R. Berndt, and David M. Cutler
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Health care costs represent a nearly 18% of U.S. gross domestic product and 20% of government spending. While there is detailed information on where these health care dollars are spent, there is much less evidence on how this spending affects health. 
           
The research in Measuring and Modeling Health Care Costs seeks to connect our knowledge of expenditures with what we are able to measure of results, probing questions of methodology, changes in the pharmaceutical industry, and the shifting landscape of physician practice. The research in this volume investigates, for example, obesity’s effect on health care spending, the effect of generic pharmaceutical releases on the market, and the disparity between disease-based and population-based spending measures. This vast and varied volume applies a range of economic tools to the analysis of health care and health outcomes.

Practical and descriptive, this new volume in the Studies in Income and Wealth series is full of insights relevant to health policy students and specialists alike.
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Measuring Functioning and Well-Being
The Medical Outcomes Study Approach
Anita L. Stewart and John E. Ware Jr., eds.
Duke University Press, 1992
Measuring Functioning and Well-Being is a comprehensive account a broad range of self-reported functioning and well-being measures developed for the Medical Outcomes Study, a large-sale study of how patients fare with health care in the United States. This book provides a set of ready-to-use generic measures that are applicable to all adults, including those well and chronically ill, as well as a methodological guide to collecting health data and constructing health measures. As demand increases for more practical methods to monitor the outcomes of health care, this volume offers a timely and valuable contribution to the field.
The contributors address conceptual and methodological issues involved in measuring such important health status concepts as: physical, social, and role functioning; psychological distress and well-being; general health perceptions; energy and fatigue; sleep; and pain. The authors present psychometric results and explain how to administer, score, and interpret the measures.
Comprising the work of a number of highly respected scholars in the field of health assessment, Measuring Functioning and Well-Being will be of great interest and value to the growing number of researchers, policymakers, and clinicians concerned with the management and evaluation of health care.
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Measuring the Gains from Medical Research
An Economic Approach
Edited by Kevin M. Murphy and Robert H. Topel
University of Chicago Press, 2003
In 1998, health expenditures in the United States accounted for 12.9% of national income-the highest share of income devoted to health in the developed world. The United States also spends more on medical research than any other country-in 2000, the federal government dedicated $18.4 billion to it, compared with only $3.7 billion for the entire European Union. In this book, leading health economists ask whether we are getting our money's worth.

From an economic perspective, they find, the answer is a resounding "yes": in fact, considering the extraordinary value of improvements to health, we may even be spending too little on medical research. The evidence these papers present and the conclusions they reach are both surprising and convincing: that growth in longevity since 1950 has been as valuable as growth in all other forms of consumption combined; that medical advances producing 10% reductions in mortality from cancer and heart disease alone would add roughly $10 trillion-a year's GDP-to the national wealth; or that the average new drug approved by the FDA yields benefits worth many times its cost of development.

The papers in this book are packed with these and many other surprising revelations, their sophisticated analysis persuasively demonstrating the massive economic benefits we can gain from investments in medical research. For anyone concerned about the cost and the value of such research-from policy makers to health care professionals and economists-this will be a landmark book.
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Measuring the Quality of Care for Psychological Health Conditions in the Military Health System
Candidate Quality Measures for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Major Depressive Disorder
Kimberly A. Hepner
RAND Corporation, 2015
To inform improvements to the quality of care delivered by the military health system for posttraumatic stress disorder and major depressive disorder, researchers developed a framework and identified, developed, and described a candidate set of measures for monitoring, assessing, and improving the quality of care. This document describes their research approach and the measure sets that they identified.
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Mediating Alzheimer's
Cognition and Personhood
Scott Selberg
University of Minnesota Press, 2022

An exploration of the representational culture of Alzheimer’s disease and how media technologies shape our ideas of cognition and aging 
 

With no known cause or cure despite a century of research, Alzheimer’s disease is a true medical mystery. In Mediating Alzheimer’s, Scott Selberg examines the nature of this enduring national health crisis by looking at the disease’s relationship to media and representation. He shows how collective investments in different kinds of media have historically shaped how we understand, treat, and live with this disease. 

Selberg demonstrates how the cognitive abilities that Alzheimer’s threatens—memory, for example—are integrated into the operations of representational technologies, from Polaroid photographs to Post-its to digital artificial intelligence. Focusing on a wide variety of media technologies, such as neuroimaging, art therapy, virtual reality, and social media, he shows how these cognitively oriented media ultimately help define personhood for people with Alzheimer’s. Media have changed the practices of successful aging in the United States, and Selberg takes us deep into how technologies like digital brain-training and online care networks shape ideas of cognition and healthy aging.

Packed with startlingly fresh insights, Mediating Alzheimer’s contributes to debates around bioethics, the labor of caregiving, and a national economy increasingly invested in communication and digital media. Probing the very technologies that promise to save and understand our brains, it gives us new ways of understanding Alzheimer’s disease and aging in America.

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Medicaid And The Limits of State Health Reform
Michael S. Sparer
Temple University Press, 1996

With the defeat of national health reform, many liberals have looked to the states as the source of health policy innovation. At the same time, many in the new Republican majority and several governors also support increased state control. In contrast, Michael S. Sparer convincingly argues that states by themselves can neither satisfy the liberal hope for universal coverage nor the conservative hope for cost containment. He also points to two critical drawbacks to a state-dominated health care system: the variation in coverage among states and the intergovernmental tension that would inevitably accompany such a change.

Supporting his arguments, Sparer analyzes the contradictions in operations and policies between the New York and California Medicaid programs. For instance, why does New York spend an average of $7,286 on its Medicaid beneficiaries and California an average of $2,801? The answer, the author suggests, is rooted in bureaucratic politics. California officials enjoy significant bureaucratic autonomy, while the system in New York is fragmented, decentralized, and interest-group dominated. The book supports this conclusion by exploring nursing home and home care policy, hospital care policy, and managed care policy in the two states. Sparer's dissection of the consequences of state-based reform make a persuasive case for national health insurance.

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Medicaid Politics
Federalism, Policy Durability, and Health Reform
Frank J. Thompson
Georgetown University Press, 2012

Medicaid, one of the largest federal programs in the United States, gives grants to states to provide health insurance for over 60 million low-income Americans. As private health insurance benefits have relentlessly eroded, the program has played an increasingly important role. Yet Medicaid’s prominence in the health care arena has come as a surprise.

Many astute observers of the Medicaid debate have long claimed that “a program for the poor is a poor program” prone to erosion because it serves a stigmatized, politically weak clientele. Means-tested programs for the poor are often politically unpopular, and there is pressure from fiscally conservative lawmakers to scale back the $350-billion-per-year program even as more and more Americans have come to rely on it. For their part, health reformers had long assumed that Medicaid would fade away as the country moved toward universal health insurance. Instead, Medicaid has proved remarkably durable, expanding and becoming a major pillar of America’s health insurance system.

In Medicaid Politics, political scientist Frank J. Thompson examines the program’s profound evolution during the presidential administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama and its pivotal role in the epic health reform law of 2010. This clear and accessible book details the specific forces embedded in American federalism that contributed so much to Medicaid’s growth and durability during this period. It also looks to the future outlining the political dynamics that could yield major program retrenchment.

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Medical Care at the End of Life
A Catholic Perspective
David F. Kelly
Georgetown University Press, 2006

For over thirty years, David F. Kelly has worked with medical practitioners, students, families, and the sick and dying to confront the difficult and often painful issues that concern medical treatment at the end of life. In this short and practical book, Kelly shares his vast experience, providing a rich resource for thinking about life's most painful decisions.

Kelly outlines eight major issues regarding end-of-life care as seen through the lens of the Catholic medical ethics tradition. He looks at the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary means; the difference between killing and allowing to die; criteria of patient competence; what to do in the case of incompetent patients; the meaning and use of advance directives; the morality of hydration and nutrition; physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia; and medical futility. Kelly's analysis is sprinkled with significant legal decisions and, throughout, elaborations on how the Catholic medical ethics tradition—as well as teachings of bishops and popes—understands each issue. He provides a helpful glossary to supplement his introduction to the terminology used by philosophical health care ethics. Included in Kelly's discussion is his lucid description of why the Catholic tradition supports the discontinuation of medical care in the Terry Schiavo case. He also explores John Paul II's controversial papal allocution concerning hydration and nutrition for unconscious patients, arguing that the Catholic tradition does not require feeding the permanently unconscious.

Medical Care at the End of Life addresses the major issues that inform this last stage of caregiving. It offers a critical guide to understanding the medical ethics and relevant legal cases needed for clear thinking when individuals are faced with those crucial decisions.

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Medical Care, Medical Costs
The Search for a Health Insurance Policy
Rashi Fein
Harvard University Press, 1986

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Medical Care Output and Productivity
Edited by David M. Cutler and Ernst R. Berndt
University of Chicago Press, 2001
With the United States and other developed nations spending as much as 14 percent of their GDP on medical care, economists and policy analysts are asking what these countries are getting in return. Yet it remains frustrating and difficult to measure the productivity of the medical care service industries.

This volume takes aim at that problem, while taking stock of where we are in our attempts to solve it. Much of this analysis focuses on the capacity to measure the value of technological change and other health care innovations. A key finding suggests that growth in health care spending has coincided with an increase in products and services that together reduce mortality rates and promote additional health gains. Concerns over the apparent increase in unit prices of medical care may thus understate positive impacts on consumer welfare. When appropriately adjusted for such quality improvements, health care prices may actually have fallen. Provocative and compelling, this volume not only clarifies one of the more nebulous issues in health care analysis, but in so doing addresses an area of pressing public policy concern.
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Medical Case Studies (Consilia medica) of the Early Modern Period
Great Pox Documented
Bohdana Divisová
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Consilia played an important role in not only medieval but also early modern professional health literature. A literary ‘consilium’ consisted of a written statement of one particular case, including the patient's condition and disease as well as advice concerning medical treatment. In the sixteenth century, consilia literature was a common component of the practices of many eminent physicians. This is illustrated through an analysis of consilia from twenty-two different collections and anthologies by fifteen selected authors, who represent university professors, personal physicians, and urban physicians from early modern Italy, France, and German-speaking Central Europe. A closer look at nearly 7,000 consilia shows how important a link they were within the medical community. A detailed view of consilia intended for patients suffering from the ‘French disease’ reveals details about, for instance, the most common treatments for syphilis – mercury and guaiacum – alongside many other interesting and important details.
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The Medical Delivery Business
Health Reform, Childbirth, and the Economic Order
Perkins, Barbara Bridgman
Rutgers University Press, 2004

 

Americans at the end of the twentieth century worried that managed care had fundamentally transformed the character of medicine. In The Medical Delivery Business, Barbara Bridgman Perkins uses examples drawn from maternal and infant care to argue that the business approach in medicine is not a new development. Health care reformers throughout the century looked to industrial, corporate, and commercial enterprises as models for the institutions, specialties, and technological strategies that defined modern medicine.

In the case of perinatal care, the business model emphasized specialized over primary care, encouraged the use of surgical and technological procedures, and unnecessarily turned childbirth into an intensive care situation. Active management techniques, for example, encouraged obstetricians to accelerate labor with oxytocin to augment their productivity. Despite the achievements of the childbirth and women’s health movement in the 1970s, aggressive medical intervention has remained the birth experience for millions of American women (and their babies) every year.

The Medical Delivery Business challenges the conventional view that a dose of the market is good for medicine. While Perkins is sympathetic to the goals of progressive and feminist reformers, she questions whether their strategies will succeed in making medicine more equitable and effective. She argues that the medical care system itself needs to be fundamentally "re-formed," and the reforms must be based on democracy, caring, and social justice as well as economics.

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Medical Entanglements
Rethinking Feminist Debates about Healthcare
Kristina Gupta
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Medical Entanglements uses intersectional feminist, queer, and crip theory to move beyond “for or against” approaches to medical intervention. Using a series of case studies – sex-confirmation surgery, pharmaceutical treatments for sexual dissatisfaction, and weight loss interventions – the book argues that, because of systemic inequality, most mainstream medical interventions will simultaneously reinforce social inequality and alleviate some individual suffering. The book demonstrates that there is no way to think ourselves out of this conundrum as the contradictions are a product of unjust systems. Thus, Gupta argues that feminist activists and theorists should allow individuals to choose whether to use a particular intervention, while directing their social justice efforts at dismantling systems of oppression and at ensuring that all people, regardless of race, gender, sexuality, class, or ability, have access to the basic resources required to flourish.
 
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Medical Ethics in the Ancient World
Paul J. Carrick
Georgetown University Press

In this book Paul Carrick charts the ancient Greek and Roman foundations of Western medical ethics. Surveying 1500 years of pre-Christian medical moral history, Carrick applies insights from ancient medical ethics to developments in contemporary medicine such as advance directives, gene therapy, physician-assisted suicide, abortion, and surrogate motherhood. He discusses such timeless issues as the social status of the physician; attitudes toward dying and death; and the relationship of medicine to philosophy, religion, and popular morality. Opinions of a wide range of ancient thinkers are consulted, including physicians, poets, philosophers, and patients. He also explores the puzzling question of Hippocrates' identity, analyzing not only the Hippocratic Oath but also the Father of Medicine's lesser-known works.

Complete with chapter discussion questions, illustrations, a map, and appendices of ethical codes, Medical Ethics in the Ancient World will be useful in courses on the medical humanities, ancient philosophy, bioethics, comparative cultures, and the history of medicine. Accessible to both professionals and to those with little background in medical philosophy or ancient science, Carrick's book demonstrates that in the ancient world, as in our own postmodern age, physicians, philosophers, and patients embraced a diverse array of perspectives on the most fundamental questions of life and death.

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Medical Ethics in the Renaissance
Winfried Schleiner
Georgetown University Press

This book is the first comprehensive examination of medical ethics in the Renaissance. It investigates the ethical considerations, evaluations of procedures, and techniques of problem-solving in the writings of European physicians and surgeons from the mid-sixteenth through the mid-seventeenth centuries.

While much of the medical practice and literature of the Renaissance remained a continuation or reinterpretation of ancient medicine, Winfried Schleiner reveals an emerging self-conscious field of medical ethics that should be considered modern, as it increasingly separates medicine from theology, the cure of the body from that of the soul. The exceptions to this trend appear in the discussions of certain sexual topics, such as masturbation, by physicians close to the Counter-Reformation. Analyzing the writings of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish physicians—the latter developed the most secular medical ethics of the era—he probes the dominant and emerging philosophical ideas together with conceptions of the role of physicians and of physical well-being.

Schleiner selects several topics to explore the development of ethical ideas in depth: placebos and the broader issue of lying to patients; the treatment of hysteria; masturbation; and the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases—subjects that are still highly charged moral as well as medical topics today.

This pioneering study will be of value to ethicists and to historians of science, medicine, and Renaissance and gender studies.

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Medical Ethics
Sources of Catholic Teachings, Fourth Edition
Kevin D. O'Rourke, OP, and Philip J. Boyle
Georgetown University Press, 2015

In a single convenient resource, this revised and updated edition of a classic text organizes and presents clearly the documents of the Catholic Church pertaining to medical ethics. Introductory chapters provide the context for interpreting the Church's teachings and theological values, guiding the reader in how to apply the teachings to particular ethical dilemmas and helping the reader to understand the role of conscience within the Catholic tradition.

The teaching of the Church in regard to health care ethics is pertinent not only for health care professionals and students, but for all who are concerned about the common good of society. Medical Ethics examines specific teachings of the Church on over seventy issues in clinical and research ethics, including abortion, AIDS, artificial insemination, assisted suicide, cloning, contraception, euthanasia, gene therapy, health care reform, organ donation and transplantation, organizational ethics, stem cells, surrogate motherhood, and withholding and withdrawing life support.

O'Rourke and Boyle bring this fourth edition up to the present day by incorporating recent papal documents regarding the social aspects of health care, assent to Church teaching, and the 2008 papal instruction Dignitas personae, an extremely influential document that illuminates such controversial dilemmas as prenatal adoption, frozen embryos, and genetic diagnosis.

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Medical Ethics
Sources of Catholic Teachings, Third Edition
Kevin D. O'Rourke, OP, and Philip J. Boyle
Georgetown University Press, 1999

In a single convenient resource, this book organizes and presents clearly the documents of the Catholic church pertaining to medical ethics. Introductory chapters provide the context for interpreting the Church's teachings and guide the reader in applying the teachings to particular ethical quandaries.

This third edition has been updated to incorporate the statements issued since the preparation of the second edition. The authors have revised the introductory chapters to include ideas from the papal encyclical Splendor Veritatis and "Instruction of the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian," published by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, concerning the various levels of the teachings of the Church. Other new statements included in this edition are relevant topics from the papal encyclical Evangelium Vitae (abortion, euthanasia, amniocentesis, suicide and withdrawing life support); the Vatican Congregation of Doctrine and Faith on uterine isolation; the U.S. bishops on the care of anencephalic infants, genetic testing, and cloning; and the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference on the treatment for rape in Catholic hospitals.

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Medical Governance
Values, Expertise, and Interests in Organ Transplantation
David L. Weimer
Georgetown University Press, 2010

Governments throughout the industrialized world make decisions that fundamentally affect the quality and accessibility of medical care. In the United States, despite the absence of universal health insurance, these decisions have great influence on the practice of medicine.

In Medical Governance, David Weimer explores an alternative regulatory approach to medical care based on the delegation of decisions about the allocation of scarce medical resources to private nonprofit organizations. He investigates the specific development of rules for the U.S. organ transplant system and details the conversion of a voluntary network of transplant centers to one private rulemaker: the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN).

As the case unfolds, Weimer demonstrates that the OPTN is more efficient, nimble, and better at making evidence-based decisions than a public agency; and the OPTN also protects accountability and the public interest more than private for-profit organizations. Weimer addresses similar governance arrangements as they could apply to other areas of medicine, including medical records and the control of Medicare expenditures, making this timely and useful case study a valuable resource for debates over restructuring the U.S. health care system.

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Medical Lives and Scientific Medicine at Michigan, 1891-1969
Joel D. Howell, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1993

U.S. health care has changed dramatically during the past century. A new breed of physicians use new machines, vaccines, and ideas in ways that have touched the lives of virtually everyone. How and why did these changes occur?

The biographical essays comprising this volume address this question through the stories of six scientific innovators at the University of Michigan Medical School. Michigan was the first major U.S. medical school to admit women, to run its own university hospital, and, by the turn of the century, was recognized as one of the finest medical schools in the country. The people whose stories unfold here played a central part in defining the place of medical science at the University of Michigan and in the larger world of U.S. health care.

Introductory sections are followed by biographical profiles of George Dock, Thomas Francis, Albion Hewlett, Louise Newburgh, Cyrus Strurgis, and Frank Wilson. Drawing on extensive archival research, the authors provide a richly textured portrait of academic medical life and reveal how the internal content of science and medicine interacted with the social context of each subject's life. Also explored is the relationship between the environment (the hospital, the university, and the city) and the search for knowledge.

These narratives expand our perspective on twentieth-century medical history by presenting these individuals' experiences as extended biopsies of the period and place, focal points illuminating the personal nature of medicine and locating the discipline within a social and institutional setting.

Joel D. Howell is Associate Professor, Department of Internal Medicine, Department of History, and Department of Health Services Management and Policy, University of Michigan.

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Medical Malpractice
Duncan Yaggy and Patricia Hodgson, editors
Duke University Press, 1987

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Medical Malpractice on Trial
Paul C. Weiler
Harvard University Press, 1991

Medical malpractice has been at the center of recurring tort crises for the last quarter-century. In 1960, expenditures on medical liability insurance in the United States amounted to about $60 million. In 1988, the figure topped $7 billion. Physicians have responded not simply with expensive methods of "defensive medicine" but also with successful pressure upon state legislatures to cut back on the tort rights of seriously injured patients. Various reforms have been proposed to deal with the successive crises, but so far none have proved to be effective and fair.

In this landmark book, Paul Weiler argues for a two-part approach to the medical malpractice crisis. First, he proposes a thorough revision of the current tort liability regime, which would concentrate available resources on meeting actual financial losses of seriously injured victims. It would also shift the focus of tort liability from the individual doctor to the hospital or other health care organization. This would elicit more effective quality assurance programs from the institutions that are in the best position to reduce our current unacceptable rate of physician-induced injuries.

But in states such as New York, Florida, and Illinois, where the current situation seems to have gone beyond the help of even drastic tort reform, the preferred solution is a no-fault system. Weiler shows how such a system would provide more equitable compensation, more effective prevention, and more economical administration than any practical alternative.

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Medical Malpractice
Theory, Evidence, and Public Policy
Patricia M. Danzon
Harvard University Press, 1985

How often are patients seriously injured through faulty medical care? And what proportion of these people receive compensation for their injuries and suffering? This is the first book that tries to answer these questions in a careful, scholarly way. Among its important findings is that at most one in ten patients injured through medical negligence receives compensation through the malpractice system.

The focus of public attention has been on the rising cost to physicians of malpractice insurance. Although Patricia Danzon analyzes this question thoroughly, her view is much broader, encompassing the malpractice system itself--the legal process, the liability insurance markets, and the feedback to health care. As an economist, she is concerned with the efficiency or cost-effectiveness of the system from the point of view of its three social purposes: deterrence of medical negligence, compensation of injured patients, and the spreading of risk. To provide evidence of the operation of the system in practice, to distinguish fact from allegation, and to evaluate proposals for reform, she has undertaken a detailed empirical analysis of malpractice claims and insurance markets. It is a major contribution to our understanding of how the system works in practice and how it might be improved.

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Medical Monopoly
Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry
Joseph M. Gabriel
University of Chicago Press, 2014
During most of the nineteenth century, physicians and pharmacists alike considered medical patenting and the use of trademarks by drug manufacturers unethical forms of monopoly; physicians who prescribed patented drugs could be, and were, ostracized from the medical community. In the decades following the Civil War, however, complex changes in patent and trademark law intersected with the changing sensibilities of both physicians and pharmacists to make intellectual property rights in drug manufacturing scientifically and ethically legitimate. By World War I, patented and trademarked drugs had become essential to the practice of good medicine, aiding in the rise of the American pharmaceutical industry and forever altering the course of medicine.
           
Drawing on a wealth of previously unused archival material, Medical Monopoly combines legal, medical, and business history to offer a sweeping new interpretation of the origins of the complex and often troubling relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and medical practice today. Joseph M. Gabriel provides the first detailed history of patent and trademark law as it relates to the nineteenth-century pharmaceutical industry as well as a unique interpretation of medical ethics, therapeutic reform, and the efforts to regulate the market in pharmaceuticals before World War I. His book will be of interest not only to historians of medicine and science and intellectual property scholars but also to anyone following contemporary debates about the pharmaceutical industry, the patenting of scientific discoveries, and the role of advertising in the marketplace.
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Medical Necessity
Health Care Access and the Politics of Decision Making
Daniel Skinner
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

How the politics of “medical necessity” complicates American health care


The definition of medical necessity has morphed over the years, from a singular physician’s determination to a complex and dynamic political contest involving patients, medical companies, insurance companies, and government agencies. In this book, Daniel Skinner constructs a comprehensive understanding of the politics of defining this concept, arguing that sustained political engagement with medical necessity is essential to developing a health care system that meets basic public health objectives.

From medical marijuana to mental health to reproductive politics, the concept of medical necessity underscores many of the most divisive and contentious debates in American health care. Skinner’s close reading of medical necessity’s production illuminates the divides between perceptions of medical need as well as how the gatekeeper concept of medical necessity tends to frame medical objectives. He questions the wisdom of continuing to use medical necessity when thinking critically about vexing health care challenges, exploring the possibility that contracts, rights, and technology may resolve the contentious politics of medical necessity.

Skinner ultimately contends that a major shift is needed, one in which health care administrators, doctors, and patients admit that medical necessity is, at its base, a contestable political concept.

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Medical Problem Solving
An Analysis of Clinical Reasoning
Arthur S. Elstein, Lee S. Shulman, and Sarah A. Sprafka
Harvard University Press, 1978

Competent physicians make accurate diagnoses. How are accurate diagnoses made? This readable book gives some important answers to that question. Experienced physicians were presented with diagnostic problems and asked to solve them. Through the use of trained actors serving as “patients” and with a variety of supplementary techniques, the investigators were able to dissect the process by which diagnoses, right and wrong, are made.

Reporting on the most comprehensive investigation of clinical reasoning yet conducted, the authors present data and conclusions of importance not just to medical educators but to anyone interested in the psychology of problem solving. Rigorous attention to methods, thorough grounding in contemporary theories of problem solving, and a healthy respect for the complexity of real-life situations characterize this remarkable study.

A sampling of its salient findings only suggests the richness of this book. Successful diagnosticians begin to form hypotheses almost as soon as they encounter a patient. They entertain a limited number of hypotheses, but these are tested repeatedly during a workup. New findings are treated as confirming, refuting, or not contributing to the solution contemplated; more elaborate schemes based on a knowledge of probabilities are not used. A common error is to relate new information to a working hypothesis, although the information is, in fact, non-contributory. The performance of even an experienced physician varies markedly from case to case. Two of the most important determinants of competence are information and experience; problem-solving skills without a rich supply of facts are insufficient for diagnostic acumen.

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Medical Professionalism in the New Information Age
Edited and with an Introduction by David J. Rothman and David Blumenthal
Rutgers University Press, 2011
With computerized health information receiving unprecedented government support, a group of health policy scholars analyze the intricate legal, social, and professional implications of the new technology. These essays explore how Health Information Technology (HIT) may alter relationships between physicians and patients, physicians and other providers, and physicians and their home institutions. Patient use of web-based information may undermine the traditional information monopoly that physicians have long enjoyed. New IT systems may increase physicians' legal liability and heighten expectations about transparency. Case studies on kidney transplants and maternity practices reveal the unanticipated effects, positive and negative, of patient uses of the new technology. An independent HIT profession may emerge, bringing another organized interest into the medical arena. Taken together, these investigations cast new light on the challenges and opportunities presented by HIT.
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Medical Protestants
The Eclectics in American Medicine, 1825-1939
John S. Haller Jr.
Southern Illinois University Press, 1994

John S. Haller,Jr., provides the first modern history of the Eclectic school of American sectarian medicine.

The Eclectic school (sometimes called the "American School") flourished in the mid-nineteenth century when the art and science of medicine was undergoing a profound crisis of faith. At the heart of the crisis was a disillusionment with the traditional therapeutics of the day and an intense questioning of the principles and philosophy upon which medicine had been built. Many American physicians and their patients felt that medicine had lost the ability to cure. The Eclectics surmounted the crisis by forging a therapeutics based on herbal remedies and an empirical approach to disease, a system independent of the influence of European practices.

Although rejected by the Regulars (adherents of mainstream medicine), the Eclectics imitated their magisterial manner, establishing two dozen colleges and more than sixty-five journals to proclaim the wisdom of their theory. Central to the story of Eclecticism is that of the Eclectic Medical Institute of Cincinnati, the "mother institute" of reform medical colleges. Organized in 1845, the school was to exist for ninety-four years before closing in 1939.

Throughout much of their history, the Eclectic medical schools provided an avenue into the medical profession for men and women who lacked the financial and educational opportunities the Regular schools required, siding with Professor Martyn Paine of the Medical Department of New York University, who, in 1846, had accused the newly formed American Medical Association of playing aristocratic politics behind a masquerade of curriculum reform. Eventually, though, they grudgingly followed the lead of the Regulars by changing their curriculum and tightening admission standards.

By the late nineteenth century, the Eclectics found themselves in the backwaters of modern medicine. Unable to break away from their botanic bias and ill-equipped to support the implications of germ theory, the financial costs of salaried faculty and staff, and the research implications of laboratory science, the Eclectics were pushed aside by the rush of modern academic medicine.

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Medical Readers' Theater
A Guide and Scripts
Todd L. Savitt
University of Iowa Press, 2002
We have all had experiences with sickness, care giving, physicians, medical emergencies, hospitals, and doctors’ offices. Health concerns are not solely the domain of medical students, physicians, or nurses—we all deal with our personal well-being and the health of our loved ones on a daily basis. Sometimes these health problems cause us to consider larger social and ethical issues. How do we respond and relate to such matters? In order to help both lay people and medical professionals consider various health care issues, East Carolina University's Brody School of Medicine developed a medical readers' theater program. Compiled for the first time in a single text, Medical Readers’ Theater: A Guide and Scripts provides a vehicle for those who wish to engage in discussions among citizens and professionals about important, topical issues in contemporary medicine.
Consisting of fourteen readers’ theater scripts, a step-by-step guide to performing readers’ theater, and questions for post-performance discussions, this volume utilizes stories by William Carlos Williams, Susan Onthank Mates, Arthur Conan Doyle, Pearl Buck, and many more. Physician/patient relationships, organ donation, chronic illness, race and ethnicity, death and dying, and aging are just a few of the topics covered in this valuable text.
Medical Readers’ Theater can be used in classrooms, hospitals, libraries, or other community settings where citizens can consider views on issues of common concern in the medical world.
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Medical Research for Hire
The Political Economy of Pharmaceutical Clinical Trials
Fisher, Jill A
Rutgers University Press, 2008
Today, more than 75 percent of pharmaceutical drug trials in the United States are being conducted in the private sector. Once the sole province of academic researchers, these important studies are now being outsourced to non-academic physicians.

According to Jill A. Fisher, this major change in the way medical research is performed is the outcome of two problems in U.S. health care: decreasing revenue for physicians and decreasing access to treatment for patients. As physicians report diminishing income due to restrictive relationships with insurers, increasing malpractice insurance premiums, and inflated overhead costs to operate private practices, they are attracted to pharmaceutical contract research for its lucrative return. Clinical trials also provide limited medical access to individuals who have no or inadequate health insurance because they offer "free" doctors' visits, diagnostic tests, and medications to participants. Focusing on the professional roles of those involved, as well as key research practices, Fisher assesses the risks and advantages for physicians and patients alike when pharmaceutical drug studies are used as an alternative to standard medical care.

A volume in the Critical Issues in Health and Medicine series, edited by Rima D. Apple and Janet Golden

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MEDICAL REVOLUTIONARIES
The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue
Karol K. Weaver
University of Illinois Press, 2006

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Medical Technics
Don Ihde
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

A personal account of the aging body and advanced technologies by a preeminent philosopher of technology

Medical Technics is a rigorous examination of how medical progress has modified our worlds and contributed to a virtual revolution in longevity. Don Ihde offers a unique autobiographical tour of medical events experienced in a decade, beginning in his 70s. Ihde offers experiential and postphenomenological analyses of technologies such as sonography and microsurgery, and ultimately asks what it means to increasingly become a cyborg. 

Forerunners: Ideas First
Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead
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The Medical Triangle
Physicians, Politicians, and the Public
Eli Ginzberg
Harvard University Press

Runaway medical costs, long-term care, market competition, for-profit medicine, nursing shortages—these are but a few of the issues that swirl around in the late twentieth century’s volatile health care scene. How much of the system do we want to change, and how much do we want to keep? Health policy expert Eli Ginzberg examines such crucial questions in his characteristically broad-gauged perspective. Framing the issues in their historical, political, and professional contexts, the author analyzes how we have arrived at the current crisis.

The book focuses on the three sides of the medical triangle that have separate and sometimes conflicting goals: the physicians want to provide the most health care for the most money; the government, which furnishes 40 percent of the system's funding, wants to limit the money it pays out for health care; and the public, with over a billion annual visits to doctors, wants the most health care for the least money.

Ginzberg explains how the core components of our health care system—the community hospital and physicians who have long practiced in a fee-for-service mode—are under attack, and he indicates the factors that make it uncertain whether the destabilization will slow down or accelerate. Moreover, can key health care centers maintain their leadership in a time when new dollars for health are scarce? How will the floundering state of foundations affect medical care in local communities?

In his final chapters the author zeroes in on the special concerns of the public: high-need patients (including those suffering from cancer, catastrophic illness, and the infirmities of old age, or those who are mentally ill or chronically poor), nursing shortages, unsuccessful cost containment, and lack of consensus within the medical triangle about the major issues on our nation's health agenda.

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Medical Writings from Early Medieval England
John D. Niles
Harvard University Press, 2023

The first comprehensive edition and translation of Old English writings on health and healing in more than 150 years.

Unlike elsewhere in Europe, vernacular writings on health and healing had a major place in early medieval England. These texts—unique local remedies and translations of late antique Latin treatises—offer insights into the history of science and medicine, social history, scribal practices, and culture. Some cures resemble ones still used today; others are linguistically extravagant, prescribing ambitious healing practices. Alongside recipes for everyday ailments such as headaches are unparalleled procedures for preventing infant mortality, restoring lost cattle, warding off elf-shot, or remedying the effects of flying venom.

Medical Writings from Early Medieval England presents the first comprehensive edition and translation from Old English of these works in more than 150 years. Volume I includes The Old English Herbal, Remedies from Animals, Lacnunga, the Peri Didaxeon, and a compendium of miscellaneous texts.

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Medicare
Intentions, Effects, and Politics, Volume 26
Mark A. Peterson, ed.
Duke University Press
At a time when Medicare stands at the forefront of national politics, Medicare: Intentions, Effects, and Politics moves past the political rhetoric of the moment to provide a groundwork for informed debate. This special issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law offers a historically-based exploration and understanding of Medicare as well as needed perspectives for intelligent reform.
A complete understanding of the particular and peculiar structure of Medicare can be gained only by considering the ideas, politics, and institutions of the 1960s that shaped it. With this historical perspective, the articles in this collection can move beyond partisan arguments and politically motivated reform proposals. Instead, they outline educated guidelines for improving Medicare and debunk commonly held but false assumptions about the program. In "How Not to Think about Medicare" the field’s most noted scholar, Theodore Marmor, exposes four such misconceptions, including the program’s seeming inability to control costs and ward off what some call a fiscal tsunami—the aging of the baby boomers. Other contributions address frequently overlooked functions of Medicare. While the program is known for its universal health coverage for the elderly and the disabled, for instance, Medicare also serves a crucial role in overseeing hospital performance and furthering health education. This special issue concludes with a discussion of Marmor’s recently revised classic book, The Politics of Medicare, by five leading specialists who interpret the present Medicare program in light of its original construct and current political influences.

Contributors. Michael Gusmano, Jacob Hacker, Nancy M. Kane, Stephen A. Magnus, Theodore Marmor, Jonathan Oberlander, Eric M. Patashnik, Mark A. Peterson, Mark J. Schlesinger, Carolyn Tuohy, Bruce Vladeck, Julian Zelizer

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Medicare Reform
Issues and Answers
Edited by Andrew J. Rettenmaier and Thomas R. Saving
University of Chicago Press, 1999
In 1965, landmark legislation established the national Medicare system as a means of insuring access to medical care for all elderly citizens. Today, rocketing medical costs combined with a rapidly aging population have thrown the Medicare system off balance, moving it perilously close to financial crisis. Medicare already accounts for 2.65 percent of gross domestic product, and by the year 2030 that share is expected to more than double. Further, the trust fund dedicated to Medicare hospitalization coverage is expected to be depleted by 2008. Clearly, Medicare as we know it cannot endure much longer without either imposing a massive tax burden or dissolving altogether under its own financial strain.

Medicare Reform—the first volume in a new series sponsored by the George Bush School of Government and Public Policy at Texas A&M University—tackles the current Medicare predicament head-on, delving into the fundamental issues surrounding the reorganization of the system: whether to allocate Medicare's growing financial load to current workers in the form of higher taxes, shift the onus to future generations, or shortchange both the expectations and care of present recipients by substantially cutting benefits. This volume assembles a group of the most highly respected analysts of health issues to consider the economic forces impacting the surging health care market.

Written for the general reader and offering innovative ideas for policy revision along with critical new data on health care economics, this comprehensive volume provides a timely and thoughtful deliberation on the precarious future of Medicare.

"Because, as Richard Weaver once said, 'ideas have consequences,' this book is important. It will not end the debate on Medicare, but it will begin it."—Phil Gramm, from the foreword
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Medicating Children
ADHD and Pediatric Mental Health
Rick Mayes, Catherine Bagwell, and Jennifer Erkulwater
Harvard University Press, 2009
Why and how did ADHD become the most commonly diagnosed mental disorder among children and adolescents, as well as one of the most controversial? Stimulant medication had been used to treat excessively hyperactive children since the 1950s. And the behaviors that today might lead to an ADHD diagnosis had been observed since the early 1930s as “organic drivenness,” and then by various other names throughout the decades.Rick Mayes and colleagues argue that a unique alignment of social and economic trends and incentives converged in the early 1990s with greater scientific knowledge to make ADHD the most prevalent pediatric mental disorder. New movements advocating for the rights of children and the disabled and a massive increase in Medicaid spending on psychotropic drugs all contributed to the dramatic spike in ADHD diagnoses and stimulant use.Medicating Children is unique in that it integrates analyses of the clinical, political, historical, educational, social, economic, and legal aspects of ADHD and stimulant pharmacotherapy. Thus, it will be invaluable to educators, clinicians, parents, and policymakers, all of whom are trying to determine what is in the best interest of millions of children.
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Medicating Race
Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference
Anne Pollock
Duke University Press, 2012
In Medicating Race, Anne Pollock traces the intersecting discourses of race, pharmaceuticals, and heart disease in the United States over the past century, from the founding of cardiology through the FDA's approval of BiDil, the first drug sanctioned for use in a specific race. She examines wide-ranging aspects of the dynamic interplay of race and heart disease: articulations, among the founders of American cardiology, of heart disease as a modern, and therefore white, illness; constructions of "normal" populations in epidemiological research, including the influential Framingham Heart Study; debates about the distinctiveness African American hypertension, which turn on disparate yet intersecting arguments about genetic legacies of slavery and the comparative efficacy of generic drugs; and physician advocacy for the urgent needs of black patients on professional, scientific, and social justice grounds. Ultimately, Pollock insists that those grappling with the meaning of racialized medical technologies must consider not only the troubled history of race and biomedicine but also its fraught yet vital present. Medical treatment should be seen as a site of, rather than an alternative to, political and social contestation. The aim of scholarly analysis should not be to settle matters of race and genetics, but to hold medicine more broadly accountable to truth and justice.
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Medication in Maternity
Infant Exposure and Maternal Information
Yvonne Brackbill, Karen McManus, and Lynn Woodward
University of Michigan Press, 1985
Mothers often know very little about the drugs they receive during pregnancy and even less about the drugs they consume during childbirth. The adverse fetal effects of drugs—whether prescription or over-the-counter—and the information mothers receive from the drug and medical communities about those drugs are shown in this International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities monograph. The research for the study presented in Medication in Maternity included 602 mothers, and as such must be seen as a significant contribution to the field of neonatology in general and to learning disabilities specifically. The authors' findings indicate that many infants are exposed to prenatal and during-birth drugs that could cause learning difficulties or have other toxic effects, and that mothers are rarely told what drugs they are taking or how those drugs could harm their child.
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Medicine and American Growth, 1800–1860
James H. Cassedy
University of Wisconsin Press, 1986

“A work of great breadth, originality, and distinction.  Rarely do we see such a successful marriage between historical demography and the history of medicine.  The interconnections between population increase, migration and immigration on the one hand, and disease and the development of medicine on the other in antebellum America are brilliantly presented.”—Irvine Loudon, Bulletin of the History of Medicine
 

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Medicine and Health in Africa
Multidisciplinary Perspectives
Paula Viterbo
Michigan State University Press, 2011
Over the last two decades, the implosion of economies under the burden of debt, the negative repercussions of structural adjustment programs, the crisis of legitimacy, civil wars, and the collapse of some states have resulted in serious health issues across the African continent. Newly emerging diseases, such as Ebola virus and HIV/AIDS have killed and disabled millions. Some “old diseases,” such as yellow fever, tuberculosis, and polio have reappeared. Malaria, cholera, and meningitis continue to kill thousands. In many countries, the medical infrastructure has collapsed, while an increasing number of physicians and nurses have migrated to more hospitable places. Stigmatization of the affected people has exacerbated social and racial discrimination and has affected the implementation of national and international public health programs. The complexity of the situation requires an interdisciplinary approach. This collection, including contributions by historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and biologists, emphasizes the social and cultural contexts of African health, paying particular attention to the history of the colonial public health system and its legacy.
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Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru
Population Growth and the Bourbon Reforms
Adam Warren
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010

By the end of the eighteenth century, Peru had witnessed the decline of its once-thriving silver industry, and it had barely begun to recover from massive population losses due to smallpox and other diseases. At the time, it was widely believed that economic salvation was contingent upon increasing the labor force and maintaining as many healthy workers as possible. In Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru,Adam Warrenpresents a groundbreaking study of the primacy placed on medical care to generate population growth during this era.

The Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century shaped many of the political, economic, and social interests of Spain and its colonies. In Peru, local elites saw the reforms as an opportunity to positively transform society and its conceptions of medicine and medical institutions in the name of the Crown. Creole physicians in particular, took advantage of Bourbon reforms to wrest control of medical treatment away from the Catholic Church, establish their own medical expertise, and create a new, secular medical culture. They asserted their new influence by treating smallpox and leprosy, by reforming medical education, and by introducing hygienic routines into local funeral rites, among other practices.

Later, during the early years of independence, government officials began to usurp the power of physicians and shifted control of medical care back to the church. Creole doctors, without the support of the empire, lost much of their influence, and medical reforms ground to a halt.  As Warren’s study reveals, despite falling in and out of political favor, Bourbon reforms and creole physicians were instrumental to the founding of modern medicine in Peru, and their influence can still be felt today.

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Medicine and the Ethics of Care
Diana Fritz Cates and Paul Lauritzen, Editors
Georgetown University Press

In these essays, a diverse group of ethicists draw insights from both religious and feminist scholarship in order to propose creative new approaches to the ethics of medical care. While traditional ethics emphasizes rules, justice, and fairness, the contributors to this volume embrace an "ethics of care," which regards emotional engagement in the lives of others as basic to discerning what we ought to do on their behalf.

The essays reflect on the three related themes: community, narrative, and emotion. They argue for the need to understand patients and caregivers alike as moral agents who are embedded in multiple communities, who seek to attain or promote healing partly through the medium of storytelling, and who do so by cultivating good emotional habits. A thought-provoking contribution to a field that has long been dominated by an ethics of principle, Medicine and the Ethics of Care will appeal to scholars and students who want to move beyond the constraints of that traditional approach.

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Medicine and the Management of Living
Taming the Last Great Beast
William Ray Arney and Bernard J. Bergen
University of Chicago Press, 1984
In recent years, relations between patients and physicians in America have undergone a dramatic change. The growing acceptance of natural childbirth, support groups for patients with serious illnesses, health maintenance organizations, and hospices for a "happy death" among family and friends is part of a redefinition of medical practice and reformulation of the field of medical power. No longer is medical practice confined to "taming the beast" of death and fighting the diseases observable in the human body. The modern practitioner is now a manager of the living, taking an ecological view of the patient as a "whole person" in a network of relationships.

Medicine and the Management of Living questions how it has been possible for the patient to change from a silenced specimen observed in the clinic to a person whose subjective experience of illness is important to medical practice and discourse. Arney and Bergen ask, What incited the demand that medicine take the whole person, including the patient's presentation of his or her illness, into consideration? And in whose terms are patients speaking about themselves? The authors argue that the inclusion of patients' experiences in medical discourse that has come about since the 1950s is not so much a result of a "patient rebellion" as an activity preciptated by the medical establishment itself. Drawing inspiration from the work of Michel Foucault, Arney and Bergen examine the structure of medical power, contending that new social technologies like support groups make the patient's subjectivity available for medical evaluation, judgment, and manipulation.

 Throughout this sensitively written discussion, the authors vivify the issues they raise with excerpts from many sources—the writings of a poet dying of cancer, the comments of doctors pondering their own fatal illnesses, and excerpts from popular magazines, medical journals, and sociological studies. They examine the changing role of the medical profession through history, using a modern advertising image and woodcuts from Vesalius's Renaissance anatomy text to show the symbolic portrayal of health and medicine. Their wide-ranging concerns lead the reader through such topics as teenage pregnancy; the historical treatment of medical anomalies like hermaphrodites and the "elephant man" (John Merrick); and literary representations of illness in Sartre, Chekhov, and Brian Clark's recent Broadway drama, "Whose Life Is It Anyway?"

In a provocative yet thoughtful way, Medicine and the Management of Living points the way for a radical reassessment of medical power and the medical establishment.
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Medicine and the Saints
Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956
By Ellen J. Amster
University of Texas Press, 2013

The colonial encounter between France and Morocco took place not only in the political realm but also in the realm of medicine. Because the body politic and the physical body are intimately linked, French efforts to colonize Morocco took place in and through the body. Starting from this original premise, Medicine and the Saints traces a history of colonial embodiment in Morocco through a series of medical encounters between the Islamic sultanate of Morocco and the Republic of France from 1877 to 1956.

Drawing on a wealth of primary sources in both French and Arabic, Ellen Amster investigates the positivist ambitions of French colonial doctors, sociologists, philologists, and historians; the social history of the encounters and transformations occasioned by French medical interventions; and the ways in which Moroccan nationalists ultimately appropriated a French model of modernity to invent the independent nation-state. Each chapter of the book addresses a different problem in the history of medicine: international espionage and a doctor’s murder; disease and revolt in Moroccan cities; a battle for authority between doctors and Muslim midwives; and the search for national identity in the welfare state. This research reveals how Moroccans ingested and digested French science and used it to create a nationalist movement and Islamist politics, and to understand disease and health. In the colonial encounter, the Muslim body became a seat of subjectivity, the place from which individuals contested and redefined the political.

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Medicine and Western Civilization
Edited by David J Rothman, Steven Marcus, and Stephanie A. Kiceluk
Rutgers University Press, 1995
This fabulous anthology is sure to be a core text for history of medicine and social science classes in colleges across the country. In order to demonstrate how medical research has influenced Western cultural perspectives, the editors have collected original works from 61 different authors around nine major themes (among them "Anatomy and Destiny," "Psyche and Soma," and "The Construction of Pain, Suffering, and Death"). The authors range from Aristotle, the Bible, and Louis Pasteur, to Masters and Johnson, Ernest Hemingway, and Simone de Beauvoir. The primary sources selected to illustrate the themes are well chosen and contrast with each other nicely. However, the brief background material for the selections center around the authors and offer little or no discussion about the selections' relevance to the topics at hand. This book would be best read in a class or group where the texts' meaning in relation to each other can be discussed, but the book can stand alone if the reader is prepared to do some critical thinking.
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Medicine at Michigan
A History of the University of Michigan Medical School at the Bicentennial
Dea H. Boster and Joel D. Howell
University of Michigan Press, 2017
A trailblazer in American medical education since 1850, the Medical School at the University of Michigan was the first program in the United States to own and operate its own hospital and the earliest major medical school to admit women. In the late nineteenth century, the School emerged as a frontrunner in modern scientific medical education in the United States, and one of the first in the nation to implement both required clinical clerkships and laboratory science as part of their curriculum, including the first full laboratory course in bacteriology. Decades later, the Medical School remained at the vanguard of medical education by increasing its focus on research, and these efforts resulted in world-changing breakthroughs such as field-testing the first safe polio vaccine, proposing a genetic mechanism for sickle cell anemia, inventing the fiber-optic endoscope, and cloning the gene responsible for cystic fibrosis. The Medical School’s history is not without its growing pains: alongside top-tier education and incredible innovation came times of stress with the broader University and Ann Arbor communities, complex expectations and realities for student diversity, and many controversies over curriculum and methodology. Medicine at Michigan explores how the School has dealt with changes in medical science, practice, and social climates over the past 150 years and illuminates the complicated interactions between economic, social, and cultural trends and medical education at the University of Michigan and across the nation. This book will appeal to readers interested in the history of medicine as well as current and former medical faculty members, students, and employees of the University of Michigan Medical School.
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Medicine by Design
The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893–1943
Annmarie Adams
University of Minnesota Press, 2008

In the history of medicine, hospitals are usually seen as passive reflections of advances in medical knowledge and technology. In Medicine by Design, Annmarie Adams challenges these assumptions, examining how hospital design influenced the development of twentieth-century medicine and demonstrating the importance of these specialized buildings in the history of architecture.

At the center of this work is Montreal’s landmark Royal Victoria Hospital, built in 1893. Drawing on a wide range of visual and textual sources, Adams uses the “Royal Vic”—along with other hospitals built or modified over the next fifty years—to explore critical issues in architecture and medicine: the role of gender and class in both fields, the transformation of patients into consumers, the introduction of new medical concepts and technologies, and the use of domestic architecture and regionally inspired imagery to soften the jarring impact of high-tech medicine.

Identifying the roles played by architects in medical history and those played by patients, doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals in the design of hospitals, Adams also links architectural spaces to everyday hospital activities, from meal preparation to the ways in which patients entered the hospital and awaited treatment.

Methodologically and conceptually innovative, Medicine by Design makes a significant contribution to the histories of both architectural and medical practices in the twentieth century. 

Annmarie Adams is William C. Macdonald Professor of Architecture at McGill University and the author of Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870–1900 and coauthor of Designing Women: Gender and the Architectural Profession.

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Medicine, Health Care, & Ethics
Catholic Voices
John F. Morris
Catholic University of America Press, 2007
Medicine, Health Care, and Ethics adds to this rich tradition with a collection of contemporary essays that represent the very best efforts of current Catholic scholarship in the field of health care and medical ethics.
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Medicine in Mexico
From Aztec Herbs to Betatrons
By Gordon Schendel
University of Texas Press, 1968

A witch doctor casting an evil spell in a steaming jungle village; a young medical-school graduate cleaning a machete wound in a rat-infested thatched hut; a world-renowned scientist doing research in Mexico City—all were part of the mid-twentieth century medical scene in Mexico, a country of great cultural, socioeconomic, and geographical contrasts.

Gordon Schendel, in collaboration with Dr. José Alvarez Amézquita and Dr. Miguel E. Bustamante, relates the history of medicine and public health and welfare in Mexico. This absorbing story begins with a great indigenous culture; continues with Spanish Colonial rule, the unproductive first century of independence from Spain, and the years of revolution; then concentrates on the modern nation.

The Aztec civilization evidenced a knowledge of pharmacology and the fundamentals of health far in advance of contemporary European societies. And almost one hundred years before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, New Spain boasted a comprehensive "Public Health Administration" and a hospital system that served all classes. However, throughout Mexico's three centuries as a Spanish colony and its first century of independence, millions of its citizens suffered abysmal poverty. Thus when the Republic of Mexico entered its post-Revolutionary era, the majority of its citizens were plagued by superstition, illiteracy, malnutrition, and the other "diseases of the poor."

The principal part of this story tells how Mexico attacked these problems, and how in a few short years it became a leader and a model for all Latin America in the fields of medicine and public health and welfare. The book is based on Mr. Schendel's research and observations and on his many interviews with doctors and govemment officials. It will be of interest to the medical profession and to concerned laymen of all nationalities, for it illustrates how a dynamic nation met challenges that all countries of the world, developed and underdeveloped, must face.

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Medicine in the Days of the Pharaohs
Bruno Halioua and Bernard Ziskind
Harvard University Press, 2005

At the temple of Kom Ombo near Aswan, an enigmatic frieze depicts the deified pharaoh Imhotep receiving a set of elaborate implements, some of which strikingly resemble modern surgical instruments: side by side with eye-of-Horus amulets one finds what surely must be forceps. Evidence of the medical practice of ancient Egypt has come down to us not only in pictorial art but also in papyrus scrolls, in funerary inscriptions, and in the mummified bodies of ancient Egyptians themselves.

Bruno Halioua and Bernard Ziskind provide a comprehensive account of pharaonic medicine that is illuminated by what modern science has discovered about the lives (and deaths) of people from all walks of life--farmers, fishermen, miners, soldiers, scribes and priests, embalmers, construction workers, bakers, prostitutes. From mummies and medical papyri we are able to recognize the aches of osteoarthritis, imagine the occupational hazards faced by press-ganged stonemasons, and learn of the gynecological complaints of courtesans. In presenting these stories Halioua and Ziskind throw light on some of the most enduring questions about life and death in antiquity: about physicians whose skills predate Hippocrates by twenty-five centuries and were first made famous by Homer; about the remedies and techniques they employed, at once strange and strangely familiar; about the men, women, and children they treated; and about the diseases and injuries they were called upon to heal.

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