Winner, Hubert Herring Book Award, Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies
Candomblé, an African religious and healing tradition that spread to Brazil during the slave trade, relies heavily on the use of plants in its spiritual and medicinal practices. When its African adherents were forcibly transplanted to the New World, they faced the challenge not only of maintaining their culture and beliefs in the face of European domination but also of finding plants with similar properties to the ones they had used in Africa.
This book traces the origin, diffusion, medicinal use, and meaning of Candomblé's healing pharmacopoeia—the sacred leaves. Robert Voeks examines such topics as the biogeography of Africa and Brazil, the transference—and transformation—of Candomblé as its adherents encountered both native South American belief systems and European Christianity, and the African system of medicinal plant classification that allowed Candomblé to survive and even thrive in the New World. This research casts new light on topics ranging from the creation of African American cultures to tropical rain forest healing floras.
Neoliberals often point to improvements in public health and nutrition as examples of globalisation's success, but this book argues that the corporate food and medicine industries are destroying environments and ruining living conditions across the world.
Scientist Stan Cox expertly draws out the strong link between Western big business and environmental destruction. This is a shocking account of the huge damage that drug manufacturers and large food corporations are inflicting on the health of people and crops worldwide. Companies discussed include Wal-Mart, GlaxoSmithKline, Tyson Foods and Monsanto. On issues ranging from the poisoning of water supplies in South Asia to natural gas depletion and how it threatens global food supplies, Cox shows how the demand for profits is always put above the public interest.
While individual efforts to "shop for a better world" and conserve energy are laudable, Cox explains that they need to be accompanied by an economic system that is grounded in ecological sustainability if we are to find a cure for our Sick Planet.
Recounts the remarkable life of a Prussian/Polish Jew who immigrated to the United States as a teenager in the 1850s and became one of the nation’s best-known physicians by the turn of the century
After medical study in South Carolina and Virginia on the eve of the Civil War, Simon Baruch served the Confederacy as a surgeon for three years, twice undergoing capture and internment. Despite economic hardships while practicing in South Carolina during Reconstruction, he helped to reactivate the State Medical Association and served as president of the State Board of Health.
In 1881 he joined the exodus of southern physicians and scientists of that period, taking up residence in New York City, where he rose to prominence through his advocacy of surgery in one of the early operations for appendicitis and through is role as the protective physician in a widely publicized “child cruelty” case involving the musical prodigy, Josef Hofmann. Baruch became a leader in the nationwide movement to establish free public baths for tenement dwellers and in the development of expert medical journalism. Although his advocacy of such natural remedies as water, fresh air, and diet often made him appear unaccountably iconoclastic to his contemporaries, he has gained posthumous recognition as a pioneer in physical medicine.
Bernard N. Baruch, one of his four sons, has memorialized this work through endowments for research and instruction in physical medicine and rehabilitation. Ward reconstructs the life of a medical student in the South at the opening of the Civil War, the adventures of a Confederate surgeon, and the difficulties of a practitioner in Reconstruction South Carolina. Simon Baruch’s physician’s registers and his correspondence with colleagues afford the reader an immediate sense of the therapeutic dilemmas facing physicians and patients of his era. Baruch’s experiences while establishing himself in New York City after 1881 reflect the challenges facing those trying to break into what was then the nation’s medical capital—as well as that city’s rich opportunities and heady intellectual atmosphere. His energetic campaign for free public baths illustrates one of the most colorful chapters of American social history, as immigrants flooded the cities at the turn of the century. As medical editor of the New York Sun from 1912 to 1918, Baruch touched on most of the health concerns of that period and a few—such as handgun control—that persist to this day.
With today's cumbersome insurance procedures, government regulations, endless paperwork, and concerns about malpractice rates, many health care professionals are asking: "Why am I doing this? Am I making a difference to my patients? Is there a better way—and if so, what is it?" In this book, Carson and Koenig examine the state of the health care system with the goal of providing healthcare professionals and caregivers the inspiration and practical tools to reclaim their sense of purpose.
The book begins with an evaluation of the current system from the perspective of the spiritual vision that initially motivated and nourished many caregivers. The authors then pose a vision of a health care system that supports and nurtures the spirituality of patients and their families, of which some elements already exist.
An overview is provided on the preparation necessary for health care professionals to offer spiritual care when there are major implications—for people with chronic illnesses, psychiatric issues, devastating injuries, and those preparing for surgery, facing death, and those living with chronic pain. Also explored are ways that health professionals and caregivers can maintain their own spiritual health even as they work to bring about healing, comfort, and solace to others.
Woven throughout the book are the personal narratives of physicians, nurses, chaplains, health care educators, community resource workers, administrators, therapists, and psychologists—all from a wide range of religious traditions. Their examples inspire and assist professionals in renewing the spiritual focus of health care.
In Spirituality and Health Research: Methods, Measurement, Statistics, and Resources, Dr. Harold G. Koenig leads a comprehensive overview of this complex subject. Dr. Koenig is one of the world’s leading authorities on the relationship between spirituality and health, and a leading researcher on the topic. As such, he is distinctively qualified to author such a book.
If laughter is good medicine, then the twenty-two essays offered here by Dr. Allen B. Weisse should prove a hearty antidote to a host of ills suffered by doctors, students and would-be students of medicine, amateur and professional medical historians, and, of course, patients, those of us who wonder what the medical profession is all about and how it affects us.
Often humorous and always informative, these essays cover a broad range of medical subjects. Weisse tackles medical ethics, offers advice to medical and premedical students and their families, delves into unusual episodes in medical history, confronts considerations of aging and self-image, and discusses the vagaries of rewards and recognition available from medical research. He also examines honesty in medical thinking, investigates ways of dealing with bureaucracies, and considers ways of learning to live with oneself. Finally, he evaluates the changing nature of medicine and medical research and looks into the roles of minorities and women in medicine.
Weisse knows whereof he speaks, enlivening each essay with personal anecdotes. When he explains past and current medical school admissions policies, for example, he approaches the subject with the combined knowledge of a former premedical student, a medical student, a faculty member, and an admissions chairperson over the past thirty years. As a medical researcher whose chief turned against him, he certainly knows what he is talking about in "Betrayal." He also writes with authority in his humorous account of how he, as a senior physician, struggles to keep on top of the overwhelming onslaught of medical advances ("Confessions of Creeping Obsolescence"). And in an essay to boost all of our spirits, he tells how an ivory tower physician (Weisse himself) gets drawn up in the service of the IRS bureaucracy and winds up tweaking its nose a bit ("In the Service of the IRS").
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the vigor, wit, and élan that characterize Weisse’s essays than his titles. "On Chinese Restaurants" deals with unusual syndromes and the way in which they have evolved and affected the way we look at ourselves. Other titles are "Pneumocystis and Me," "The Vanishing Male," "Say It Isn’t ‘No," "Bats in the Belfry or Bugs in the Belly?: Helicobacter and the Resurrection of Johannes Fibiger," and "PC: Politically Correct or Potentially Corrupting?"
Finally, two words in this book’s subtitle succinctly characterize Weisse’s essays: pertinent and impertinent—germane and irreverent information rakishly presented.
Did you know that New Jersey spearheaded the discovery of antibiotics? Or that the Garden State had the first state hospital serving the mentally ill and the first community rescue squad? And did you know that close to a million people around the world can walk again, thanks to the New Jersey Knee?
New Jersey is a small state that has played a big role in the history of medicine. Adrenalin, streptomycin, pure milk, tranquilizers, malaria control, cortisone, vitamins, revelations of radium's dangers—New Jersey’s impressive contributions to American health have been on display in a major traveling exhibition, “A State of Health: New Jersey’s Medical Heritage.” By 2002, more than twelve sites throughout New Jersey and Philadelphia will have hosted this display.
This catalogue to the exhibition celebrates more than four centuries of New Jersey medicine through original essays and 150-plus striking illustrations of artifacts, manuscripts, books, photographs, works of art, and postcards. Taking subjects of perennial interest—epidemics, children’s health, public health, hospitals, and biomedical research—curator Karen Reeds explores the state’s rich medical heritage and its uniqueplace as the heart of the world’s pharmaceutical industry.
Engagingly written and handsomely produced, A State of Health: New Jersey’s
Medical Heritage is at once a lasting resource for students, teachers, and historians and the perfect gift to your favorite healthcare professional or local history buff.
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