front cover of Reimagining Social Medicine from the South
Reimagining Social Medicine from the South
Abigail H. Neely
Duke University Press, 2021
In Reimagining Social Medicine from the South, Abigail H. Neely explores social medicine's possibilities and limitations at one of its most important origin sites: the Pholela Community Health Centre (PCHC) in South Africa. The PCHC's focus on medical and social factors of health yielded remarkable success. And yet South Africa's systemic racial inequality hindered health center work, and witchcraft illnesses challenged a program rooted in the sciences. To understand Pholela's successes and failures, Neely interrogates the “social” in social medicine. She makes clear that the social sciences the PCHC used failed to account for the roles that Pholela's residents and their environment played in the development and success of its program. At the same time, the PCHC's reliance on biomedicine prevented it from recognizing the impact on health of witchcraft illnesses and the social relationships from which they emerged. By rewriting the story of social medicine from Pholela, Neely challenges global health practitioners to recognize the multiple worlds and actors that shape health and healing in Africa and beyond.
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Revolutionizing Women's Healthcare
The Feminist Self-Help Movement in America
Hannah Dudley-Shotwell
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Winner of the 2021 Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians (WAWH)​

Revolutionizing Women’s Healthcare is the story of a feminist experiment: the self-help movement. This movement arose out of women’s frustration, anger, and fear for their health. Tired of visiting doctors who saw them as silly little girls, suffering shame when they asked for birth control, seeking abortions in back alleys, and holding little control over their own reproductive lives, women took action. Feminists created “self-help groups” where they examined each other’s bodies and read medical literature. They founded and ran clinics, wrote books, made movies, undertook nationwide tours, and raided and picketed offending medical institutions. Some performed their own abortions. Others swore off pharmaceuticals during menopause. Lesbian women found “at home” ways to get pregnant. Black women used self-help to talk about how systemic racism affected their health. Hannah Dudley-Shotwell engagingly chronicles these stories and more to showcase the creative ways women came together to do for themselves what the mainstream healthcare system refused to do.
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The Riddle of Malnutrition
The Long Arc of Biomedical and Public Health Interventions in Uganda
Jennifer Tappan
Ohio University Press, 2017

More than ten million children suffer from severe acute malnutrition globally each year. In Uganda, longstanding efforts to understand, treat, and then prevent the condition initially served to medicalize it, in the eyes of both biomedical personnel and Ugandans who brought their children to the hospital for treatment and care. Medicalization meant malnutrition came to be seen as a disease—as a medical emergency—not a preventable condition, further compromising nutritional health in Uganda.

Rather than rely on a foreign-led model, physicians in Uganda responded to this failure by developing a novel public health program known as Mwanamugimu. The new approach prioritized local expertise and empowering Ugandan women, blending biomedical knowledge with African sensibilities and cultural competencies.

In The Riddle of Malnutrition, Jennifer Tappan examines how over the course of half a century Mwanamugimu tackled the most fatal form of childhood malnutrition—kwashiorkor—and promoted nutritional health in the midst of postcolonial violence, political upheaval, and neoliberal resource constraints. She draws on a diverse array of sources to illuminate the interplay between colonialism, the production of scientific knowledge, and the delivery of health services in contemporary Africa.

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Risk vs. Risk
Tradeoffs in Protecting Health and the Environment
John D. Graham
Harvard University Press, 1995
We see the stories in the newspaper nearly every day: a drug hailed as a breakthrough treatment turns out to cause harmful side effects; controls implemented to reduce air pollution are shown to generate hazardous solid waste; bans on dangerous chemicals result in the introduction of even more risky substitutes. Could our efforts to protect our health and the environment actually be making things worse? In Risk versus Risk, John D. Graham, Jonathan Baert Wiener, and their colleagues at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis marshal an impressive set of case studies which demonstrate that all too often our nation's campaign to reduce risks to our health and the environment is at war with itself.
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Risk-Benefit Analysis
Second Edition
Richard Wilson and Edmund A. C. Crouch
Harvard University Press, 2001
Over the centuries, mankind has slowly reduced the risks and hazards that even as recently as a century ago kept life expectancy to a mere 45 years. Our average lifespan has improved to 77 years by remarkable progress in public health and safety. But with this improvement has come a demand for greater efforts to improve both life expectancy and the quality of life. The first edition of this book, published in 1982, was a pioneer in the development of logical, yet simple, analytic tools for discussion of the risks which we all face. This new edition, revised, expanded, and illustrated in detail, should be of value both to professionals in the field and to those who wish to understand these vital issues.
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RSF
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: The Social, Political, and Economic Effects of the Affordable Care Act
Andrea Campbell
Russell Sage Foundation, 2020
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, often referred to as the ACA or Obamacare, was enacted in 2010 in the wake of the Great Recession. The law transformed the way that Americans access healthcare, nearly halving the ranks of the 49 million uninsured Americans. Edited by political scientist Andrea Louise Campbell and economist Lara Shore-Sheppard, this issue of RSF examines the social, political, and economic effects of this landmark legislation.
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This journal issue explores the political dimensions of the rollout of the ACA and the attendant backlash. Contributors Helen Levy, Andrew Ying, and Nicholas Bagley argue that despite repeated efforts at repeal, over 80 percent of the Act has been implemented as it was originally intended.  Julianna Pacheco, Jake Haselswerdt, and Jamila Michener show that when Republican governors support Medicaid expansion, Republican voters become more favorable toward the ACA, and polarization between Republican and Democrat voters decreases. Yet Charles Courtemanche, James Marton, and Aaron Yelowitz find little impact of the ACA on voter participation. Lisa Beauregard and Edward Miller examine states’ adoption of the ACA’s home and community-based care services for the elderly and people with disabilities, finding that states with more liberal elected officials and more fiscal capacity were more likely to adopt these provisions. Paul Shafer, David Anderson, Seciah Aquino, Laura Baum, Erika Franklin Fowler, and Sarah Gollust probe the role of different types of health insurance and political advertising on insurance enrollment.  Richard Fording and Dana Patton explain the emergence of contentious Medicaid work requirements and patient co-pays that limit access to Medicaid. 

Other contributors address how the ACA affects marginalized populations. Carrie Fry, Thomas McGuire, and Richard Frank link Medicaid expansion to lower rates of recidivism among the formerly incarcerated. Radhika Gore, Ritu Dhar, Sadia Mohaimin, Priscilla Lopez, Anna Divney, Jennifer Zanowiak, Lorna Thorpe, and Nadia Islam study primary care practices serving South Asian immigrants in New York City and highlight the importance of social context and organizational constraints in designing population health interventions. The issue also examines the economic effects of the ACA, especially on access to private and public health insurance. Both Mark Hall and Jean Abraham study instability in ACA health insurance markets, with Hall focusing on uncertainty arising from political factors and Abraham examining the factors that lead local markets to face high premiums and low insurer participation. Philip Rocco and Andrew Kelly explore the mechanisms included in the ACA to try to spur innovations in care delivery that both improve health and generate long-term cost savings.
As the COVID-19 pandemic affects healthcare in unprecedented ways, affordable healthcare access is critical. This RSF journal issue offers a timely, thoughtful consideration of one of the most pressing issues in American life. 
 
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