front cover of Affirmative Action in Medicine
Affirmative Action in Medicine
Improving Health Care for Everyone
James L. Curtis, M.D.
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Affirmative action programs have significantly changed American medicine for the better, not only in medical school admissions and access to postgraduate training but also in bringing a higher quality of health care to all people. James L. Curtis approaches this important transition from historical, statistical, and personal perspectives. He tells how over the course of his medical education and career as a psychiatrist and professor--often as the first or only African American in his cohort--the status of minorities in the medical professions grew from a tiny percentage to a far more equitable representation of the American population.
Advancing arguments from his earlier book, Blacks, Medical Schools, and Society, Curtis evaluates the outcomes of affirmative action efforts over the past thirty years. He describes formidable barriers to minority access to medical-education opportunities and the resulting problems faced by minority patients in receiving medical treatment. His progress report includes a review of two thousand minority students admitted to U.S. medical schools in 1969, following them through graduation and their careers, comparing them with the careers of two thousand of their nonminority peers. These samples provide an important look at medical schools that, while heralding dramatic progress in physician education and training opportunity, indicates much room for further improvement.
A basic hurdle continues to face African Americans and other minorities who are still confined to segregated neighborhoods and inferior school systems that stifle full scholastic development. Curtis urges us as a nation to develop all our human resources through an expansion of affirmative action programs, thus improving health care for everyone.
James L. Curtis is Clinical Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.
[more]

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Arc of Interference
Medical Anthropology for Worlds on Edge
João Biehl and Vincanne Adams, editors
Duke University Press, 2023
The radically humanistic essays in Arc of Interference refigure our sense of the real, the ethical, and the political in the face of mounting social and planetary upheavals. Creatively assembled around Arthur Kleinman’s medical anthropological arc and eschewing hegemonic modes of intervention, the essays advance the notion of a care-ful ethnographic praxis of interference. To interfere is to dislodge ideals of naturalness, blast enduring binaries (human/nonhuman, self/other, us/them), and redirect technocratic agendas while summoning relational knowledge and the will to create community. The book’s multiple ethnographic arcs of interference provide a vital conceptual toolkit for today’s world and a badly needed moral perch from which to peer toward just horizons.

Contributors. Vincanne Adams, João Biehl, Davíd Carrasco, Lawrence Cohen, Jean Comaroff, Robert Desjarlais, Paul Farmer, Marcia Inhorn, Janis H. Jenkins, David S. Jones, Salmaan Keshavjee, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Adriana Petryna
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front cover of Biomedicine and Alternative Healing Systems in America
Biomedicine and Alternative Healing Systems in America
Issues of Class, Race, and Gender
Hans A. Baer
University of Wisconsin Press, 2001

Examining medical pluralism in the United States from the Revolutionary War period through the end of the twentieth century, Hans Baer brings together in one convenient reference a vast array of information on healing systems as diverse as Christian Science, osteopathy, acupuncture, Santeria, southern Appalachian herbalism, evangelical faith healing, and Navajo healing.
    In a country where the dominant paradigm of biomedicine (medical schools, research hospitals, clinics staffed by M.D.s and R.N.s) has been long established and supported by laws and regulations, the continuing appeal of other medical systems and subsystems bears careful consideration. Distinctions of class, Baer emphasizes, as well as differences in race, ethnicity, and gender, are fundamental to the diversity of beliefs, techniques, and social organizations represented in the phenomenon of medical pluralism.
    Baer traces the simultaneous emergence in the nineteenth century of formalized biomedicine and of homeopathy, botanic medicine, hydropathy, Christian Science, osteopathy, and chiropractic. He examines present-day osteopathic medicine as a system parallel to biomedicine with an emphasis on primary care; chiropractic, naturopathy, and acupuncture as professionalized heterodox medical systems; homeopathy, herbalism, bodywork, and lay midwifery in the context of the holistic health movement; Anglo-American religious healing; and folk medical systems, particularly among racial and ethnic minorities. In closing he focuses on the persistence of folk medical systems among working-class Americans and considers the growing interest of biomedical physicians, pharmaceutical and healthcare corporations, and government in the holistic health movement

[more]

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The Body Multiple
Ontology in Medical Practice
Annemarie Mol
Duke University Press, 2002
The Body Multiple is an extraordinary ethnography of an ordinary disease. Drawing on fieldwork in a Dutch university hospital, Annemarie Mol looks at the day-to-day diagnosis and treatment of atherosclerosis. A patient information leaflet might describe atherosclerosis as the gradual obstruction of the arteries, but in hospital practice this one medical condition appears to be many other things. From one moment, place, apparatus, specialty, or treatment, to the next, a slightly different “atherosclerosis” is being discussed, measured, observed, or stripped away. This multiplicity does not imply fragmentation; instead, the disease is made to cohere through a range of tactics including transporting forms and files, making images, holding case conferences, and conducting doctor-patient conversations.

The Body Multiple juxtaposes two distinct texts. Alongside Mol’s analysis of her ethnographic material—interviews with doctors and patients and observations of medical examinations, consultations, and operations—runs a parallel text in which she reflects on the relevant literature. Mol draws on medical anthropology, sociology, feminist theory, philosophy, and science and technology studies to reframe such issues as the disease-illness distinction, subject-object relations, boundaries, difference, situatedness, and ontology. In dialogue with one another, Mol’s two texts meditate on the multiplicity of reality-in-practice.

Presenting philosophical reflections on the body and medical practice through vivid storytelling, The Body Multiple will be important to those in medical anthropology, philosophy, and the social study of science, technology, and medicine.

[more]

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City on Fire
Technology, Social Change, and the Hazards of Progress in Mexico City, 1860-1910
Anna Rose Alexander
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
By the mid-nineteenth century, efforts to modernize and industrialize Mexico City had the unintended consequence of exponentially increasing the risk of fire while also breeding a culture of fear. Through an array of archival sources, Anna Rose Alexander argues that fire became a catalyst for social change, as residents mobilized to confront the problem. Advances in engineering and medicine soon fostered the rise of distinct fields of fire-related expertise while conversely, the rise of fire-profiteering industries allowed entrepreneurs to capitalize on crisis.
 
City on Fire demonstrates that both public and private engagements with fire risk highlight the inequalities that characterized Mexican society at the turn of the twentieth century.
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Community-Engaged Research for Resilience and Health, Volume 4
Edited by Kelli E. Canada and Clark M. Peters
University of Cincinnati Press, 2022
Promoting resilience in underserved populations.

The fourth volume in the Interdisciplinary Community-Engaged Research for Health series departs from the traditional view of resilience driven by individuals and reconstructs it to hinge on the community of context. Editors Kelli E. Canada and Clark Peters identified six scholar-practitioner teams who worked to promote resilience in communities across the nation facing health crises and other structural barriers to health, such as low socioeconomic positions, structural racism, and discrimination. This research is part of a two-pronged approach to public health, intending to increase resilience and communities’ internal support while simultaneously reducing barriers to health care access.

The efforts featured in Community-Engaged Research for Resilience and Health highlight community-based solutions, points of strength, and sources of resilience to help communities that are struggling to survive and thrive in the face of adversity. Whether these communities are facing opioid addiction or other substance abuse issues, domestic violence, armed conflict, trauma, or cultural discrimination, the editors and contributors in this volume share examples of Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) practices where through a collaborative partnership, the community actively participates in every aspect of the alongside the interdisciplinary research team. What transpires demonstrates how researchers and communities come together to turn adversity into improved health through resilience-focused programs and interventions.
[more]

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The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany
A Social History, 1890-1930
Michael Hau
University of Chicago Press, 2003
From the 1890s to the 1930s, a growing number of Germans began to scrutinize and discipline their bodies in a utopian search for perfect health and beauty. Some became vegetarians, nudists, or bodybuilders, while others turned to alternative medicine or eugenics. In The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany, Michael Hau demonstrates why so many men and women were drawn to these life reform movements and examines their tremendous impact on German society and medicine.

Hau argues that the obsession with personal health and fitness was often rooted in anxieties over professional and economic success, as well as fears that modern industrialized civilization was causing Germany and its people to degenerate. He also examines how different social groups gave different meanings to the same hygienic practices and aesthetic ideals. What results is a penetrating look at class formation in pre-Nazi Germany that will interest historians of Europe and medicine and scholars of culture and gender.
[more]

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The Cultivation of Whiteness
Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia
Warwick Anderson
Duke University Press, 2006
The Cultivation of Whiteness is an award-winning history of scientific ideas about race and place in Australia from the time of the first European settlement through World War II. Chronicling the extensive use of biological theories and practices in the construction and “protection” of whiteness, Warwick Anderson describes how a displaced “Britishness” (or whiteness) was defined by scientists and doctors in relation to a harsh, strange environment and in opposition to other races. He also provides the first account of extensive scientific experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s on poor whites in tropical Australia and on Aboriginal people in the central deserts.

“[Anderson] writes with passion, wit, and panache, and the principal virtues of The Cultivation of Whiteness are the old-fashioned ones of thoroughness, accuracy, and impeccable documentation. . . . [His] sensitive study is a model of how contentious historical issues can be confronted.”—W. F. Bynum, Times Literary Supplement

“One of the virtues of The Cultivation of Whiteness is that it brings together aspects of Australian life and history that are now more often separated—race and environment, blood and soil, medicine and geography, tropical science and urban health, biological thought and national policy, Aboriginality and immigration, the body and the mind. The result is a rich and subtle history of ideas that is both intellectual and organic, and that vividly evokes past states of mind and their lingering, haunting power.”—Tom Griffiths, Sydney Morning Herald

[more]

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The Cultural Geography of Health Care
Wilbert M. Gesler
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992

In health care delivery and health care research, basic concepts of cultural behavior are ignored—at a high personal and financial cost—because both fields are dominated by technical solutions and quantitative analysis. They have little use for what is often regarded as irrelevant information.
In this wide-ranging book, written for students and non-specialists, Gesler applies cultural geography to health care and shows that throughout the world, in western and developing countries alike, the social sciences can inform the medical sciences nd make them more effective and less expensive.

[more]

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Cultural Sutures
Medicine and Media
Lester D. Friedman, ed.
Duke University Press, 2004
Medicine and the media exist in a unique symbiosis. Increasingly, health-care consumers turn to media sources—from news reports to Web sites to tv shows—for information about diseases, treatments, pharmacology, and important health issues. And just as the media scour the medical terrain for news stories and plot lines, those in the health-care industry use the media to publicize legitimate stories and advance particular agendas. The essays in Cultural Sutures delineate this deeply collaborative process by scrutinizing a broad range of interconnections between medicine and the media in print journalism, advertisements, fiction films, television shows, documentaries, and computer technology.

In this volume, scholars of cinema studies, philosophy, English, sociology, health-care education, women’s studies, bioethics, and other fields demonstrate how the world of medicine engages and permeates the media that surround us. Whether examining the press coverage of the Jack Kevorkian–euthanasia controversy; pondering questions about accessibility, accountability, and professionalism raised by such films as Awakenings, The Doctor, and Lorenzo’s Oil; analyzing the depiction of doctors, patients, and medicine on E.R. and Chicago Hope; or considering the ways in which digital technologies have redefined the medical body, these essays are consistently illuminating and provocative.

Contributors. Arthur Caplan, Tod Chambers, Stephanie Clark-Brown, Marc R. Cohen, Kelly A. Cole, Lucy Fischer, Lester D. Friedman, Joy V. Fuqua, Sander L. Gilman, Norbert Goldfield, Joel Howell, Therese Jones, Timothy Lenoir, Gregory Makoul, Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Faith McLellan, Jonathan M. Metzl, Christie Milliken, Martin F. Norden, Kirsten Ostherr, Limor Peer, Audrey Shafer, Joseph Turow, Greg VandeKieft, Otto F. Wahl

[more]

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The Death Gap
How Inequality Kills
David A. Ansell, MD
University of Chicago Press, 2021
We hear plenty about the widening income gap between the rich and the poor in America and about the expanding distance separating the haves and the have-nots. But when detailing the many things that the poor have not, we often overlook the most critical—their health. The poor die sooner. Blacks die sooner. And poor urban blacks die sooner than almost all other Americans. In nearly four decades as a doctor at hospitals serving some of the poorest communities in Chicago, David A. Ansell, MD,  has witnessed firsthand the lives behind these devastating statistics. In The Death Gap, he gives a grim survey of these realities, drawn from observations and stories of his patients.

While the contrasts and disparities among Chicago’s communities are particularly stark, the death gap is truly a nationwide epidemic—as Ansell shows, there is a thirty-five-year difference in life expectancy between the healthiest and wealthiest and the poorest and sickest American neighborhoods. If you are poor, where you live in America can dictate when you die. It doesn’t need to be this way; such divisions are not inevitable. Ansell calls out the social and cultural arguments that have been raised as ways of explaining or excusing these gaps, and he lays bare the structural violence—the racism, economic exploitation, and discrimination—that is really to blame. Inequality is a disease, Ansell argues, and we need to treat and eradicate it as we would any major illness. To do so, he outlines a vision that will provide the foundation for a healthier nation—for all.

As the COVID-19 mortality rates in underserved communities proved, inequality is all around us, and often the distance between high and low life expectancy can be a matter of just a few blocks. Updated with a new foreword by Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot and an afterword by Ansell, The Death Gap speaks to the urgency to face this national health crisis head-on.
[more]

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The Death Gap
How Inequality Kills
David A. Ansell, MD
University of Chicago Press, 2017
We hear plenty about the widening income gap between the rich and the poor in America and about the expanding distance separating the haves and the have-nots. But when detailing the many things that the poor have not, we often overlook the most critical—their health. The poor die sooner. Blacks die sooner. And poor urban blacks die sooner than almost all other Americans. In nearly four decades as a doctor at hospitals serving some of the poorest communities in Chicago, David A. Ansell, MD,  has witnessed firsthand the lives behind these devastating statistics. In The Death Gap, he gives a grim survey of these realities, drawn from observations and stories of his patients.

While the contrasts and disparities among Chicago’s communities are particularly stark, the death gap is truly a nationwide epidemic—as Ansell shows, there is a thirty-five-year difference in life expectancy between the healthiest and wealthiest and the poorest and sickest American neighborhoods. If you are poor, where you live in America can dictate when you die. It doesn’t need to be this way; such divisions are not inevitable. Ansell calls out the social and cultural arguments that have been raised as ways of explaining or excusing these gaps, and he lays bare the structural violence—the racism, economic exploitation, and discrimination—that is really to blame. Inequality is a disease, Ansell argues, and we need to treat and eradicate it as we would any major illness. To do so, he outlines a vision that will provide the foundation for a healthier nation—for all.

Inequality is all around us, and often the distance between high and low life expectancy can be a matter of just a few blocks. But geography need not be destiny, urges  Ansell. In The Death Gap he shows us how we can face this national health crisis head-on and take action against the circumstances that rob people of their dignity and their lives.
[more]

front cover of Diagnosis, Therapy, and Evidence
Diagnosis, Therapy, and Evidence
Conundrums in Modern American Medicine
Grob, Gerald N
Rutgers University Press, 2010
In Diagnosis, Therapy, and Evidence, Gerald N. Grob and Allan V. Horwitz employ historical and contemporary data and case studies, combining into one book a variety of medical and psychiatric conditions. They utilize case studies and examine tonsillectomy, cancer, heart disease, PTSD, anxiety, and depression, and identify differences between rhetoric and reality and the weaknesses in diagnosis and treatment
[more]

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Differences in Medicine
Unraveling Practices, Techniques, and Bodies
Marc Berg and Annemarie Mol, eds.
Duke University Press, 1998
Western medicine—especially in contrast with non-Western traditions of medical practice—is widely thought of as a coherent and unified field in which beliefs, definitions, and judgments are shared. Marc Berg and Annemarie Mol debunk this myth with an interdisciplinary and intercultural collection of essays that reveals the significantly varied ways practitioners of “conventional” Western medicine handle bodies, study test results, configure statistics, and converse with patients .
Combining theoretical work with interviews and direct observation of the activities and interactions of doctors, nurses, technicians, and patients, the contributors to this volume provide comparative studies of specific cases. Individual chapters explore topics such as the contested domain of fetal surgery in a California hospital, the construction of gender identity before transsexual surgery in Germany, and differences in the treatment and definition of pain by two clinics in France. Differences in Medicine advances earlier studies on medicine’s social diversity and regional variations to expose significant differences in the presumptions and decisions that affect patients’ lives, and marks a dramatic development in both the study of medicine and in science studies generally.
Revealing the ways in which the bodies and lives of people are constructed as medical objects by practitioners, technologies, and textbooks, this collection calls for and initiates new, more textured investigations and theories of the body in medicine and the practice of science. It will open new discussions among medical and healthcare professionals as well as scholars in medical anthropology, science studies, sociology, philosophy, and the history of medicine.

Contributors.
Isabelle Baszanger, Marc Berg, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Monica J. Casper, Charis M. Cussins, Nicolas Dodier, Stefan Hirschauer, Annemarie Mol, Vicky Singleton, Susan Leigh Star, Stefan Timmermans, Dick Willems


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Disease in the History of Modern Latin America
From Malaria to AIDS
Diego Armus, ed.
Duke University Press, 2003
Challenging traditional approaches to medical history, Disease in the History of Modern Latin America advances understandings of disease as a social and cultural construction in Latin America. This innovative collection provides a vivid look at the latest research in the cultural history of medicine through insightful essays about how disease—whether it be cholera or aids, leprosy or mental illness—was experienced and managed in different Latin American countries and regions, at different times from the late nineteenth century to the present.

Based on the idea that the meanings of sickness—and health—are contestable and subject to controversy, Disease in the History of Modern Latin America displays the richness of an interdisciplinary approach to social and cultural history. Examining diseases in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, the contributors explore the production of scientific knowledge, literary metaphors for illness, domestic public health efforts, and initiatives shaped by the agendas of international agencies. They also analyze the connections between ideas of sexuality, disease, nation, and modernity; the instrumental role of certain illnesses in state-building processes; welfare efforts sponsored by the state and led by the medical professions; and the boundaries between individual and state responsibilities regarding sickness and health. Diego Armus’s introduction contextualizes the essays within the history of medicine, the history of public health, and the sociocultural history of disease.

Contributors.
Diego Armus, Anne-Emanuelle Birn, Kathleen Elaine Bliss, Ann S. Blum, Marilia Coutinho, Marcus Cueto, Patrick Larvie, Gabriela Nouzeilles, Diana Obregón, Nancy Lays Stepan, Ann Zulawski

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Final Negotiations
A Story of Love, and Chronic Illness
Carolyn Ellis
Temple University Press, 1995

When Carolyn Ellis, a graduate student, and Gene Weinstein, her Professor, fell in love, he was experiencing the first stages of emphysema. As he became increasingly disabled and immobile, these two intensely connected partners fought to maintain their love and to live a meaningful life. They learned to negotiate their daily lives in a way that enabled each of them to feel sufficiently autonomous—him not always like a patient and her not always like a caretaker. Writing as a sociologist, Ellis protrays their life together as a way to understand the complexities of romance, of living with a progressive illness, and, in the final negotiation and reversal of positions, of coping with the loss of a loved one.

This rare memoir full of often raw details and emotions becomes an intimate conversation about the intricacies of feeling and relating in a relationship. What Ellis calls experimental ethnography is a finely crafted, forthright, and daring story framed by the author's reflections on writing about and analyzing one's own life. Casting off the safe distance of most social science inquiry, she surrenders the private shroud of a complex relationship to bring sociology closer to literature.

[more]

front cover of Framing Disease
Framing Disease
Studies in Cultural History
Rosenberg, Charles E
Rutgers University Press, 1992

"In some ways disease does not exist until we have agreed that it does, by perceiving, naming, and responding to it, " writes Charles E. Rosenberg in his introduction to this stimulating set of essays. Disease is both a biological event and a social phenomenon. Patient, doctor, family, and social institutions—including employers, government, and insurance companies—all find ways to frame the biological event in terms that make sense to them and serve their own ends.

Many diseases discussed here—endstage renal disease, rheumatic fever, parasitic infectious diseases, coronary thrombosis—came to be defined, redefined, and renamed over the course of several centuries. As these essays show, the concept of disease has also been used to frame culturally resonant behaviors: suicide, homosexuality, anorexia nervosa, chronic fatigue syndrome. Disease is also framed by public policy, as the cases of industrial disability and of forensic psychiatry demonstrate. Medical institutions, as managers of people with disease, come to have vested interests in diagnoses, as the histories of facilities to treat tuberculosis or epilepsy reveal. Ultimately, the existence and conquest of disease serves to frame a society's sense of its own "healthiness" and to give direction to social reforms.   

The contributors include Steven J. Peitzman, Peter C. English, John Farley, Christopher Lawrence, Michael MacDonald, Bert Hansen, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Robert A. Aronowitz, Gerald Markowitz, David Rosner, Janet A. Tighe, Barbara Bates, Ellen Dwyer, John M. Eyler, and Elizabeth Fee. For any student of disease and society, this book is essential, compelling reading.

[more]

front cover of From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism
From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism
Doctors, Healers, and Public Power in Costa Rica, 1800–1940
Steven Palmer
Duke University Press, 2003
From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism presents the history of medical practice in Costa Rica from the late colonial era—when none of the fifty thousand inhabitants had access to a titled physician, pharmacist, or midwife—to the 1940s, when the figure of the qualified medical doctor was part of everyday life for many of Costa Rica’s nearly one million citizens. It is the first book to chronicle the history of all healers, both professional and popular, in a Latin American country during the national period.
Steven Palmer breaks with the view of popular and professional medicine as polar opposites—where popular medicine is seen as representative of the authentic local community and as synonymous with oral tradition and religious and magical beliefs and professional medicine as advancing neocolonial interests through the work of secular, trained academicians. Arguing that there was significant and formative overlap between these two forms of medicine, Palmer shows that the relationship between practitioners of each was marked by coexistence, complementarity, and dialogue as often as it was by rivalry. Palmer explains that while the professionalization of medical practice was intricately connected to the nation-building process, the Costa Rican state never consistently displayed an interest in suppressing the practice of popular medicine. In fact, it persistently found both tacit and explicit ways to allow untitled healers to practice. Using empirical and archival research to bring people (such as the famous healer or curandero Professor Carlos Carbell), events, and institutions (including the Rockefeller Foundation) to life, From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism demonstrates that it was through everyday acts of negotiation among agents of the state, medical professionals, and popular practitioners that the contours of Costa Rica’s modern, heterogeneous health care system were established.
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Health and Health Care In Developing Countries
Sociological Perspectives
Peter Conrad
Temple University Press, 1993

In this seminal collection of articles on health care in the Third World, sociological perspectives are applied to medical issues in revealing ways. Fourteen essays (all but two of which are original to this volume) examine the social production of health, disease, and systems of care throughout the developing world. The volume covers a range of areas—central Africa, Nigeria, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, Nepal, China, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Mexico—and a broad scope of topics, from emergency care, the AIDS epidemic, and women's health care, to public health programs and national health care policies.

Contributors address the central question of whether health systems in developing areas should emphasize the role of clinical medicine and individual physicians or community and preventive medical resources. The major health problems faced by these societies—inadequate sanitation, infectious disease, high infant-child mortality, and a lack of family planning—indicate the greater need for health educators and public health workers despite many poor nations' desire for Western doctors. Other topics that are examined include the process of seeking medical aid; the relationship between traditional and modern medicines; medical education, hospital care, and communication between doctors and patients in developing countries; and the relevance and application of sociology in Third World settings.

This volume seeks to draw attention to the significance of medical sociology for understanding Third World health problems and to show how examining developing societies may necessitate reframing or modifying some Western sociological notions. In addition, these essays stretch the boundaries of medical sociology to include Third World issues.

[more]

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Health and Social Change in International Perspective
Lincoln C. Chen
Harvard University Press, 1994

Health and Social Change in International Perspective brings together an unprecedented interdisciplinary series of approaches to understanding the social dimensions of health change around the world. The seventeen contributors—demographers, epidemiologists, economists, anthropologists, public health scientists—are among the intellectual leaders of efforts to respond to the world’s health challenges.

Moving beyond the limits of established theories about demographic and epidemiologic transition, this book offers broad explorations of the social causes and consequences of health change. Consensus is reached on some matters, but critical debate and controversy predominate in others. The authors address several critical questions: What are the forms and structures of health transitions? Do these changes assume universally consistent patterns, or are health transitions particularistic, reflecting space, time, and community? What are the methodological issues in definition and measurement? And how can understanding improve health policy, interventions, and the research agenda?

Exploring new frontiers of a vital topic, Health and Social Change in International Perspective is an invaluable resource for social and health scientists working to understand world health change.

[more]

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Health and Work Productivity
Making the Business Case for Quality Health Care
Edited by Ronald C. Kessler and Paul E. Stang
University of Chicago Press, 2006
A recent study of productivity in the workplace revealed that workers spend on average eight percent of their workday doing nothing. This statistic takes on greater significance when we find that health problems impact employee productivity loss by an even greater percentage. In light of this discovery, a group of leading experts from the emerging field of health and productivity research argues that the expansion of health care benefits represents a substantial investment opportunity for employers.
 
Health and Work Productivity presents state-of-the-art health and productivity research that suggests interventions aimed at prevention, early detection, and best-practice treatment of workers along with an informed allocation strategy can produce significant cost-benefits for employers. Contributors cover all the major aspects of this new area of research: approaches to studying the effects of health on productivity, ways for employers to estimate the costs of productivity loss, concrete suggestions for future research developments in the area, and the implications of this research for public policy.
[more]

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

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

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

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

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

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Killing with Kindness
Haiti, International Aid, and NGOs
Schuller, Mark
Rutgers University Press, 2012

Winner of the 2015 Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology

After Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, over half of U.S. households donated to thousands of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in that country. Yet we continue to hear stories of misery from Haiti. Why have NGOs failed at their mission?

Set in Haiti during the 2004 coup and aftermath and enhanced by research conducted after the 2010 earthquake, Killing with Kindness analyzes the impact of official development aid on recipient NGOs and their relationships with local communities. Written like a detective story, the book offers rich ethnographic comparisons of two Haitian women’s NGOs working in HIV/AIDS prevention, one with public funding (including USAID), the other with private European NGO partners. Mark Schuller looks at participation and autonomy, analyzing donor policies that inhibit these goals. He focuses on NGOs’ roles as intermediaries in “gluing” the contemporary world system together and shows how power works within the aid system as these intermediaries impose interpretations of unclear mandates down the chain—a process Schuller calls “trickle-down imperialism.”

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Liminal Lives
Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine
Susan Merrill Squier
Duke University Press, 2004
Embryo adoptions, stem cells capable of transforming into any cell in the human body, intra- and inter-species organ transplantation—these and other biomedical advances have unsettled ideas of what it means to be human, of when life begins and ends. In the first study to consider the cultural impact of the medical transformation of the entire human life span, Susan Merrill Squier argues that fiction—particularly science fiction—serves as a space where worries about ethically and socially charged scientific procedures are worked through. Indeed, she demonstrates that in many instances fiction has anticipated and paved the way for far-reaching biomedical changes. Squier uses the anthropological concept of liminality—the state of being on the threshold of change, no longer one thing yet not quite another—to explore how, from the early twentieth century forward, fiction and science together have altered not only the concept of the human being but the contours of human life.

Drawing on archival materials of twentieth-century biology; little-known works of fiction and science fiction; and twentieth- and twenty-first century U.S. and U.K. government reports by the National Institutes of Health, the Parliamentary Advisory Group on the Ethics of Xenotransplantation, and the President’s Council on Bioethics, she examines a number of biomedical changes as each was portrayed by scientists, social scientists, and authors of fiction and poetry. Among the scientific developments she considers are the cultured cell, the hybrid embryo, the engineered intrauterine fetus, the child treated with human growth hormone, the process of organ transplantation, and the elderly person rejuvenated by hormone replacement therapy or other artificial means. Squier shows that in the midst of new phenomena such as these, literature helps us imagine new ways of living. It allows us to reflect on the possibilities and perils of our liminal lives.

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The Limits of Medicine
How Science Shapes Our Hope for the Cure
Edward S. Golub
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Edward Golub, distinguished researcher and former professor of immunology, shows that
major advances in medicine are caused by changes in the way scientists describe disease.
Bleeding, sweating, and other treatments we consider barbaric were standard treatments for
centuries because they conformed to a conception of disease shared by patients and doctors.
Scientific breakthroughs in the understanding of disease in the nineteenth century transformed
treatment and the goals of medicine. Golub argues that the ongoing revolution in molecular
genetics has opened the door to the "biology of complexity," again transforming our view of
disease. This thought-provoking, timely book reveals a crucial but overlooked role of science
in medicine, and offers a new vision for the goals of both science and medicine as we enter the
twenty-first century.
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The Medical Library Association Guide to Health Literacy at the Library
American Library Association
American Library Association, 2008

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Medicalized Masculinities
edited by Dana Rosenfeld and Christopher A. Faircloth
Temple University Press, 2006
When medicalization—the characterization of human traits in terms of disease and ailment—first appeared as a concept in the 1970s, most social science gender scholarship focused on female or genderless bodies. The work on men, health, and medicine was scant and tended to depict masculinity as intrinsically damaging to men's health.

Medicalized Masculinities considers how these threads in scholarship failed to consider the male body adequately and presents cutting-edge research into the definition and regulation of masculinity by medicine. Renowned health and gender studies experts examine medicalized conditions such as balding, aging, and other dimensions of the life cycle in the tradition of the sociology of health and gender.
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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.
[more]

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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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The Mirage of Health
Utopia, Progress, and Biological Change
Dubos, Jean
Rutgers University Press, 1987
'Complete freedom from disease and from struggle is almost incompatible with the process of living, ' Rene Dubos asserted in this classic essay on ecology and health. All the accomplishments of science and technology, he argued, will not bring the utopian dream of universal well-being, because they ignore the dynamic process of adaptation to a constantly changing environment that every living organism must face.
[more]

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The Political Economy of Health in Africa
Mis Af#60
Toyin Falola
Ohio University Press, 1992
This book examines the major phases in the history of health services in Africa and treats health as an integral aspect of the deepening crisis in Africa’s underdevelopment. One important thesis is that Western delivery systems have made health care less accessible for most people. Contributors direct attention to problems engendered by food shortages, acute cases of infection, the market in fake drugs as well as the inequality of access to facilities, the violation of human rights, and the recent danger of the dumping of toxic wastes in several African countries. One major implication of this volume is that there can be no solution to the health crisis in Africa until the linkage between health and poverty is recognized. The authors consider questions that add to the contemporary discussion of the place that traditional African medicine and philosophy should take alongside modern Western medicine in Africa today.
[more]

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The Politics of Public Health
Turshen, Meredeth
Rutgers University Press, 1989
In the progressive public health tradition, Meredeth Turshen criticizes conventional approaches to disease and offers an alternative framework based on the concept that health and illness are socially produced throughout the world. Using contemporary and historical accounts of great moments and great debates in public health, Turshen exposes the failure to improve health even when a specific program like smallpox vaccination succeeds. Her analyses incorporate theoretical contributions from Marxism and feminism.

The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 outlines current and alternative approaches to health, theories of disease causation, the policies and practices that follow from these theories, and issues of equity and access to health care. A chapter of women's health in three African countries illustrates these concepts. Part 2 describes limits to conventional public health, using case histories of plague control, dioxin decontamination, sanitary reform, and smallpox and malaria eradication. In Part 3, Turshen presents case histories of preventive medicine, nutrition and agribusiness, mental health, and AIDS in Africa to suggest new approaches based on an alternative model of social production. Part 4 looks to the future of public health. It examines basic issues in integrating public health research, training, and services, and concludes with an agenda for action.
[more]

front cover of The Politics of Public Health
The Politics of Public Health
Turshen, Meredeth
Rutgers University Press, 1989
In the progressive public health tradition, Meredeth Turshen criticizes conventional approaches to disease and offers an alternative framework based on the concept that health and illness are socially produced throughout the world. Using contemporary and historical accounts of great moments and great debates in public health, Turshen exposes the failure to improve health even when a specific program like smallpox vaccination succeeds. Her analyses incorporate theoretical contributions from Marxism and feminism.

The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 outlines current and alternative approaches to health, theories of disease causation, the policies and practices that follow from these theories, and issues of equity and access to health care. A chapter of women's health in three African countries illustrates these concepts. Part 2 describes limits to conventional public health, using case histories of plague control, dioxin decontamination, sanitary reform, and smallpox and malaria eradication. In Part 3, Turshen presents case histories of preventive medicine, nutrition and agribusiness, mental health, and AIDS in Africa to suggest new approaches based on an alternative model of social production. Part 4 looks to the future of public health. It examines basic issues in integrating public health research, training, and services, and concludes with an agenda for action.
[more]

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Popular Print and Popular Medicine
Almanacs and Health Advice in Early America
Thomas A. Horrocks
University of Massachusetts Press, 2008
In this innovative study of the relationship between popular print and popular attitudes toward the body, health, and disease in antebellum America, Thomas A. Horrocks focuses our attention on a publication long neglected by scholars—the almanac. Approaching his subject as both a historian of the book and a historian of medicine, Horrocks contends that the almanac, the most popular secular publication in America from the late eighteenth century to the first quarter of the nineteenth, both shaped and was shaped by early Americans' beliefs and practices pertaining to health and medicine. Analyzing the astrological, therapeutic, and regimen advice offered in American almanacs over two centuries, and comparing it with similar advice offered in other genres of popular print of the period, Horrocks effectively demonstrates that the almanac was a leading source of health information in America prior to the Civil War. He contends that the almanac was an integral component of a complicated, fragmented, semi-vernacular health literature of the period, and that the genre played a leading role in disseminating astrological health advice as well as shaping contemporary and future perceptions of astrology. In terms of therapeutic and regimen advice, Horrocks asserts that the almanac performed a complementary role, confirming and reinforcing traditional beliefs and practices. By analyzing the almanac as a cultural artifact that represents a time, a place, and a certain set of assumptions and beliefs, he demonstrates that the genre can provide a lens through which scholars may examine early American attitudes and practices concerning their health in particular and American popular culture in general.
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Profession of Medicine
A Study of the Sociology of Applied Knowledge
Eliot Freidson
University of Chicago Press, 1988
"Must be judged as a landmark in medical sociology."—Norman Denzin, Journal of Health and Social Behavior

"Profession of Medicine is a challenging monograph; the ideas presented are stimulating and thought provoking. . . . Given the expanding domain of what illness is and the contentions of physicians about their rights as professionals, Freidson wonders aloud whether expertise is becoming a mask for privilege and power. . . . Profession of Medicine is a landmark in the sociological analysis of the professions in modern society."—Ron Miller, Sociological Quarterly

"This is the first book that I know of to go to the root of the matter by laying open to view the fundamental nature of the professional claim, and the structure of professional institutions."—Everett C. Hughes, Science
[more]

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Raw Material
Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture
Erin O'Connor
Duke University Press, 2000
Raw Material analyzes how Victorians used the pathology of disease to express deep-seated anxieties about a rapidly industrializing England’s relationship to the material world. Drawing on medicine, literature, political economy, sociology, anthropology, and popular advertising, Erin O’Connor explores “the industrial logic of disease,” the dynamic that coupled pathology and production in Victorian thinking about cultural processes in general, and about disease in particular.
O’Connor focuses on how four particularly troubling physical conditions were represented in a variety of literature. She begins by exploring how Asiatic cholera, which reached epidemic proportions on four separate occasions between 1832 and 1865, was thought to represent the dangers of cultural contamination and dissolution. The next two chapters concentrate on the problems breast cancer and amputation posed for understanding gender. After discussing how breast cancer was believed to be caused by the female body’s intolerance to urban life, O'Connor turns to men’s bodies, examining how new prosthetic technology allowed dismembered soldiers and industrial workers to reconstruct themselves as productive members of society. The final chapter explores how freak shows displayed gross deformity as the stuff of a new and improved individuality. Complicating an understanding of the Victorian body as both a stable and stabilizing structure, she elaborates how Victorians used disease as a messy, often strategically unintelligible way of articulating the uncertainties of chaotic change. Over the course of the century, O’Connor shows, the disfiguring process of disease became a way of symbolically transfiguring the self. While cholera, cancer, limb loss, and deformity incapacitated and even killed people, their dramatic symptoms provided opportunities for imaginatively adapting to a world where it was increasingly difficult to determine not only what it meant to be human but also what it meant to be alive.
Raw Material will interest an audience of students and scholars of Victorian literature, cultural history, and the history of medicine.
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Rebirth of the Clinic
Places and Agents in Contemporary Health Care
Cindy Patton
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
From physical location to payment processes to expectations of both patients and caregivers, nearly everything surrounding the contemporary medical clinic's central activity has changed since Michel Foucualt's Birth of the Clinic. Indebted to that work, but recognizing the gap between what the modern clinic hoped to be and what it has become, Rebirth of the Clinic explores medical practices that shed light on the fraught relationship between medical systems, practitioners, and patients.

Combining theory, history, and ethnography, the contributors to this volume ground today's clinic in a larger scheme of power relations, identifying the cultural, political, and economic pressures that frame clinical relationships, including the instrumentalist definition of health, actuarial-based medical practices, and patient self-help movements, which simultaneously hem in and create the conditions under which agents creatively change ideas of illness and treatment.

From threatened community health centers in poor African American locales to innovative nursing practices among the marginally housed citizens of Canada's poorest urban neighborhood, this volume addresses not just the who, what, where, and how of place-specific clinical practices, but also sets these local experiences against a theoretical backdrop that links them to the power of modern medicine in shaping fundamental life experiences.
 
Contributors: Christine Ceci, U of Alberta; Lisa Diedrich, Stony Brook U; Suzanne Fraser, Monash U; John Liesch, Simon Fraser U; Jenna Loyd, CUNY; Annemarie Mol, U of Amsterdam; Mary Ellen Purkis, U of Victoria.
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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.
[more]

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Risky Rhetoric
AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing
J. Blake Scott
Southern Illinois University Press, 2003

Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing is the first book-length study of the rhetoric inherent in and surrounding HIV testing. In addition to providing a history of HIV testing in the United States from 1985 to the present, J. Blake Scott explains how faulty arguments about testing’s power and effects have promoted unresponsive and even dangerous testing practices for so-called healthy subjects as well as those deemed risky.A new afterword to the paperback edition discusses changes in testing technology, treatments, and public health responses in the last ten years. The ultimate goal of Risky Rhetoric is to offer strategies to policy makers, HIV educators and test counselors, and other rhetors for developing more responsive and egalitarian testing-related rhetorics and practices.

[more]

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The Social Medicine Reader
Gail E. Henderson, Nancy M. P. King, Ronald P. Strauss, Sue E. Estroff, and Larry R. Churchill, eds.
Duke University Press, 1997
To meet the needs of the rapidly changing world of health care, future physicans and health care providers will need to be trained to become wiser scientists and humanists in order to understand the social and moral as well as technological aspects of health and illness. The Social Medicine Reader is designed to meet this need.
Based on more than a decade of teaching social medicine to first-year medical students at the pioneering Department of Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina, The Social Medicine Reader defines the meaning of the social medicine perspective and offers an approach for teaching it. Looking at medicine from a variety of perspectives, this anthology features fiction, medical reports, scholarly essays, poetry, case studies, and personal narratives by patients and doctors—all of which contribute to an understanding of how medicine and medical practice is profoundly influenced by social, cultural, political, and economic forces.
What happens when a person becomes a patient? How are illness and disability experienced? What causes disease? What can medicine do? What constitutes a doctor/patient relationship? What are the ethical obligations of a health care provider? These questions and many others are raised by The Social Medicine Reader, which is organized into sections that address how patients experience illness, cultural attitudes toward disease, social factors related to health problems, the socialization of physicians, the doctor/patient relationship, health care ethics and the provider’s role, medical care financing, rationing, and managed care.
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The Social Medicine Reader, Second Edition
Volume 3: Health Policy, Markets, and Medicine
Jonathan Oberlander, Larry R. Churchill, Sue E. Estroff, Gail E. Henderson, Nancy M. P. King, and Ronald P. Strauss, eds.
Duke University Press, 2005
Duke University Press is pleased to announce the second edition of the bestselling Social Medicine Reader. The Reader provides a survey of the challenging issues facing today’s health care providers, patients, and caregivers by bringing together moving narratives of illness, commentaries by physicians, debates about complex medical cases, and conceptually and empirically based writings by scholars in medicine, the social sciences, and the humanities. The first edition of The Social Medicine Reader was a single volume. This significantly revised and expanded second edition is divided into three volumes to facilitate use by different audiences with varying interests.

Praise for the 3-volume second edition of The Social Medicine Reader:
“A superb collection of essays that illuminate the role of medicine in modern society. Students and general readers are not likely to find anything better.”—Arnold S. Relman, Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Praise for the first edition:
“This reviewer strongly recommends The Social Medicine Reader to the attention of medical educators.”—Samuel W. Bloom, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association

Volume 3:

Over the past four decades the American health care system has witnessed dramatic changes in private health insurance, campaigns to enact national health insurance, and the rise (and perhaps fall) of managed care. Bringing together seventeen pieces new to this second edition of The Social Medicine Reader and four pieces from the first edition, Health Policy, Markets, and Medicine draws on a broad range of disciplinary perspectives—including political science, economics, history, and bioethics—to consider changes in health care and the future of U.S. health policy. Contributors analyze the historical and moral foundation of today’s policy debates, examine why health care spending is so hard to control in the United States, and explain the political dynamics of Medicare and Medicaid. Selections address the rise of managed care, its impact on patients and physicians, and the ethical implications of applying a business ethos to medical care; they also compare the U.S. health care system to the systems in European countries, Canada, and Japan. Additional readings probe contemporary policy issues, including the emergence of consumer-driven health care, efforts to move quality of care to the top of the policy agenda, and the implications of the aging of America for public policy.

Contributors: Henry J. Aaron, Drew E. Altman, George J. Annas, Robert H. Binstock, Thomas Bodenheimer, Troyen A. Brennan, Robert H. Brook, Lawrence D. Brown, Daniel Callahan, Jafna L. Cox, Victor R. Fuchs, Kevin Grumbach, Rudolf Klein, Robert Kuttner, Larry Levitt, Donald L. Madison, Wendy K. Mariner, Elizabeth A. McGlynn, Jonathan Oberlander, Geov Parrish, Sharon Redmayne, Uwe E. Reinhardt, Michael S. Sparer, Deborah Stone

[more]

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The Social Medicine Reader, Second Edition
Volume Two: Social and Cultural Contributions to Health, Difference, and Inequality
Gail E. Henderson, Sue E. Estroff, Larry R. Churchill, Nancy M. P. King, Jonathan Oberlander, and Ronald P. Strauss, eds.
Duke University Press, 2005
Duke University Press is pleased to announce the second edition of the bestselling Social Medicine Reader. The Reader provides a survey of the challenging issues facing today’s health care providers, patients, and caregivers by bringing together moving narratives of illness, commentaries by physicians, debates about complex medical cases, and conceptually and empirically based writings by scholars in medicine, the social sciences, and the humanities. The first edition of The Social Medicine Reader was a single volume. This significantly revised and expanded second edition is divided into three volumes to facilitate use by different audiences with varying interests.

Praise for the 3-volume second edition of The Social Medicine Reader:
“A superb collection of essays that illuminate the role of medicine in modern society. Students and general readers are not likely to find anything better.”—Arnold S. Relman, Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Praise for the first edition:
“This reviewer strongly recommends The Social Medicine Reader to the attention of medical educators.”—Samuel W. Bloom, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association

Volume 2:

Ranging from a historical look at eugenics to an ethnographic description of parents receiving the news that their child has Down syndrome, from analyses of inequalities in the delivery of health services to an examination of the meaning of race in genomics research, and from a meditation on the loneliness of the long-term caregiver to a reflection on what children owe their elderly parents, this volume explores health and illness. Social and Cultural Contributions to Health, Difference, and Inequality brings together seventeen pieces new to this edition of The Social Medicine Reader and five pieces that appeared in the first edition. It focuses on how difference and disability are defined and experienced in contemporary America, how the social categories commonly used to predict disease outcomes—such as gender, race and ethnicity, and social class—have become contested terrain, and why some groups have more limited access to health care services than others. Juxtaposing first-person narratives with empirical and conceptual studies, this compelling collection draws on several disciplines, including cultural and medical anthropology, sociology, and the history of medicine.

Contributors: Laurie K. Abraham, Raj Bhopal, Ami S. Brodoff, Daniel Callahan, David Diamond, Liam Donaldson, Alice Dreger, Sue E. Estroff, Paul Farmer, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Jerome Groopman, Gail E. Henderson, Linda M. Hunt, Barbara A. Koenig, Donald R. Lannin, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, Carol Levine, Judith Lorber, Nancy Mairs, Holly F. Mathews, James P. Mitchell, Joanna Mountain, Alan R. Nelson, Martin S. Pernick, Rayna Rapp, Sally L. Satel, Robert S. Schwartz, Brian D. Smedley, Adrienne Y. Stith, Sharon Sytsma, Gordon Weaver, Bruce Wilson, Irving Kenneth Zola

[more]

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The Social Medicine Reader, Volume I, Third Edition
Ethics and Cultures of Biomedicine
Jonathan Oberlander, Mara Buchbinder, Larry R. Churchill, Sue E. Estroff, Nancy M. King, Barry F. Saunders, Ronald P. Strauss, and Rebecca L. Walker, editors
Duke University Press, 2019
The extensively updated and revised third edition of the bestselling Social Medicine Reader provides a survey of the challenging issues facing today's health care providers, patients, and caregivers by bringing together moving narratives of illness, commentaries by physicians, debates about complex medical cases, and conceptually and empirically based writings by scholars in medicine, the social sciences, and the humanities.

Volume 1, Ethics and Cultures of Biomedicine, contains essays, case studies, narratives, fiction, and poems that focus on the experiences of illness and of clinician-patient relationships. Among other topics the contributors examine the roles and training of professionals alongside the broader cultures of biomedicine; health care; experiences and decisions regarding death, dying, and struggling to live; and particular manifestations of injustice in the broader health system. The Reader is essential reading for all medical students, physicians, and health care providers.
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The Social Medicine Reader, Volume II, Third Edition
Differences and Inequalities, Volume 2
Jonathan Oberlander, Mara Buchbinder, Larry R. Churchill, Sue E. Estroff, Nancy M. King, Barry F. Saunders, Ronald P. Strauss, and Rebecca L. Walker, editors
Duke University Press, 2019
The extensively updated and revised third edition of the bestselling Social Medicine Reader provides a survey of the challenging issues facing today's health care providers, patients, and caregivers with writings by scholars in medicine, the social sciences, and the humanities.
[more]

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Social Structure and Testosterone
Explorations in the Socio-Bio-Social Chain
Kemper, Theodore D
Rutgers University Press, 1990
Challenging the accepted view that social structures are founded on a pre-existing and slowly changing biological base, Kemper (sociology, St. John's U.) argues that the two realms interact, specifically that testosterone levels in both men and women are determined by social dominance. 
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Sudden Death and the Myth of CPR
Stefan Timmermans, foreword by Bern Shen
Temple University Press, 1999
Sudden Death and the Myth of CPR is for anyone who has taken a CPR course or who believes the images from television dramas. It is also for families of victims and survivors of CPR. It will engage emergency personnel, others in the medical field, and anyone concerned with ethical issues of death and dying.

Anyone who has ever taken a CPR course has wondered, "What would happen if I actually had to use CPR?" In Western societies, the lifesaving power of resuscitation has the status of a revered cultural myth. It promises life in the face of sudden death, but the reality is that lives are rarely saved. Medical researchers estimate the survival rate for out-of-hospital CPR to be between 1 and 3 percent. Sudden Death and the Myth of CPR explores the history of this medical innovation and the promotion of its effectiveness.

The overuse of resuscitation, Timmermans explains, defines people's experience with sudden death, something he learned firsthand by following the practice of lifesaving from street corner to emergency room. He argues that very few people are successfully resuscitated without brain damage despite the promotion of CPR's effectiveness through powerful media images. In vivid accounts of the day-to-day practices of cardiopulmonary resuscitation in one of the only studies o f sudden death, Timmermans records the astonishingly frank comments of emergency personnel. Doctors, nurses, social workers, and  paramedics express emotions from cynicism about going through the futile motions to genuine concern for victims' family members.

If a person who  was supposed to keep on living dies at the end of a resuscitative attempt, how socially meaningful is the dying? Timmermans asks tough questions and addresses the controversial ethical issues about the appropriateness of interfering with life and death. He suggests policy reform and the restoration of dignity to sudden death.
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Technology Bureaucracy Healing
A Postmodern Paradigm
Roger J. Bulger
University of Iowa Press, 1988

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Welfare Medical Care
An Experiment
Charles H. Goodrich, Margaret C. Olendzki, and George G. Reader
Harvard University Press, 1970
This comprehensive report on the New York Hospital–Cornell Project, 1960–1965, describes the first hospital-based experiment in the organization of welfare medical care service in New York City. The purposes of the project were to determine whether it was feasible for a voluntary teaching hospital to provide complete medical care for a population of welfare recipients and to compare the utilization, cost, and quality of that care with that provided to a control group who received care under the existing system. The project found that hospital-based medical care for welfare recipients is feasible and satisfactory.
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The Western Disease
Contesting Autism in the Somali Diaspora
Claire Laurier Decoteau
University of Chicago Press, 2021

Because autism is an increasingly common diagnosis, North Americans are familiar with its symptoms and treatments. But what we know and think about autism is shaped by our social relationship to health, disease, and the medical system. In The Western Disease Claire Laurier Decoteau explores the ways that recent immigrants from Somalia to Canada and the US make sense of their children’s diagnosis of autism. Having never heard of autism before migrating to North America, they often determine that it must be a Western disease. Given its apparent absence in Somalia, they view it as Western in nature, caused by environmental and health conditions unique to life in North America. 

Following Somali parents as they struggle to make sense of their children's illness and advocate for alternative care, Decoteau unfolds how complex interacting factors of immigration, race, and class affect Somalis’ relationship to the disease. Somalis’ engagement with autism challenges the prevailing presumption among Western doctors that their approach to healing is universal.   Decoteau argues that centering an analysis on autism within the Somali diaspora exposes how autism has been defined and institutionalized as a white, middle-class disorder, leading to health disparities based on race, class, age, and ability. The Western Disease asks us to consider the social causes of disease and the role environmental changes and structural inequalities play in health vulnerability.

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