1414 books match the query 'Medical' and 119 start with a

cover of And a Time to Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life

And a Time to Die

How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life

Sharon R. Kaufman

University of Chicago Press, 2006

Over the past thirty years, the way Americans experience death has been dramatically altered. The advent of medical technology capable of sustaining life without restoring health has changed where, when, and how we die. In this revelatory study, medical anthropologist Sharon R. Kaufman examines the powerful center of those changes: the hospital, where most Americans die today. She deftly links the experiences of patients and families, the work of hospital staff, and the ramifications of institutional bureaucracy to show the invisible power of the hospital system in shaping death and our individual experience of it. In doing so, Kaufman also speaks to the ways we understand what it means to be human and to be alive.

“An act of courage and a public service.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“This beautifully synthesized and disquieting account of how hospital patients die melds disciplined description with acute analysis, incorporating the voices of doctors, nurses, social workers, and patients in a provocative analysis of the modern American quest for a ‘good death.’”—Publishers Weekly

“Kaufman exposes the bureaucratic and ethical quandaries that hover over the modern deathbed.”—Psychology Today

“Kaufman’s analysis illuminates the complexity of the care of critically ill and dying patients [and] the ambiguity of slogans such as ‘death with dignity,’ ‘quality of life,’ and ‘stopping life support.’ . . . Thought-provoking reading for everyone contemplating the fate of us all.”—New England Journal of Medicine

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cover of Animals, Aging, and the Aged

Animals, Aging, and the Aged

Leo K. Bustad

University of Minnesota Press, 1981

Animals, Aging, and the Aged was first published in 1981. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This volume explores the significant contributions of animals to our understanding of aging, to improving geriatric medicine, and to providing companionship and assistance to the elderly. Leo L. Bustad discusses what can be learned from animal life-span studies about the process of aging, including the problems of cardiovascular disease, cancer, osteoporosis, and age-related mental conditions. The results of these studies suggest that changes in life-style—especially the diet—may modify the effects of chronic degenerative diseases.

Other studies show that caring for a pet can contribute greatly to the health and well being of the elderly. Bustad surveys experiments using animals in therapy and he presents, for the first time, evaluative instruments for choosing the appropriate pet. Companion animals allow many elderly people to maintain their independence. Animals are also helpful as aids for those with visual, hearing, and physical impairments. An appendix lists agencies that train dogs as aids to the physically impaired.

Animals, Aging, and the Aged is a thoughtful discussion of the physical, psychological, and social problems faced by the elderly, with emphasis on the ways that animals have contributed to the solution of some of those problems. As such, it will be useful for those involved in geriatric medicine and social work and in veterinary medicine and research. This book is volume 5 in the series Wesley W. Spink Lectures in Comparative Medicine.

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cover of Another Magic Mountain: Kibong'oto Hospital and African Tuberculosis, 1920–2000

Another Magic Mountain

Kibong'oto Hospital and African Tuberculosis, 1920–2000

Christoph Gradmann

Ohio University Press, 2025

Kibong’oto Hospital, opened in 1926, is an East African tuberculosis treatment center located on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. Its history is crucial to understanding tuberculosis in Tanzania and, more broadly, in Africa. With the hospital as a point of departure, Christoph Gradmann presents a history of this disease that engages with local and regional contexts rather than with international elite science and health policies.

The book addresses key questions about the African experience with tuberculosis:

  • What did it mean to do clinical science on tuberculosis in colonial and postcolonial contexts?
  • Along which trajectories did medical practice and research evolve in a place where international advances in medical science were sometimes heard of only faintly and where resources could be scarce?
  • How did a large hospital with several hundred beds dedicated to the treatment of just one condition figure in the development of national and regional health systems?
  • How did Kibong’oto Hospital, a pride of colonial health governance, transition after Tanzania gained independence?
  • How did treating and researching tuberculosis change throughout the twentieth century in an African hospital dedicated to that condition?
  • How did research at the hospital contribute to tuberculosis-control strategies on national and international levels?

The book is based on the hospital’s unique archive: its surviving library of thousands of case summaries. Since 1926, this library has documented an enormous number of patient lives, staff careers, diagnoses, treatments, clinical trials, and much more. For today’s readers, the library provides insight into a history of clinical medicine in Africa, for which very few comparable archives exist. Gradmann supplements this site-specific research with material from national and international archives, as well as interviews with former staff involved in that history. The book’s four chapters offer perspectives on colonial epidemiological research in the interwar years; on late colonial healthcare development plans and the arrival of modern drug therapies; on the role of a national tuberculosis hospital in a newly independent country; and on the history of tuberculosis control in an age of economic crisis, HIV, and emergent global health-treatment programs. Finally, Gradmann discusses what the history of a large hospital can add to today’s tuberculosis research, control policy, and historiography.

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cover of Anthony Cerami: A Life in Translational Medicine

Anthony Cerami

A Life in Translational Medicine

Conrad Keating

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Since the turn of the new millennium, ‘translational research’, the scientific process of bringing disease-targeted knowledge from the laboratory to treat patients in the clinic, has gone mainstream and is now practiced by large universities and institutes across the globe.  Into this dynamic of the rapidly changing world of translational medical research this book sets the life of one of the discipline’s most influential practitioners, Anthony Cerami. His work spans more than five decades and culminated in the discovery, invention and development of diagnostics and therapeutics used daily by millions of people. Students in molecular medicine and investigators pursuing basic science in the hope of improving human health will find inspiration in examining the sacrifices and achievements of Cerami’s career in translational medicine. During his three decades at Rockefeller University his cross-disciplinary and laboratory-without-wall approach established ‘rational drug design’ as the most effective means of advancing the fields of parasitology, hematology, immunology, metabolism, therapeutics and molecular medicine. Cerami’s story and that of the evolution of translation are intimately entwined: the contours of Cerami’s career shaped by developments in translation, and in exchange, the field itself molded by Cerami’s work.  To understand one is to understand the other. By examining the life of this often overlooked biochemist it is possible to intimately focus on the ideas and thought processes of a scientist who has helped to define the great acceleration in translational research over the past half century – research that, knowingly or otherwise, has most likely affected the life of almost everyone on the planet.  We also gain a better understanding of the febrile creative atmosphere that percolated through the laboratories leading the way in translational medicine, and gain insight into the art, science, successes, failures and providence that underlie major scientific breakthroughs.  Anybody interested in the questions of where modern medicines come from, how health outcomes around the globe are affected by research and imagination, and where the future of drug discovery is leading, will be rewarded by exploring Cerami’s life in translation.  This book is not restricted to those with a professional interest in science, because anyone dedicated to living a life of creativity and discovery will be rewarded by reading this book.  In many respects, Cerami’s life reflects the modern metaphor of the ‘American dream’ with his journey from humble beginnings on a chicken farm in rural New Jersey, to occupying a place in  the highest echelons of the US scientific establishment.  His journey in translational medicine was propelled forward by two obsessions; the idea that he could help people who were sick, and the excitement of discovery. In following his two great passions, he trained a generation of specialists in translational medicine that continue to transform our understanding of, and treatments for, human disease.  Anthony Cerami’s work has shown how science has become an important force for social change by laying the foundations of modern translational medicine.
 
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cover of Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950

Appetite and Its Discontents

Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950

Elizabeth A. Williams

University of Chicago Press, 2020

Why do we eat? Is it instinct? Despite the necessity of food, anxieties about what and how to eat are widespread and persistent. In Appetite and Its Discontents, Elizabeth A. Williams explores contemporary worries about eating through the lens of science and medicine to show us how appetite—once a matter of personal inclination—became an object of science.
 
Williams charts the history of inquiry into appetite between 1750 and 1950, as scientific and medical concepts of appetite shifted alongside developments in physiology, natural history, psychology, and ethology. She shows how, in the eighteenth century, trust in appetite was undermined when researchers who investigated ingestion and digestion began claiming that science alone could say which ways of eating were healthy and which were not. She goes on to trace nineteenth- and twentieth-century conflicts over the nature of appetite between mechanists and vitalists, experimentalists and bedside physicians, and localists and holists, illuminating struggles that have never been resolved. By exploring the core disciplines in investigations in appetite and eating, Williams reframes the way we think about food, nutrition, and the nature of health itself..
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cover of Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China

Appetites

Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China

Judith Farquhar

Duke University Press, 2002

Judith Farquhar’s innovative study of medicine and popular culture in modern China reveals the thoroughly political and historical character of pleasure. Ranging over a variety of cultural terrains--fiction, medical texts, film and television, journalism, and observations of clinics and urban daily life in Beijing—Appetites challenges the assumption that the mundane enjoyments of bodily life are natural and unvarying. Farquhar analyzes modern Chinese reflections on embodied existence to show how contemporary appetites are grounded in history.

From eating well in improving economic times to memories of the late 1950s famine, from the flavors of traditional Chinese medicine to modernity’s private sexual passions, this book argues that embodiment in all its forms must be invented and sustained in public reflections about personal and national life. As much at home in science studies and social theory as in the details of life in Beijing, this account uses anthropology, cultural studies, and literary criticism to read contemporary Chinese life in a materialist and reflexive mode. For both Maoist and market reform periods, this is a story of high culture in appetites, desire in collective life, and politics in the body and its dispositions.
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cover of Aquamarine Blue 5: Personal Stories of College Students with Autism

Aquamarine Blue 5

Personal Stories of College Students with Autism

Dawn Prince-Hughes

Ohio University Press, 2002

Rated Outstanding by the American Association of School Libraries

This is the first book to be written by autistic college students about the challenges they face. Aquamarine Blue 5 details the struggle of these highly sensitive students and shows that there are gifts specific to autistic students that enrich the university system, scholarship, and the world as a whole.

Dawn Prince-Hughes presents an array of writings by students who have been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome or High-Functioning Autism, showing their unique ways of looking at and solving problems. In their own words, they portray how their divergent thinking skills could be put to great use if they were given an opportunity. Many such students never get the chance because the same sensitivity that gives them these insights makes the flicker of fluorescent lights and the sound of chalk on the board unbearable For simple—and easily remedied—reasons, we lose these students, who are as gifted as they are challenged.

Aquamarine Blue 5 is a showcase of the strength and resilient character of individuals with Asperger’s Syndrome. It will be an invaluable resource for those touched by this syndrome, their friends and families, and school administrators.

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cover of Arc of Interference: Medical Anthropology for Worlds on Edge

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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cover of Archiving Medical Violence: Consent and the Carceral State

Archiving Medical Violence

Consent and the Carceral State

Christopher Perreira

University of Minnesota Press, 2023

A major new reading of a U.S. public health system shaped by fraught perceptions of culture, race, and criminality

At the heart of Archiving Medical Violence is an interrogation of the notions of national and scientific progress, marking an advance in scholarship that shows how such violence is both an engine of medical progress and, more broadly, the production of empire. It reads the medical archive through a lens that centers how it is produced, remembered, and contested within cultural production and critical memory.

 

In this innovative and interdisciplinary book, Christopher Perreira argues that it is in the contradictions of settler colonialism and racial capitalism that we find how medical violence is narrated as a public good. He presents case studies from across a range of locations—Hawai‘i, California, Louisiana, Guatemala—and historical periods from the nineteenth century on. Examining national and scientific conceptions of progress through the lens of medicine and public health, he places official archives in dialogue with visual and literary works, patient writing, and more. 

 

Archiving Medical Violence explores the contested public terrains for narrating value and vulnerabilities, bodies and geographical locations. Ultimately, Perreira reveals for us a medical imaginary built on racialized criminality driving contemporary politics of citizenship, memory, and identity.

 

 

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

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cover of Arterial and Venous Access in the Cardiac Catheterization Lab: Arterial and Venous Access in the Cardiac Catheterization Lab

Arterial and Venous Access in the Cardiac Catheterization Lab

Arterial and Venous Access in the Cardiac Catheterization Lab

Abu-Fadel, Mazen

Rutgers University Press, 2016

Percutaneous cardiac and endovascular procedures are performed by a variety of interventional physicians and continue to evolve and expand. One of the most important steps in performing these procedures is vascular access and their Achilles heel is vascular access site complications. This volume is intended to help the clinician by providing a practical overview of the techniques and technologies used in top catheterization laboratories to access the arterial and venous beds. 

Dr. Mazen Abu-Fadel and his contributors, part of the renowned cardiovascular team at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, carefully walk the reader through the various techniques used to obtain vascular access into most arterial and venous sites. They thoroughly describe current data, techniques, advantages, risks, and benefits of each vascular access site. Covering everything from anatomic landmarks to closures devices, Arterial and Venous Access in the Cardiac Catheterization Lab offers a complete overview of each procedure. In addition, it provides an up-to-date guide to the best medical technologies and equipment used when performing these procedures.

Arterial and Venous Access in the Cardiac Catheterization Lab is an invaluable resource for a wide range of clinical personnel, from attending physicians and trainees to nursing staff and vascular technicians. Written by experienced leaders in the field, it demonstrates how to perform complex, risky procedures while providing patients with expert care.

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cover of Asian Biotech: Ethics and Communities of Fate

Asian Biotech

Ethics and Communities of Fate

Aihwa Ong and Nancy N. Chen, eds.

Duke University Press, 2010

Providing the first overview of Asia’s emerging biosciences landscape, this timely and important collection brings together ethnographic case studies on biotech endeavors such as genetically modified foods in China, clinical trials in India, blood collection in Singapore and China, and stem-cell research in Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. While biotech policies and projects vary by country, the contributors identify a significant trend toward state entrepreneurialism in biotechnology, and they highlight the ways that political thinking and ethical reasoning are converging around the biosciences. As ascendant nations in a region of postcolonial emergence, with an “uncanny surplus” in population and pandemics, Asian countries treat their populations as sources of opportunity and risk. Biotech enterprises are allied to efforts to overcome past humiliations and restore national identity and political ambition, and they are legitimized as solutions to national anxieties about food supplies, diseases, epidemics, and unknown biological crises in the future. Biotechnological responses to perceived risks stir deep feelings about shared fate, and they crystallize new ethical configurations, often re-inscribing traditional beliefs about ethnicity, nation, and race. As many of the essays in this collection illustrate, state involvement in biotech initiatives is driving the emergence of “biosovereignty,” an increasing pressure for state control over biological resources, commercial health products, corporate behavior, and genetic based-identities. Asian Biotech offers much-needed analysis of the interplay among biotechnologies, economic growth, biosecurity, and ethical practices in Asia.

Contributors
Vincanne Adams
Nancy N. Chen
Stefan Ecks
Kathleen Erwin
Phuoc V. Le
Jennifer Liu
Aihwa Ong
Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner
Kaushik Sunder Rajan
Wen-Ching Sung
Charis Thompson
Ara Wilson

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cover of Assessment of Chronic Pain Patients with the MMPI-2

Assessment of Chronic Pain Patients with the MMPI-2

Laura S. Keller

University of Minnesota Press, 1991

Supplies clinicians with data on the applicability of previous MMPI chronic pain research to the revised version of the test.
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cover of Asylum on the Hill: History of a Healing Landscape

Asylum on the Hill

History of a Healing Landscape

Katherine Ziff

Ohio University Press, 2012

Asylum on the Hill is the story of a great American experiment in psychiatry, a revolution in care for those with mental illness, as seen through the example of the Athens Lunatic Asylum. Built in southeast Ohio after the Civil War, the asylum embodied the nineteenth-century “gold standard” specifications of moral treatment. Stories of patients and their families, politicians, caregivers, and community illustrate how a village in the coalfields of the Hocking River valley responded to a national movement to provide compassionate care based on a curative landscape, exposure to the arts, outdoor exercise, useful occupation, and personal attention from a physician.

Katherine Ziff’s compelling presentation of America’s nineteenth-century asylum movement shows how the Athens Lunatic Asylum accommodated political, economic, community, family, and individual needs and left an architectural legacy that has been uniquely renovated and repurposed. Incorporating rare photos, letters, maps, and records, Asylum on the Hill is a fascinating glimpse into psychiatric history.

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cover of At Ansha's: Life in the Spirit Mosque of a Healer in Mozambique

At Ansha's

Life in the Spirit Mosque of a Healer in Mozambique

Daria Trentini

Rutgers University Press, 2021

At Ansha's takes the reader inside the spirit mosque of a female healer in Nampula, northern Mozambique. It is here that Ansha, a Makonde spirit healer, heals the resisting ailments of her patients, discloses pieces of her story of affliction and healing, and engages the world outside her mosque. We come to know Ansha’s experiences as revolutionary and migrant, her religious trajectories, family, the healers who cured her, the spirits who possessed her, and her declining health. We follow Ansha’s shifts in her life and work in the mosque as these intersect with the visible and invisible borders of Mozambique and of its fraught history. Confronting events in her life and in the mosque between 2009 and 2016, Ansha invites us to make meaning with her, as we sit in her mosque, and engage with her family, spirits, friends, patients, and world.
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cover of At Risk: Rhetoric, Deviance, and the Politics of HIV Prevention

At Risk

Rhetoric, Deviance, and the Politics of HIV Prevention

McKinley Green

The Ohio State University Press, 2026

At Risk explores how young people living with HIV have developed risk-reduction practices that seem to contradict public health recommendations for HIV prevention. Putting forward a rhetoric of deviance to frame these instances, McKinley Green argues that they represent intentional healthcare decisions that help young people mitigate the health risks that are most pressing in their daily lives. While current HIV risk-reduction priorities in the US are framed around a finite spectrum of sexual behaviors and medical technologies, those living with HIV often encounter a broader spectrum of risks shaped by structural inequities like racism, housing insecurity, queer and transphobia, HIV stigma, trauma in medical settings, and addiction, all of which create conditions that increase the risk of HIV transmission and present other threats to safety and autonomy.

Drawing from more than sixty hours of interviews with young people living with HIV, frontline healthcare workers, and HIV activists, Green highlights how those living with HIV have developed agency and expertise in navigating, mitigating, and communicating about risk. In doing so, he offers alternative epistemologies of sexual health risk that point toward more patient-centered HIV prevention frameworks.

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cover of Attachments to War: Biomedical Logics and Violence in Twenty-First-Century America

Attachments to War

Biomedical Logics and Violence in Twenty-First-Century America

Jennifer Terry

Duke University Press, 2017

In Attachments to War Jennifer Terry traces how biomedical logics entangle Americans in a perpetual state of war. Focusing on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars between 2002 and 2014, Terry identifies the presence of a biomedicine-war nexus in which new forms of wounding provoke the continual development of complex treatment, rehabilitation, and prosthetic technologies. At the same time, the U.S. military rationalizes violence and military occupation as necessary conditions for advancing medical knowledge and saving lives. Terry examines the treatment of war-generated polytrauma, postinjury bionic prosthetics design, and the development of defenses against infectious pathogens, showing how the interdependence between war and biomedicine is interwoven with neoliberal ideals of freedom, democracy, and prosperity. She also outlines the ways in which military-sponsored biomedicine relies on racialized logics that devalue the lives of Afghan and Iraqi citizens and U.S. veterans of color. Uncovering the mechanisms that attach all Americans to war and highlighting their embeddedness and institutionalization in everyday life via the government, media, biotechnology, finance, and higher education, Terry helps lay the foundation for a more meaningful opposition to war.
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cover of Attitudes on Altitude: Pioneers of Medical Research in Colorado's High Mountains

Attitudes on Altitude

Pioneers of Medical Research in Colorado's High Mountains

John T. Reeves

University Press of Colorado, 2001

John T Reeves and Robert F Grover have gathered together seven episodes narrating the exploits of innovative researchers that led to some extraordinary medical findings, altering the course of medicine in Colorado and throughout the world. From the summit
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cover of Autistic Intelligence: Interaction, Individuality, and the Challenges of Diagnosis

Autistic Intelligence

Interaction, Individuality, and the Challenges of Diagnosis

Douglas W. Maynard and Jason Turowetz

University of Chicago Press, 2022

Winner 2024 Outstanding Recent Contribution in Social Psychology Award, Social Psychology Section, American Sociological Association

Winner 2024 Melvin Pollner Prize, Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis Section, American Sociological Association

As autism has grown in prevalence, so too have our attempts to make sense of it. From placing unfounded blame on vaccines to seeking a genetic cause, Americans have struggled to understand what autism is and where it comes from. Amidst these efforts, however, a key aspect of autism has been largely overlooked: the diagnostic process itself. That process is the central focus of Autistic Intelligence. The authors ask us to question the norms by which we measure autistic behavior, to probe how that behavior can be considered sensible rather than disordered, and to explore how we can better appreciate the individuality of those who receive the diagnosis.
 
Drawing on hundreds of hours of video recordings and ethnographic observations at a clinic where professionals evaluated children for autism, the authors’ analysis of interactions among clinicians, parents, and children demystifies the categories, tools, and practices involved in the diagnostic process. Autistic Intelligence shows that autism is not a stable category; it is the outcome of complex interactional processes involving professionals, children, families, and facets of the social and clinical environments they inhabit. The authors suggest that diagnosis, in addition to carefully classifying children, also can highlight or include unique and particular contributions those with autism potentially can make to the world around us.
 
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cover of Autonomic Imbalance and the Hypthalamus: Implications for Physiology, Medicine, Psychology, and Neuropsychiatry

Autonomic Imbalance and the Hypthalamus

Implications for Physiology, Medicine, Psychology, and Neuropsychiatry

Ernst Gellhorn

University of Minnesota Press, 1957

Autonomic Imbalance and the Hypothalamus was first published in 1957.Fundamental alterations in the reactivity of autonomically innervated structures frequently have been observed in physiological tests as well as under clinical conditions. However, the mechanism of these alterations and the changes in the reactivity of the central structures of the autonomic nervous system that are their most frequent site of action had not been subjected to systematic, experimental analysis until Dr. Gellhorn launched the investigations he reports in this volume.The influence of the sino-aortic reflexes on the hypothalamus and the cortex is analyzed experimentally, and new data on the relation of the hypothalamus to vascular, respiratory, and visceral functions are presented. On the basis of his physiological work Dr. Gellhorn shows how clinically applicable methods for the diagnosis of parasympathetic and sympathetic disorders at the hypothalamic level may be devised. He shows the significance of his observations for an understanding of the physiology of the emotions and suggests clinical applications to such problems as hypertension, central autonomic disorders, and functional psychoses. The influence of age on parasympathetic and sympathetic excitability is shown on control subjects and on neuropsychiatric patients, and significant differences between these two groups at similar age levels are disclosed.For the convenience of the clinical reader the experimental results are summarized in a special section before the clinical applications are discussed.
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