Results by title

124 books match the query 'Health and hygiene' and 7 start with b

cover of BEYOND THE REPRODUCTIVE BODY: Politics of Women’s Health & Work in Early Victorian England

BEYOND THE REPRODUCTIVE BODY

Politics of Women’s Health & Work in Early Victorian England

Marjorie Levine-Clark

The Ohio State University Press, 2004

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cover of BODIES OF TECHNOLOGY: Women’s Involvement with Reproductive Medicine

BODIES OF TECHNOLOGY

Women’s Involvement with Reproductive Medicine

Edited by Ann R. Saetnan, Nelly Oudshoorn, and Marta Kirejczyk

The Ohio State University Press, 2000

Bodies of Technology is based on the premise that technology and society mutually shape one another, and on a concern for women’s health and autonomy. A basic question is one of cultural appropriation: Do technologies take on different shapes, different practices, and have different impacts as they spread from one place to another? By juxtaposing a number of culturally and historically contextualized studies of similar technologies, the editors demonstrate that although technologies globalize by spreading among cultures, they are also localized by the cultures they encounter.

The first part of the book investigates how potential users of hormone-based contraceptives are represented as these technologies are developed in laboratories and field tests. The next section explores the political and economic processes that regulate access to and practices of assisted fertilization. The final section focuses on individual users engaging with fetal diagnostic technologies in clinical practice. Taken as a whole, the book points out the need and the possibilities for women to become directly involved in the shaping of technologies that so strongly affect their health and their daily lives.

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cover of Babylost: Racism, Survival, and the Quiet Politics of Infant Mortality, from A to Z

Babylost

Racism, Survival, and the Quiet Politics of Infant Mortality, from A to Z

Monica J. Casper

Rutgers University Press, 2021

The U.S. infant mortality rate is among the highest in the industrialized world, and Black babies are far more likely than white babies to die in their first year of life. Maternal mortality rates are also very high. Though the infant mortality rate overall has improved over the past century with public health interventions, racial disparities have not. Racism, poverty, lack of access to health care, and other causes of death have been identified, but not yet adequately addressed. The tragedy is twofold: it is undoubtedly tragic that babies die in their first year of life, and it is both tragic and unacceptable that most of these deaths are preventable. Despite the urgency of the problem, there has been little public discussion of infant loss. The question this book takes up is not why babies die; we already have many answers to this question. It is, rather, who cares that babies, mostly but not only Black and Native American babies, are dying before their first birthdays? More importantly, what are we willing to do about it? This book tracks social and cultural dimensions of infant death through 58 alphabetical entries, from Absence to ZIP Code. It centers women’s loss and grief, while also drawing attention to dimensions of infant death not often examined. It is simultaneously a sociological study of infant death, an archive of loss and grief, and a clarion call for social change.
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cover of Bioarchaeological Studies of Life in the Age of Agriculture: A View from the Southeast

Bioarchaeological Studies of Life in the Age of Agriculture

A View from the Southeast

Edited by Patricia M. Lambert

University of Alabama Press, 2000

Investigations of skeletal remains from key archaeological sites reveal new data and offer insights on prehistoric life and health in the Southeast.

The shift from foraging to farming had important health consequences for prehistoric peoples, but variations in health existed within communities that had made this transition. This new collection draws on the rich bioarchaeological record of the Southeastern United States to explore variability in health and behavior within the age of agriculture. It offers new perspectives on human adaptation to various geographic and cultural landscapes across the entire Southeast, from Texas to Virginia, and presents new data from both classic and little-known sites.

The contributors question the reliance on simple cause-and-effect relationships in human health and behavior by addressing such key bioarchaeological issues as disease history and epidemiology, dietary composition and sufficiency, workload stress, patterns of violence, mortuary practices, and biological consequences of European contact. They also advance our understanding of agriculture by showing that uses of maize were more varied than has been previously supposed.

Representing some of the best work being done today by physical anthropologists, this volume provides new insights into human adaptation for both archaeologists and osteologists. It attests to the heterogeneous character of Southeastern societies during the late prehistoric and early historic periods while effectively detailing the many factors that have shaped biocultural evolution.

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cover of Black Women’s Health in the Age of Hip Hop and HIV/AIDS: A Narrative Remix

Black Women’s Health in the Age of Hip Hop and HIV/AIDS

A Narrative Remix

Nghana tamu Lewis

The Ohio State University Press, 2025

In Black Women’s Health in the Age of Hip Hop and HIV/AIDS, Nghana tamu Lewis chronicles the work of five black women creators to demonstrate how hip hop feminism operates as a vital tool for interpreting and building knowledge about the lived experiences of black women and girls. Between 1996 and 2006, novelists Sapphire and Sister Souljah, television producer Mara Brock Akil, and playwrights Nikkole Salter and Danai Gurira addressed the neglect of black women’s health in mainstream biomedical and public health discourses. At a time when responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic largely focused on gay white men, Lewis argues, these creators deployed the strategies of hip hop feminism to frame and untangle issues of self-care, risk, and the ways that caregiving roles place black women and girls at disproportionate risk of adverse health outcomes. Building on previous intersectionality and social justice advocacy scholarship, Lewis argues that Sapphire, Souljah, Brock Akil, and Salter and Gurira both documented the effects of the epidemic on black women and girls and equipped the masses with solutions-oriented responses to the crisis, thus intervening in ways that mainstream biomedical and public health research has yet to do.
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cover of Bodies of Knowledge: The Medicalization of Reproduction in Greece

Bodies of Knowledge

The Medicalization of Reproduction in Greece

Eugenia Georges

Vanderbilt University Press, 2008

Recipient of the 2006 Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize for the best project in the area of medicine.

The author, a second-generation Greek American, returned to Greece with her young daughter to do fieldwork over the course of a decade. Focusing on Rhodes, an island that blends continuity with the past and rapid social change in often unexpected ways, she interviewed over a hundred women, doctors, and midwives about issues of reproduction.

The result is a detailed portrait of how a longstanding system of "local" gynecological and obstetrical knowledge under the control of women was rapidly displaced in the the period following World War II, and how the technologically-intensive biomedical model that took its place in turn assumed its own distinctive signature.

Bodies of Knowledge is a vivid ethnographic study of how a presumably globalizing and homogenizing process like medicalization can be reshaped as women and medical experts alike selectively accept or reject new practices and technologies. Georges found, for example, that women in Rhodes have enthusiastically embraced some new technologies, like fetal imaging during pregnancy, but rejected others, like medical contraception. They are also avid consumers of popular childbirth manuals.

This book is the recipient of the 2006 Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize for the best project in the area of medicine.

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cover of Body Factory: Exploiting University Athletes' Healthcare for Profit in the Training Room

Body Factory

Exploiting University Athletes' Healthcare for Profit in the Training Room

Kaitlin Pericak

Temple University Press, 2025

A university’s athletic training room is meant to care for and heal college athletes and ensure they are receiving the help they need. Although sports medicine staff members are sincere in their goal of centering athletes and providing the best healthcare possible, organizational constraints affect their approach. Chief among them is the pressure sports medicine staff members feel to keep athletes from profit-generating sports healthy enough to perform.

Body Factory enters an NCAA Division I athletic training room to examine the disconnect between what the NCAA states as its goal of athlete healthcare and what is actually happening. Kaitlin Pericak conducts observations in this space and interviews injured athletes and sports medicine staff members to show how institutional control over “best interests” often ends up exploiting the individual athlete. The influences at work are part of a neoliberal paradigm that explains why interest in an athlete’s care is greatly diminished once they are injured and can no longer play.

Body Factory considers how race, gender, and health before and after injury are deciding factors in these university training centers. The bureaucratic organization has a goal of maintaining power to generate profit, and Pericak shows this is almost always at the expense of the athlete.
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