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Iatrogenesis is the occurrence of untoward effects resulting from actions of health care providers, including medical errors, medical malpractice, practicing beyond one’s expertise, adverse effects of medication, unnecessary treatment, inappropriate screenings, and surgical errors. This is a huge public health issue: tens to hundreds of thousands of deaths are attributed to iatrogenic causes each year in the U.S., and vulnerable populations such as the elderly and minorities are particularly susceptible. 

Edited by two renowned cardiology experts, Iatrogenicity: Causes and Consequences of Iatrogenesis in Cardiovascular Medicine addresses both the iatrogenicity that arises with cardiovascular interventions, as well as non-cardiovascular interventions that result in adverse consequences on the cardiovascular system. The book aims to achieve three things: to summarize the available information on this topic in a single high-yield volume; to highlight the human and financial cost of iatrogenesis; and to describe and propose potential interventions to ameliorate the effects of iatrogenesis. This accessible book is a practical reference for any practicing physician who sees patients with cardiovascular issues. .
 

The AIDS epidemic soured the memory of the sexual revolution and gay liberation of the 1970s, and prominent politicians, commentators, and academics instructed gay men to forget the sexual cultures of the 1970s in order to ensure a healthy future. But without memory there can be no future, argue Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed in this exploration of the struggle over gay memory that marked the decades following the onset of AIDS.

Challenging many of the assumptions behind first-wave queer theory, If Memory Serves offers a new perspective on the emergence of contemporary queer culture from the suppression and repression of gay memory. Drawing on a rich archive of videos, films, television shows, novels, monuments, paintings, and sculptures created in the wake of the epidemic, the authors reveal a resistance among critics to valuing—even recognizing—the inscription of gay memory in art, literature, popular culture, and the built environment. Castiglia and Reed explore such topics as the unacknowledged ways in which the popular sitcom Will and Grace circulated gay subcultural references to awaken a desire for belonging among young viewers; the post-traumatic (un)rememberings of queer theory; and the generation of “ideality politics” in the art of Félix González-Torres, the film Chuck & Buck, and the independent video Video Remains.

Inspired by Alasdair MacIntyre’s insight that “the possession of a historical identity and the possession of a social identity coincide,” Castiglia and Reed demonstrate that memory is crafted in response to inadequacies in the present—and therefore a constructive relation to the past is essential to the imagining of a new future.

Is drug addiction a disease that can be treated, or is it a crime that should be punished? In her probing study, Illness or Deviance?, Jennifer Murphy investigates the various perspectives on addiction, and how society has myriad ways of handling it—incarcerating some drug users while putting others in treatment.

Illness or Deviance? highlights the confusion and contradictions about labeling addiction. Murphy’s fieldwork in a drug court and an outpatient drug treatment facility yields fascinating insights, such as how courts and treatment centers both enforce the “disease” label of addiction, yet their management tactics overlap treatment with “therapeutic punishment.” The “addict" label is a result not just of using drugs, but also of being a part of the drug lifestyle, by selling drugs. In addition, Murphy observes that drug courts and treatment facilities benefit economically from their cooperation, creating a very powerful institutional arrangement.

Murphy contextualizes her findings within theories of medical sociology as well as criminology to identify the policy implications of a medicalized view of addiction.

From seventeenth-century broadsides about the handling of dead bodies, printed during London's plague years, to YouTube videos about preventing the transmission of STDs, public health advocacy and education has always had a powerful visual component. Imagining Illness explores the diverse visual culture of public health, broadly defined, from the nineteenth century to the present.

Contributors to this volume examine historical and contemporary visual practices-Chinese health fairs, documentary films produced by the World Health Organization, illness maps, fashions for nurses, and live surgery on the Internet-in order to delve into the political and epidemiological contexts underlying their creation and dissemination.
 

Contributors: Liping Bu, Alma College; Lisa Cartwright, U of California, San Diego; Roger Cooter, U College London; William H. Helfand; Lenore Manderson, Monash U, Australia; Emily Martin, New York U; Gregg Mitman, U of Wisconsin, Madison; Mark Monmonier, Syracuse U; Kirsten Ostherr, Rice U; Katherine Ott, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian; Shawn Michelle Smith, Art Institute of Chicago; Claudia Stein, Warwick U.

In Improvising Medicine, Julie Livingston tells the story of Botswana's only dedicated cancer ward, located in its capital city of Gaborone. This affecting ethnography follows patients, their relatives, and ward staff as a cancer epidemic emerged in Botswana. The epidemic is part of an ongoing surge in cancers across the global south; the stories of Botswana's oncology ward dramatize the human stakes and intellectual and institutional challenges of an epidemic that will shape the future of global health. They convey the contingencies of high-tech medicine in a hospital where vital machines are often broken, drugs go in and out of stock, and bed-space is always at a premium. They also reveal cancer as something that happens between people. Serious illness, care, pain, disfigurement, and even death emerge as deeply social experiences. Livingston describes the cancer ward in terms of the bureaucracy, vulnerability, power, biomedical science, mortality, and hope that shape contemporary experience in southern Africa. Her ethnography is a profound reflection on the social orchestration of hope and futility in an African hospital, the politics and economics of healthcare in Africa, and palliation and disfigurement across the global south.

The HIV/AIDS epidemic has been a major catastrophe for gay communities. In less than two decades, the disease has profoundly changed the lives of gay men and lesbians. Not just a biological and viral agent, HIV has become an opportunistic social invader, reshaping communities and the distribution of wealth, altering the social careers of gay professionals and the patterns of entry into gay and lesbian life, and giving birth to groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation.

The distinguished contributors to this volume discuss the ways HIV/AIDS has changed collective and individual identities, as well as lives, of gay men and lesbians, and how these alterations have changed our perceptions of the epidemic. They cover such topics as the impact of the epidemic on small towns, cultural barriers to AIDS prevention, gay youth and intergenerational relations, and the roles of lesbians in AIDS organizations. This collection provides compelling insights into the new communities among gay men and lesbians and the new kinds of identities and relationships that are emerging from the social and cultural ferment engendered by HIV/AIDS.

Contributors include Barry D. Adam, Lourdes Arguelles, Rafael Miguel Diaz, John H. Gagnon, Gilbert Herdt, Gregory M. Herek, Nan D. Hunter, Peter M. Nardi, John L. Peterson, Anne Rivero, Gayle S. Rubin, Beth E. Schneider, and Nancy E. Stoller.

Winner of the American Sociological Association Sociology of Law Section 2013 Outstanding Book Award

How do we know when physicians practice medicine safely? Can we trust doctors to discipline their own? What is a proper role of experts in a democracy? In the Public Interest raises these provocative questions, using medical licensing and discipline to advocate for a needed overhaul of how we decide public good in a society dominated by private interest groups. Throughout the twentieth century, American physicians built a powerful profession, but their drive toward professional autonomy has made outside observers increasingly concerned about physicians’ ability to separate their own interests from those of the general public.

Ruth Horowitz traces the history of medical licensure and the mechanisms that democratic societies have developed to certify doctors to deliver critical services. Combining her skills as a public member of medical licensing boards and as an ethnographer, Horowitz illuminates the workings of the crucial public institutions charged with maintaining public safety. She demonstrates the complex agendas different actors bring to board deliberations, the variations in the board authority across the country, the unevenly distributed institutional resources available to board members, and the difficulties non-physician members face as they struggle to balance interests of the parties involved.

In the Public Interest suggests new procedures, resource allocation, and educational initiatives to increase physician oversight. Horowitz makes the case for regulations modeled after deliberative democracy that promise to open debates to the general public and allow public members to take a more active part in the decision-making process that affects vital community interests.

Terminal illness and the pain and anguish it brings are experiences that have touched millions of people in the past and continue to shape our experience of the present. Hospital machines that artificially support life and monitor vital signs beg the question: Is there not anything that medical science can offer as solace?

Incurable and Intolerable looks at the history of incurable illness from a variety of perspectives, including those of doctors, patients, families, religious counsel, and policy makers. This compellingly documented and well-written history illuminates the physical, emotional, social, and existential consequences of chronic disease and terminal illness, and offers an original look at the world of palliative medicine, politics, religion, and charity. Revealing the ways in which history can shed new light on contemporary thinking, Jason Szabo encourages a more careful scrutiny of today's attitudes, policies, and practices surrounding "imminent death" and its effects on society.

The experience of illness (both mental and physical) figures prominently in the critical thought and activism of the 1960s and 1970s, though it is largely overshadowed by practices of sexuality. Lisa Diedrich explores how and why illness was indeed so significant to the social, political, and institutional transformation beginning in the 1960s through the emergence of AIDS in the United States. A rich intervention—both theoretical and methodological, political and therapeutic—Indirect Action illuminates the intersection of illness, thought, and politics.

Not merely a revision of the history of this time period, Indirect Action expands the historiographical boundaries through which illness and health activism in the United States have been viewed. Diedrich explores the multiplicity illness–thought–politics through an array of subjects: queering the origin story of AIDS activism by recalling its feminist history; exploring health activism and the medical experience; analyzing psychiatry and self-help movements; thinking ecologically about counterpractices of generalism in science and medicine; and considering the experience and event of epilepsy and the witnessing of schizophrenia. 

Indirect Action places illness in the leading role in the production of thought during the emergence of AIDS, ultimately showing the critical interconnectedness of illness and political and critical thought.

The influenza epidemic of 1918 was one of the worst medical disasters in human history, taking close to thirty million lives worldwide in less than a year, including more than 500,000 in the United States. What made this pandemic even more frightening was the fact that it occurred when death rates for most common infectious diseases were diminishing. Still, an epidemic is not merely a medical crisis; it has sociological, psychological, and political dimensions as well. In Influenza and Inequality, Patricia J. Fanning examines these other dimensions and brings to life this terrible episode of epidemic disease by tracing its path through the town of Norwood, Massachusetts.

By 1918, Norwood was a small, ethnically diverse, industrialized, and stratified community. Ink, printing, and tanning factories were owned by wealthy families who lived privileged lives. These industries attracted immigrant laborers who made their homes in several ethnic neighborhoods and endured prejudice and discrimination at the hands of native residents. When the epidemic struck, the immigrant neighborhoods were most affected; a fact that played a significant role in the town's response—with tragic results.

This close analysis of one town's struggle illuminates how even well-intentioned elite groups may adopt and implement strategies that can exacerbate rather than relieve a medical crisis. It is a cautionary tale that demonstrates how social behavior can be a fundamental predictor of the epidemic curve, a community's response to crisis, and the consequences of those actions.

For years, opponents of outsourcing have argued that offshoring American jobs destroys our local industries, lays waste to American job creation, and gives foreigners the good jobs and income that would otherwise remain on our shores. Yet few Americans realize that a parallel dynamic is occurring in the healthcare sector—previously one of the most consistent sources of stable, dependable living-wage jobs in the entire nation. Instead of outsourcing high-paying jobs overseas—as the manufacturing and service sectors do—hospitals and other healthcare companies insource healthcare labor from developing countries, giving the jobs to people who are willing to accept lower pay and worse working conditions than U.S. healthcare workers. As Dr. Tulenko shows, insourcing has caused tens of thousands of high-paying local jobs in the healthcare sector to effectively vanish from the reach of U.S. citizens, weakened the healthcare systems of developing nations, and constricted the U.S. health professional education system. She warns Americans about what she’s seeing—a stunning story they’re scarcely aware of, which impacts all of us directly and measurably—and describes how to create better American health professional education, more high-paying healthcare jobs, and improved health for the poor in the developing world.

Few large institutions have changed as fully and dramatically as the U.S. healthcare system since World War II. Compared to the 1930s, healthcare now incorporates a variety of new technologies, service-delivery arrangements, financing mechanisms, and underlying sets of organizing principles.

This book examines the transformations that have occurred in medical care systems in the San Francisco Bay area since 1945. The authors describe these changes in detail and relate them to both the sociodemographic trends in the Bay Area and to shifts in regulatory systems and policy environments at local, state, and national levels. But this is more than a social history; the authors employ a variety of theoretical perspectives—including strategic management, population ecology, and institutional theory—to examine five types of healthcare organizations through quantitative data analysis and illustrative case studies.

Providing a thorough account of changes for one of the nation's leading metropolitan areas in health service innovation, this book is a landmark in the theory of organizations and in the history of healthcare systems.

This case study chronicles the integration of pre-service training in contraception and comprehensive abortion care into the medical school and OBGYN residency training program at St. Paul’s Hospital Millennium Medical College (SPHMMC) through an authentic partnership with the University of Michigan. The case study showcases the key elements that were crucial in the successful implementation of the SPHMMC program, which has now become mainstream and has been emulated in eight other medical schools in Ethiopia through the University of Michigan’s Center for International Reproductive Health Training (CIRHT).
 
The innovative approach, founded on the values of sustainable capacity building through academic partnership and centered on improving access to dignified women’s reproductive health care through effective pre-service training, has the potential for expansion to other countries with high rates of maternal mortality and morbidity. In this case study, we spell out the best practices, which we hope will inspire academic medical centers in the Global South, global health departments/centers internationally, and the reproductive health community at large.

In riveting case studies, Robert Zussman describes how medical decisions in ICUs are considered and reconsidered, made and remade, negotiated and renegotiated. He concentrates on the practice of medical ethics, on the ways in which right and wrong are interpreted and used in the ward—how definitions of right and wrong emerge from the social situations of patients, families, doctors, and nurses and from the workings of hospitals and the courts.

His book is a portrait of the way careful planning is undermined by the unpredictability of illness and the persistence of self-interest, by high principle and curious compromise.

During the last two decades, a new form of trade in commercial surrogacy grew across Asia. Starting in India, a “disruptive” model of surrogacy offered mass availability, rapid accessibility, and created new demands for surrogacy services from people who could not afford or access surrogacy elsewhere.
 
In International Surrogacy as Disruptive Industry in Southeast Asia, Andrea Whittaker traces the development of this industry and its movement across Southeast Asia following a sequence of governmental bans in India, Nepal, Thailand, and Cambodia. Through a case study of the industry in Thailand, the book offers a nuanced and sympathetic examination of the industry from the perspectives of the people involved in it: surrogates, intended parents, and facilitators. The industry offers intended parents the opportunity to form much desired families, but also creates vulnerabilities for all people involved. These vulnerabilities became evident in cases of trafficking, exploitation, and criminality that emerged in southeast Asia, leading to greater scrutiny on the industry as a whole. Yet the trade continues in new flexible hybrid forms, involving the circulation of reproductive gametes, embryos, surrogates, and ova donors across international borders to circumvent regulations. The book demonstrates the need for new forms of regulation to protect those involved in international surrogacy arrangements.

Winner of the 2016 Lavinia Dock Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing

 Awarded first place in the 2016 American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Award in the History and Public Policy category

The most dramatic growth of Christianity in the late twentieth century has occurred in Africa, where Catholic missions have played major roles. But these missions did more than simply convert Africans. Catholic sisters became heavily involved in the Church’s health services and eventually in relief and social justice efforts. In Into Africa, Barbra Mann Wall offers a transnational history that reveals how Catholic medical and nursing sisters established relationships between local and international groups, sparking an exchange of ideas that crossed national, religious, gender, and political boundaries.
 
Both a nurse and a historian, Wall explores this intersection of religion, medicine, gender, race, and politics in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on the years following World War II, a period when European colonial rule was ending and Africans were building new governments, health care institutions, and education systems. She focuses specifically on hospitals, clinics, and schools of nursing in Ghana and Uganda run by the Medical Mission Sisters of Philadelphia; in Nigeria and Uganda by the Irish Medical Missionaries of Mary; in Tanzania by the Maryknoll Sisters of New York; and in Nigeria by a local Nigerian congregation. Wall shows how, although initially somewhat ethnocentric, the sisters gradually developed a deeper understanding of the diverse populations they served. In the process, their medical and nursing work intersected with critical social, political, and cultural debates that continue in Africa today: debates about the role of women in their local societies, the relationship of women to the nursing and medical professions and to the Catholic Church, the obligations countries have to provide care for their citizens, and the role of women in human rights.
 
A groundbreaking contribution to the study of globalization and medicine, Into Africa highlights the importance of transnational partnerships, using the stories of these nuns to enhance the understanding of medical mission work and global change.

Recent history has witnessed a revolution in womens health care. Beginning in the late 1960s, women in communities across the United States challenged medical and male control over womens health. Few people today realize the extent to which these grassroots efforts shifted power and responsibility from the medical establishment into womens hands as health care consumers, providers, and advocates.

Into Our Own Hands traces the womens health care movement in the United States. Richly documented, this study is based on more than a decade of research, including interviews with leading activists; documentary material from feminist health clinics and advocacy organizations; a survey of womens health movement organizations in the early 1990s; and ethnographic fieldwork. Sandra Morgen focuses on the clinics born from this movement, as well as how the movements encounters with organized medicine, the state, and ascendant neoconservative and neoliberal political forces of the 1970s to the1980s shaped the confrontations and accomplishments in womens health care. The book also explores the impact of political struggles over race and class within the movement organizations.

Rather than defining and using a single concept of intuition—philosophical, practical, or neuroscientific—Braude here examines intuition as it occurs at different levels and in different contexts of clinical reasoning. He argues that not only does intuition provide the bridge between medical reasoning and moral reasoning, but that it also links the epistemological, ontological, and ethical foundations of clinical decision making. In presenting his case, Braude takes readers on a journey through Aristotle’s Ethics—highlighting the significance of practical reasoning in relation to theoretical reasoning and the potential bridge between them—then through current debates between regulators and clinicians on evidence-based medicine, and finally applies the philosophical perspectives of Reichenbach, Popper, and Peirce to analyze the intuitive support for clinical equipoise, a key concept in research ethics. Through his phenomenological study of intuition Braude aims to demonstrate that ethical responsibility for the other lies at the heart of clinical judgment.

 

Braude’s original approach advances medical ethics by using philosophical rigor and history to analyze the tacit underpinnings of clinical reasoning and to introduce clear conceptual distinctions that simultaneously affirm and exacerbate the tension between ethical theory and practice. His study will be welcomed not only by philosophers but also by clinicians eager to justify how they use moral intuitions, and anyone interested in medical decision making.

Britain's supremacy in the nineteenth century depended in large part on its vast deposits of coal. This coal not only powered steam engines in factories, ships, and railway locomotives but also warmed homes and cooked food. As coal consumption skyrocketed, the air in Britain's cities and towns became filled with ever-greater and denser clouds of smoke.

In this far-reaching study, Peter Thorsheim explains that, for much of the nineteenth century, few people in Britain even considered coal smoke to be pollution. To them, pollution meant miasma: invisible gases generated by decomposing plant and animal matter. Far from viewing coal smoke as pollution, most people considered smoke to be a valuable disinfectant, for its carbon and sulfur were thought capable of rendering miasma harmless.

Inventing Pollution examines the radically new understanding of pollution that emerged in the late nineteenth century, one that centered not on organic decay but on coal combustion. This change, as Peter Thorsheim argues, gave birth to the smoke-abatement movement and to new ways of thinking about the relationships among humanity, technology, and the environment.

A funny, smart, and engaging book on Social Security? You bet! Let Bill and Betty Boomer, their parents Ed and Ethel Elderly, and the young married Steve and Sue Sprout take you through the thickets of this thorny issue. You will come to understand why people are so worried about Social Security, how it operates, how we can keep it going, the problems we would face under a privatized system, and why Americans have always chosen to shore up this important program. You will learn about the system and the current debates surrounding it--and find yourself enjoying it at the same time.

Barbara R. Bergmann is Professor Emerita, University of Maryland and The American University. Jim Bush is the editorial cartoonist for the Providence Journal.

Stroke is the fifth leading cause of death in the United States and is a leading cause of adult disability and discharge from hospitals to chronic care facilities. Despite the frequency and morbidity of stroke, there is a relative paucity of “stroke experts,” such as vascular neurologists and neurocritical care physicians, to care for these patients. Clinical research in the diagnosis and treatment of stroke has grown exponentially over the past two decades resulting in a great deal of new clinical information for attending physicians to absorb. Grounded in cutting-edge and evidence-based strategies, Ischemic Stroke closes the gap in stroke care by providing a cogent and intuitive guide for all physicians caring for stroke patients.

Key topics explored cover all elements of stroke care, including examinations of: emergent evaluation of the suspected stroke patient, clinical signs and symptoms of stroke, mechanisms of ischemic stroke, neuroimaging, cardiac-based evaluation, thrombolytic therapy, endovascular therapy, critical care management, rehabilitation, cardiac arrhythmias, and structural heart disease.
 

It’s Not Your Fault! offers evidence-based strategies for parents who need assistance with toilet training and helping their child with urinary control issues. Dr. Joseph Barone, M.D., provides proven techniques that bring bedwetting to a happy conclusion. Frequently, parents are misguided by bad advice from friends, TV talk shows, the Internet, or parenting books. With many years of clinical experience, Dr. Barone shares valuable, practical information for parents to guide them through the basics of toilet training and bedwetting, and presents management plans to resolve any difficulties that occur. A comprehensive guide, this book covers everything parents need to know about normal toilet training and bedwetting, as well as step-by-step solutions based on testing and research in a real-world setting to help children suffering from delayed toilet training, bed wetting, and daytime urinary wetting.

It’s Not Your Fault! provides hope and guidance to those desperate to help their children overcome urinary control and toilet training problems. Dr. Barone sets parents on a course that makes things better for both themselves and their children.

In iatrogenesis: Essays on Becoming a Physician, medical students share coming-of-age stories that illustrate the rigorous, rewarding, and sometimes unforgiving journey into medicine.
 
In Greek, iatro- means doctor, and -genesis means origin: Iatrogenesis thus describes any effect, good or bad, brought forth by a physician’s actions. This essay compendium looks beyond a physician’s impact on patients, instead turning inward to examine the impact of medical training on student doctors. These essays written by University of Michigan medical students span from the donning of the White Coat to graduation. Along the way, each writer weaves a story, the threads of which unite in a tapestry highlighting the universality of this coming-of-age journey. These essays breathe life into each stage of medical apprenticeship, displaying the full spectrum of human emotion as medical students find ways to reinvent themselves as the physicians of tomorrow.