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1415 books match the query 'Medical' and 35 start with l

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La Partera

Fran Leeper Buss

University of Michigan Press, 2001

Jesusita Aragon earned the title "la partera," or midwife, at the age of fourteen. Apprenticed to her grandmother, she learned the traditional Hispanic methods of assisting childbirth. She won the coveted title by performing her first delivery when an expectant mother went into labor in her grandmother's absence. In the years that followed, she was often the only source of medical care available in an isolated, mountainous area of New Mexico. Jesusita was so prized for her medical wisdom that she came to deliver more than 12,000 babies in the course of her career.
This is Jesusita's story, told in her own words. She describes her early training as a midwife, her forced departure from home due to two unmarried pregnancies, and her solitary struggle to support her children. La Partera tells how she gradually emerged as a leader in her community, painstakingly building by hand a small maternity center for her patients while gaining the respect of the Anglo medical community.
As Jesusita's story unfolds, so too does the story of the women of the region. Supplemental sections by the author illuminate Jesusita's culture and past, along with a historical account of the network of medical care provided by Hispanic and Anglo female healers. Illustrated with photographs of both people and places, La Partera reflects the culture of an era through the prism of Jesusita's hard and useful life.
Fran Leeper Buss lives and teaches in Tucson, Arizona.

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La Partera

Story of a Midwife

Fran Leeper Buss

University of Michigan Press, 1980

Jesusita Aragon earned the title "la partera," or midwife, at the age of fourteen. Apprenticed to her grandmother, she learned the traditional Hispanic methods of assisting childbirth. She won the coveted title by performing her first delivery when an expectant mother went into labor in her grandmother's absence. In the years that followed, she was often the only source of medical care available in an isolated, mountainous area of New Mexico. Jesusita was so prized for her medical wisdom that she came to deliver more than 12,000 babies in the course of her career.This is Jesusita's story, told in her own words. She describes her early training as a midwife, her forced departure from home due to two unmarried pregnancies, and her solitary struggle to support her children. La Partera tells how she gradually emerged as a leader in her community, painstakingly building by hand a small maternity center for her patients while gaining the respect of the Anglo medical community.As Jesusita's story unfolds, so too does the story of the women of the region. Supplemental sections by the author illuminate Jesusita's culture and past, along with a historical account of the network of medical care provided by Hispanic and Anglo female healers. Illustrated with photographs of both people and places, La Partera reflects the culture of an era through the prism of Jesusita's hard and useful life.

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Labor of Love

Gestational Surrogacy and the Work of Making Babies

Jacobson, Heather

Rutgers University Press, 2016

While the practice of surrogacy has existed for millennia, new fertility technologies have allowed women to act as gestational surrogates, carrying children that are not genetically their own. While some women volunteer to act as gestational surrogates for friends or family members, others get paid for performing this service. The first ethnographic study of gestational surrogacy in the United States, Labor of Love examines the conflicted attitudes that emerge when the ostensibly priceless act of bringing a child into the world becomes a paid occupation.

Heather Jacobson interviews not only surrogate mothers, but also their family members, the intended parents who employ surrogates, and the various professionals who work to facilitate the process. Seeking to understand how gestational surrogates perceive their vocation, she discovers that many regard surrogacy as a calling, but are reluctant to describe it as a job. In the process, Jacobson dissects the complex set of social attitudes underlying this resistance toward conceiving of pregnancy as a form of employment.

Through her extensive field research, Jacobson gives readers a firsthand look at the many challenges faced by gestational surrogates, who deal with complicated medical procedures, delicate work-family balances, and tricky social dynamics. Yet Labor of Love also demonstrates the extent to which advances in reproductive technology are affecting all Americans, changing how we think about maternity, family, and the labor involved in giving birth.

For more, visit http://www.heatherjacobsononline.com/

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Laboring in the Shadow of Empire

Race, Gender, and Care Work in Portugal

Celeste Vaughan Curington

Rutgers University Press, 2024

Winner of the ASA Race, Gender, and Class section's Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award

Winner of the ASA Racial and Ethnic Minorities section’s Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award

Laboring in the Shadow of Empire: Race, Gender, and Care Work in Portugal examines the everyday lives of an African-descendant care service workforce that labors in an ostensibly “anti-racial” Europe and against the backdrop of the Portuguese colonial empire. While much of the literature on global care work has focused on Asian and Latine migrant care workers, there is comparatively less research that explicitly examines African care workers and their migration histories to Europe. Sociologist Celeste Vaughan Curington focuses on Portugal—a European setting with comparatively liberal policies around family settlement and naturalization for migrants. In this setting, rapid urbanization in the late twentieth century, along with a national push to reconcile work and family, has shaped the growth of paid home care and cleaning service industries. Many researchers focus on informal work settings, where immigrant rights are restricted and many workers are undocumented or without permanent residence status. Curington instead examines workers who have accessed citizenship or permanent residence status and also explores African women’s experiences laboring in care and service industries in the formal market, revealing how deeply colonial and intersectional logics of a racialized and international division of reproductive labor in Portugal render these women “hyper-invisible” and “hyper-visible” as “appropriate” workers in Lisbon.

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Lady Lushes

Gender, Alcoholism, and Medicine in Modern America

McClellan, Michelle L

Rutgers University Press, 2017

According to the popular press in the mid twentieth century, American women, in a misguided attempt to act like men in work and leisure, were drinking more. “Lady Lushes” were becoming a widespread social phenomenon. From the glamorous hard-drinking flapper of the 1920s to the disgraced and alcoholic wife and mother played by Lee Remick in the 1962 film “Days of Wine and Roses,” alcohol consumption by American women has been seen as both a prerogative and as a threat to health, happiness, and the social order.

In Lady Lushes, medical historian Michelle L. McClellan traces the story of the female alcoholic from the late-nineteenth through the twentieth century. She draws on a range of sources to demonstrate the persistence of the belief that alcohol use is antithetical to an idealized feminine role, particularly one that glorifies motherhood. Lady Lushes offers a fresh perspective on the importance of gender role ideology in the formation of medical knowledge and authority.

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Landscapes of Activism

Civil Society, HIV and AIDS Care in Northern Mozambique

Reed, Joel Christian

Rutgers University Press, 2018

AIDS activists are often romanticized as extremely noble and selfless. However, the relationships among HIV support group members highlighted in Landscapes of Activism are hardly utopian or ideal. At first, the group has everything it needs, a thriving membership, and support from major donors. Soon, the group undergoes an identity crisis over money and power, eventually fading from the scene. As government and development institutions embraced activist demands—decentralizing AIDS care through policies of health systems strengthening—civil society was increasingly rendered obsolete. Charting this transition—from subjects, to citizens, and back again—reveals the inefficacy of protest, and the importance of community resilience. The product of in-depth ethnography and focused anthropological inquiry, this is the first book on AIDS activists in Mozambique. AIDS activism’s strange decline in southern Africa, rather than a reflection of citizen apathy, is the direct result of targeted state and donor intervention.

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Landscapes of Disease

Malaria in Modern Greece

Katerina Gardikas

Central European University Press, 2018

Malaria has existed in Greece since prehistoric times. Its prevalence fluctuated depending on climatic, socioeconomic and political changes. The book focuses on the factors that contributed to the spreading of the disease in the years between independent statehood in 1830 and the elimination of malaria in the 1970s.

By the nineteenth century, Greece was the most malarious country in Europe and the one most heavily infected with its lethal form, falciparum malaria. Owing to pressures on the environment from economic development, agrarian colonization and heightened mobility, the situation became so serious that malaria became a routine part of everyday life for practically all Greek families, further exacerbated by wars. The country’s highly fragmented geography and its variable rainfall distribution created an environment that was ideal for sustaining and spreading of diseases, which, in turn, affected the tolerance of the population to malaria. In their struggle with physical suffering and death, the Greeks developed a culture of avid quinine consumption and were likewise eager to embrace the DDT spraying campaign of the immediate post WW II years, which, overall, had a positive demographic effect.

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Last Best Gifts

Altruism and the Market for Human Blood and Organs

Kieran Healy

University of Chicago Press, 2006

More than any other altruistic gesture, blood and organ donation exemplifies the true spirit of self-sacrifice. Donors literally give of themselves for no reward so that the life of an individual—often anonymous—may be spared. But as the demand for blood and organs has grown, the value of a system that depends solely on gifts has been called into question, and the possibility has surfaced that donors might be supplemented or replaced by paid suppliers.

Last Best Gifts offers a fresh perspective on this ethical dilemma by examining the social organization of blood and organ donation in Europe and the United States. Gifts of blood and organs are not given everywhere in the same way or to the same extent—contrasts that allow Kieran Healy to uncover the pivotal role that institutions play in fashioning the contexts for donations. Procurement organizations, he shows, sustain altruism by providing opportunities to give and by producing public accounts of what giving means. In the end, Healy suggests, successful systems rest on the fairness of the exchange, rather than the purity of a donor’s altruism or the size of a financial incentive.

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Launching Global Health

The Caribbean Odyssey of the Rockefeller Foundation

Steven Palmer

University of Michigan Press, 2010

From the Rockefeller Foundation to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, U.S. philanthropies have played a leading role in the evolution of international health. Launching Global Health examines one of the earliest of these initiatives abroad, the Rockefeller Foundation's International Health Board. The flagship agency made its first call in British Guiana in 1914 to experiment with its new "American method" for the treatment of hookworm disease. Within months it was involved in ambitious hookworm programs in six Central American and Caribbean sites, its directors self-consciously choosing to test run the prototype for their global project in the nearest and clearest domain of American imperial influence. These efforts continued until 1930, when most of the International Health Board hookworm campaigns had evolved into public health projects of a different nature. Launching Global Health is the first book to explore the inaugural Rockefeller Foundation campaigns in depth and to treat them as an ensemble---as a laboratory for discovering and testing the elements of a global health system for the twentieth century. Orienting the study according to the priorities and perspectives of the social and cultural history of medicine and marrying the results with social science and institutional approaches, Steven Palmer rediscovers elements and dynamics in the original history of global health that were either discarded or that have continued to operate beneath the radar of scholarship. In particular, Palmer examines the extraordinary encounters that took place between the Rockefeller proselytizers of biomedicine and public health and the diverse populations whom they were attempting to help. Launching Global Health devotes special attention to the health narratives and practices of laboring people of different ethnicities and how they clashed and blended with the stories and rituals being promoted by the Rockefeller Foundation, ultimately showing the locally assembled health teams of microscopists, inspectors, and dispensers to have been active agents in the shaping of encounters between imperial and popular medicine. A volume in the series Conversations in Medicine and Society.

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Law at the End of Life

The Supreme Court and Assisted Suicide

Carl E. Schneider, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 2000

We live in a world in which courts crucially shape public policy through constitutional adjudication. This is a book written for that world. It brings together a group of distinguished scholars from many disciplines to examine the Supreme Court's recent decision that statutes prohibiting doctors from helping their patients commit suicide may be constitutional. It offers a guide to that decision and to the larger issues it raises for citizens and scholars alike. Law at the End of Life asks everyone's first question: What does the decision mean for today and tomorrow? It asks the lawyer's question: Is the Supreme Court's reasoning clear and convincing? It asks the doctor's question: How will the decision affect the decisions physicians make with their patients? It asks the ethicist's question: Will the decision conduce to wise and just decisions at the end of life? It asks the historian's question: How are we to understand the Court's work in light of our disturbing national experience with euthanasia? Ultimately, it asks the questions citizens need to ask in our new world: Is constitutional adjudication a good way to make public policy? Are courts well equipped -- with experience, with doctrine, with wisdom -- to make good policy? What role should courts have in making policy in a democracy? Has the Supreme Court made good public policy? What is the right policy for law at the end of life?

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Leaders in Plastic Surgery

The Dingman-Grabb Era 1946-1986

Robert M. Oneal, MD, and Lauralee A. Lutz

Michigan Publishing Services, 2017

Leaders in Plastic Surgery traces the inspirational leadership of Reed O. Dingman, DDS, MD, and William C. Grabb, MD, and details the origins and growth of plastic and reconstructive surgery and the training of residents in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the University of Michigan. It covers the years before and during the period of explosive innovations that have led the specialty to provide hope, correction, and rehabilitation to vast numbers of people suffering from a wide range of congenital abnormalities and acquired deformities. The authors, because of their long, personal association with plastic surgery in Ann Arbor, have brought to life the extensive accomplishments of the two leaders in terms of surgical techniques, surgical education, and important applied research while also documenting the many important contributions from the younger faculty and the trainees to the training program during those forty years. Many from that time frame have contributed their own memories, which has greatly enriched the documentation of an amazing history of an era past but not forgotten.

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Learning to Cut

Surgical Training and Practice, 1450–1800

Edited by Maria Pia Donato, Elaine Leong, and Tillmann Taape

University College London, 2026

The first-ever volume to offer a broader European narrative on surgical training and education in the early modern era.

This volume brings together case studies from the French, Italian, German, and English contexts to reveal diverse modes of surgical teaching and learning that were shaped by local contexts in early modern towns and cities. The chapters reveal the many spaces where practitioners learned and experienced surgery, shedding new light on the practice of early modern surgery.

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Leaving a Legacy

Lessons from the Writings of Daniel Drake

Philip Diller

University of Minnesota Press, 2019

In the midst of a fast-paced profession, it is increasingly a challenge to pause and reflect on where a person’s life is heading. All can feel overwhelming. In these moments, when nothing seems stable, it can be instructive to pause and study individuals from previous generations who lived fully and left a lasting legacy. To find valuable lessons and perspective on the present, author Dr. Phillip Diller has often turned to man, citizen, writer, educator, and physician, Dr. Daniel Drake, who lived from 1785-1852.

Leaving a Legacy: Lessons from the Writings of Daniel Drake is a selective collection of excerpts from the vast writings from the nineteenth-century doctor and medical pioneer Daniel Drake. From Drake’s life, documented here in his own words from excerpts of lectures, personal journal entries, presentations, speeches, books, and letters to his children, readers learn about the scope of his accomplishments in medicine, contributions to his community, and dedication to his family. Diller goes beyond biography to contextualize Drake’s life choices and what made him a role model for today’s physicians. Diller selected one hundred and eighty thematically arranged excerpts, which he paired with original reflection questions to guide the reader through thought-provoking prompts. In doing so, Diller presents the lessons from Drake’s remarkable life and work as a guide for others who wish to build an enduring legacy.

Designed to appeal to early and mid-career professionals, particularly those in the medical field, Drake and Diller offer readers a way to enhance life with small actions that can leave a legacy in any community—professional or personal. Documented previously as a man whose life was remarkable for the breadth and depth of his professional accomplishments, Drake’s countless contributions are showcased here to demonstrate the impact he truly had in his time and for generations to come. Engaging with Drake and Diller’s thoughtful and principled voices provides a lasting perspective for those trying to find their purpose in the present.

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Legitimating Life

Adoption in the Age of Globalization and Biotechnology

van Wichelen, Sonja

Rutgers University Press, 2019

The phenomenon of transnational adoption is changing in the age of globalization and biotechnology. In Legitimating Life, Sonja van Wichelen boldly describes how contemporary justifications of cross-border adoption navigate between child welfare, humanitarianism, family making, capitalism, science, and health. Focusing on contemporary institutional practices of adoption in the United States and the Netherlands, she traces how professionals, bureaucrats, lawyers, politicians, social workers, and experts legitimate a practice that became progressively controversial. Throughout the past few decades transnational adoption transformed from a humanitarian response to a means of making family. In this new manifestation, life becomes necessarily economized. While push and pull factors, demand and supply dynamics, and competition between agencies set the stage for the globalization of adoption, international conventions, scientific knowledge, and the language of human rights universalized the phenomenon. Van Wichelen argues that such technoscientific legitimations of a globalizing practice are rearticulating colonial logics of race and civilization. Yet, she also lets us see beyond the biopolitical project and into alternative ways of making kin.

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Lesser Harms

The Morality of Risk in Medical Research

Sydney A. Halpern

University of Chicago Press, 2004

Research physicians face intractable dilemmas when they consider introducing new medical procedures. Innovations carry the promise of preventing or curing life-threatening diseases, but they can also lead to injury or even death. How have clinical scientists made high-stakes decisions about undertaking human tests of new medical treatments? In Lesser Harms, Sydney Halpern explores this issue as she examines vaccine trials in America during the early and mid-twentieth century.

Today's scientists follow federal guidelines for research on human subjects developed during the 1960s and 1970s. But long before these government regulations, medical investigators observed informal rules when conducting human research. They insisted that the dangers of natural disease should outweigh the risks of a medical intervention, and they struggled to accurately assess the relative hazards. Halpern explores this logic of risk in immunization controversies extending as far back as the eighteenth century. Then, focusing on the period between 1930 and 1960, she shows how research physicians and their sponsors debated the moral quandaries involved in moving vaccine use from the laboratory to the clinic.

This probing work vividly describes the efforts of clinical investigators to balance the benefits and dangers of untested vaccines, to respond to popular sentiment about medical hazards, and to strategically present risk laden research to sponsors and the public.

“Concise and extremely well-written. . . . A fascinating synthesis of sociology, history, and institutional theory.”—Samuel C. Blackman, Journal of the American Medical Association

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Lessons in Mortality

Doctors and Patients Struggling Together

Allen B. Weisse, M.D.

University of Missouri Press, 2006

It doesn’t take a trip to the doctor to know that the bond between physicians and patients isn’t what it used to be. Specialization, rising costs, managed care, the insurance industry, the shadow of litigation—so many factors have changed what was once a traditional relationship grounded in respect and caring.

In light of the altered climate in health care, this thoughtful book deals with the way that today’s doctors and patients view themselves and one another. Allen Weisse has observed the changing medical scene during half a century of treating patients and training future physicians, and he writes frankly here about how doctors and patients have come to deal with illness in the twenty-first century.

Weisse first recalls his own brush with death as a young man diagnosed with testicular cancer—a time when one thinks of God and Death and little else. He then shares true stories of how different people have dealt with cancer, heart disease, stroke, infectious disease, AIDS, and other dire diagnoses—narratives enhanced by professional savvy and enriched by the kind of empathy that the survivor of such a calamity can provide.

Drawing from a storehouse of experiences shared by colleagues, patients, and friends, Weisse writes with passion, conviction, and clarity to encourage a renewal of the openness and trust that seem to be lacking in today’s doctor-patient relationships. These are accounts both uplifting and disturbing—some sad, others tinged with humor—intended to make doctors and patients alike come to a fuller realization that we are all together in this delicate but crucial business of staying alive.

While not quite foreseeing a return to the Norman Rockwell image of the family physician, Weisse urges the kind of care and compassion that patients often feel is lacking from their doctors, and he reassures victims of seemingly hopeless conditions that, despite the obstacles they often face, there are still health care professionals who truly have their patients’ welfare foremost in mind. Lessons in Mortality is just what the doctor ordered for a health care system in crisis: an honest look at the medical profession that encourages greater understanding on the part of both physicians and patients, reminding us that what we most need is one another.

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Lethal Decisions

The Unnecessary Deaths of Women and Children from HIV/AIDS

Arthur J. Ammann

Vanderbilt University Press, 2017

This first-person account by one of the pioneers of HIV/AIDS research chronicles the interaction among the pediatric HIV/AIDS community, regulatory bodies, governments, and activists over more than three decades. After the discovery of AIDS in a handful of infants in 1981, the next fifteen years showed remarkable scientific progress in prevention and treatment, although blood banks, drug companies, and bureaucrats were often slow to act. 1996 was a watershed year when scientific and clinical HIV experts called for treating all HIV-infected individuals with potent triple combinations of antiretroviral drugs that had been proven effective. Aggressive implementation of prevention and treatment in the United States led to marked declines in the number of HIV-related deaths, fewer new infections and hospital visits, and fewer than one hundred infants born infected each year.

Inexplicably, the World Health Organization recommended withholding treatment for the majority of HIV-infected individuals in poor countries, and clinical researchers embarked on studies to evaluate inferior treatment approaches even while the pandemic continued to claim the lives of millions of women and children. Why did it take an additional twenty years for international health organizations to recommend the treatment and prevention measures that had had such a profound impact on the pandemic in wealthy countries? The surprising answers are likely to be debated by medical historians and ethicists.

At last, in 2015, came a universal call for treating all HIV-infected individuals with triple-combination antiretroviral drugs. But this can only be accomplished if the mistakes of the past are rectified. The book ends with recommendations on how the pediatric HIV/AIDS epidemic can finally be brought to an end.

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Life And Death In Intensive Care

Joan Cassell

Temple University Press, 2005

Life and Death in Intensive Care offers a unique portrait of the surgical intensive care unit (SICU), the place in medical centers and hospitals where patients with the gravest medical conditions—from comas to terminal illness—are treated. Author Joan Cassell employs the concept of "moral economies" to explain the dilemmas that patients, families, and medical staff confront in treatment. Drawing upon her fieldwork conducted in both the United States and New Zealand, Cassell compares the moral outlooks and underlying principles of SICU nurses, residents, intensivists, and surgeons. Using real life examples, Life and Death in Intensive Care clearly presents the logic and values behind the SICU as well as the personalities, procedures, and pressures that characterize every case. Ultimately, Cassell demonstrates the differing systems of values, and the way cultural definitions of medical treatment inform how we treat the critically ill.

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Life Atomic

A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine

Angela N. H. Creager

University of Chicago Press, 2013

After World War II, the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) began mass-producing radioisotopes, sending out nearly 64,000 shipments of radioactive materials to scientists and physicians by 1955. Even as the atomic bomb became the focus of Cold War anxiety, radioisotopes represented the government’s efforts to harness the power of the atom for peace—advancing medicine, domestic energy, and foreign relations.

In Life Atomic, Angela N. H. Creager tells the story of how these radioisotopes, which were simultaneously scientific tools and political icons, transformed biomedicine and ecology. Government-produced radioisotopes provided physicians with new tools for diagnosis and therapy, specifically cancer therapy, and enabled biologists to trace molecular transformations. Yet the government’s attempt to present radioisotopes as marvelous dividends of the atomic age was undercut in the 1950s by the fallout debates, as scientists and citizens recognized the hazards of low-level radiation. Creager reveals that growing consciousness of the danger of radioactivity did not reduce the demand for radioisotopes at hospitals and laboratories, but it did change their popular representation from a therapeutic agent to an environmental poison. She then demonstrates how, by the late twentieth century, public fear of radioactivity overshadowed any appreciation of the positive consequences of the AEC’s provision of radioisotopes for research and medicine.

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Life beyond Medicine

The Joys and Challenges of Physician Retirement

Sharon Romm

Dartmouth College Press, 2018

Physicians retire at all ages—older doctors forsake medical practice when tired of it or when forced to do so by age or illness; younger practitioners leave because of burnout, disillusionment with the medical system, or a desire to engage in new activities. But research and literature about physician retirement is scanty. Given the limited resources available, many physicians who want to retire from medicine remain mired in indecision, wondering how their life might be different if they left medicine. Sharon Romm has written the definitive guide to help health care professionals of all ages prepare for the joys and challenges ahead.

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Life on Ice

A History of New Uses for Cold Blood

Joanna Radin

University of Chicago Press, 2017

After the atomic bombing at the end of World War II, anxieties about survival in the nuclear age led scientists to begin stockpiling and freezing hundreds of thousands of blood samples from indigenous communities around the world. These samples were believed to embody potentially invaluable biological information about genetic ancestry, evolution, microbes, and much more. Today, they persist in freezers as part of a global tissue-based infrastructure. In Life on Ice, Joanna Radin examines how and why these frozen blood samples shaped the practice known as biobanking.

The Cold War projects Radin tracks were meant to form an enduring total archive of indigenous blood before it was altered by the polluting forces of modernity. Freezing allowed that blood to act as a time-traveling resource. Radin explores the unique cultural and technical circumstances that created and gave momentum to the phenomenon of life on ice and shows how these preserved blood samples served as the building blocks for biomedicine at the dawn of the genomic age. In an era of vigorous ethical, legal, and cultural debates about genetic privacy and identity, Life on Ice reveals the larger picture—how we got here and the promises and problems involved with finding new uses for cold human blood samples.

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Life with AIDS

Rose Weitz

Rutgers University Press, 1991

Rose Weitz presents a holistic picture of the experiences of people with HIV disease, using their own words and focusing on the issues that they consider important. Her information comes from in-depth interviews with women and men who have HIV disease--from those who are asymptomatic but infected to those who have full-blown AIDS--and from interviews with doctors who treat persons with HIV disease.

Weitz describes how these people are affected by and respond to the changes in their bodies and their social relationships, from the time when they realize that they are at risk of infection to the time when death approaches. It covers such issues as how individuals obtain diagnoses, develop their initial ideas about what the future will bring, and come to terms with their impending deaths. To put this into a broader context, she also explores the moral status of illness in general and looks at why some illnesses, including HIV disease, have become especially stigmatized.

The author also explores how doctors are affected by and cope with the unique pressures of treating persons with HIV disease. The concluding chapter theorizes about how changes in the social construction, demographic distribution, and treatment of HIV disease are changing the lives of people with AIDS.

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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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Lincoln and Medicine

Glenna R. Schroeder-Lein

Southern Illinois University Press, 2012

The life of America’s sixteenth president has continued to fascinate the public since his tragic death. Now, Glenna R. Schroeder-Lein unveils an engaging volume on the medical history of the Lincoln family. Lincoln and Medicine,the first work on the subject in nearly eighty years, investigates the most enduring controversies about Lincoln’s mental health, physical history, and assassination; the conditions that afflicted his wife and children, both before and after his death; and Lincoln’s relationship with the medical field during the Civil War, both as commander-in-chief and on a personal level.

Since his assassination in 1865, Lincoln has been diagnosed with no less than seventeen conditions by doctors, historians, and researchers, including congestive heart failure, epilepsy, Marfan syndrome, and mercury poisoning. Schroeder-Lein offers objective scrutiny of the numerous speculations and medical mysteries that continue to be associated with the president’s physical and mental health, from the recent interest in testing Lincoln’s DNA and theories that he was homosexual, to analysis of the deep depressions, accidents, and illnesses that plagued his early years. Set within the broader context of the prevailing medical knowledge and remedies of the era, Lincoln and Medicine takes into account new perspectives on the medical history of Abraham Lincoln and his family, offering an absorbing and informative view into a much-mythologized, yet underinvestigated, dimension of one of the nation’s most famous leaders.

Best of the Best by the Univeristy Press Books for Public and Secondary School Libraries, 2013

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Listen to Me Good

The Story of an Alabama Midwife

Margaret Charles Smith and Linda Janet Holmes

The Ohio State University Press, 1996

Margaret Charles Smith, a ninety-one-year-old Alabama midwife, has thousands of birthing stories to tell. Sifting through nearly five decades of providing care for women in rural Greene County, she relates the tales that capture the life-and-death struggle of the birthing experience and the traditions, pharmacopeia, and spiritual attitudes that influenced her practice. She debunks images of the complacent southern “granny” midwife and honors the determination, talent, and complexity of midwifery.

Fascinating to read, this book is part of the new genre of writing that recognizes the credibility of midwives who have emerged from their own communities and were educated through apprenticeship and personal experience. Past descriptions of southern black midwives have tended to denigrate their work in comparison with professional established medicine. Believed to be the oldest living (though retired) traditional African American midwife in Alabama, Smith is one of the few who can recount old-time birthing ways. Despite claims that midwives contributed to high infant mortality rates, Smith’s story emphasizes midwives' successes in facing medical challenges and emergencies.

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Listening to the Whispers

Re-thinking Ethics in Healthcare

Edited by Christine Sorrell Dinkins and Jeanne Merkle Sorrell

University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

Listening to the Whispers gives voice to scholars in philosophy, medical anthropology, physical therapy, and nursing, helping readers re-think ethics across the disciplines in the context of today's healthcare system. Diverse voices, often unheard, challenge readers to enlarge the circle of their ethical concerns and look for hidden pathways toward new understandings of ethics. Essays range from a focus on the context of corporatization and managed care environments to a call for questioning the fundamental values of society as these values silently affect many others in healthcare. Each chapter is followed by a brief essay that highlights issues useful for scholarly research and classroom discussion. The conversations of interpretive research in healthcare contained in this volume encourage readers to re-think ethics in ways that will help to create an ethical healthcare system with a future of new possibilities.

Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine

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Living With Cancer

A Practical Guide

Visel, Dave

Rutgers University Press, 2006

In this essential guide, Dave Visel draws on expertise hard-won during his wife’s battle with lymphoma. He provides an overview of the varieties of cancer and all the basic types of treatments available. Chapters dispel common myths associated with these treatments and provide tips on nutrition and physical fitness. Visel also moves beyond the hospital to provide information and strategies to help with the emotional, practical, and financial effects of a diagnosis. Cancer patients will find the tools they need to make well-informed decisions on questions ranging from the right time to tell coworkers to whether to travel for treatment. Because medical bankruptcies affect nearly two million Americans each year, Visel devotes several chapters to financial issues. He also addresses the effects of cancer on relationships, such as how to deal with a difficult parent or whether to reconcile with an estranged spouse. In addition, Living with Cancer provides a comprehensive overview of the most useful corporate, government, and non-profit resources available. Anyone looking for help in understanding the full range of personal, professional, and legal issues associated with cancer will welcome this book. As inspiring as it is informative, it is a survival guide in the truest sense.

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Living and Dying in São Paulo

Immigrants, Health, and the Built Environment in Brazil

Jeffrey Lesser

Duke University Press, 2025

There is a saying in Brazil: “Mosquitoes are democratic: they bite the rich and the poor alike.” Why then is bad health---from violence to respiratory disease, from malaria to dengue---dispersed unevenly across different social and national groups? In Living and Dying in São Paulo, Jeffrey Lesser focuses on the Bom Retiro neighborhood to explore such questions by examining the competing visions of well-being in Brazil among racialized immigrants and policymakers and health officials. He analyzes the fraught relationship between Bom Retiro residents and the state and health care agencies that have overseen community sanitation efforts since the mid-nineteenth century, drawing out the connected systems of the built environment, public health laws and practices, and citizenship. Lesser employs the concept of “residues” to outline how continuing historical material, legislative, and social legacies structure contemporary daily life and health outcomes in the neighborhood. In so doing, Lesser creates a dialogue between the past and the present, showing how the relationship between culture and disease is both layered and interconnected.

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Living in the Land of Limbo

Fiction and Poetry about Family Caregiving

Carol Levine

Vanderbilt University Press, 2014

Living in the Land of Limbo is the first anthology of short stories and poems about family caregivers. These men and women find themselves in "limbo," as they struggle to take care of a family member or friend in the uncertain world of chronic illness. The authors explore caregivers' experiences as they deal with family conflicts, the complexities of the health care system, and the impact of their choices on their lives and the lives of others. The book includes selections devoted to caregivers of aging parents; husbands and wives; ill children; and relatives, lovers, and friends. A final section is devoted to paid caregivers and their clients. Among the conditions that form the background of the selections are dementia, HIV/AIDS, mental illness, multiple sclerosis, and pediatric cancer.

Many of the authors are well-known poets and writers, but others have not been published in mainstream media. They represent a range of cultural backgrounds. Although their works approach caregiving in very different ways, the authors share a commitment to emotional truth, unvarnished by societal ideals of what caregivers should feel and do. These stories and poems paint profoundly moving and revealing portraits of family caregivers.

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