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1414 books match the query 'Medical' and 29 start with o

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Obesity

Brewis, Alexandra A

Rutgers University Press, 2010

In a world now filled with more people who are overweight than underweight, public health and medical perspectives paint obesity as a catastrophic epidemic that threatens to overwhelm health systems and undermine life expectancies globally. In many societies, being obese also creates profound personal suffering because it is so culturally stigmatized. Yet despite loud messages about the health and social costs of being obese, weight gain is a seemingly universal aspect of the modern human condition.

Grounded in a holistic anthropological approach and using a range of ethnographic and ecological case studies, Obesity shows that the human tendency to become and stay fat makes perfect sense in terms of evolved human inclinations and the physical and social realities of modern life. Drawing on her own fieldwork in the rural United States, Mexico, and the Pacific Islands over the last two decades, Alexandra A. Brewis addresses such critical questions as why obesity is defined as a problem and why some groups are so much more at risk than others. She suggests innovative ways that anthropology and other social sciences can use community-based research to address the serious public health and social justice concerns provoked by the global spread of obesity.

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Obsession

A History

Lennard J. Davis

University of Chicago Press, 2008

We live in an age of obsession. Not only are we hopelessly devoted to our work, strangely addicted to our favorite television shows, and desperately impassioned about our cars, we admire obsession in others: we demand that lovers be infatuated with one another in films, we respond to the passion of single-minded musicians, we cheer on driven athletes. To be obsessive is to be American; to be obsessive is to be modern.

But obsession is not only a phenomenon of modern existence: it is a medical category—both a pathology and a goal. Behind this paradox lies a fascinating history, which Lennard J. Davis tells in Obsession. Beginning with the roots of the disease in demonic possession and its secular successors, Davis traces the evolution of obsessive behavior from a social and religious fact of life into a medical and psychiatric problem. From obsessive aspects of professional specialization to obsessive compulsive disorder and nymphomania, no variety of obsession eludes Davis’s graceful analysis.

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Of Others Inside

Insanity, Addiction And Belonging in America

Darin Weinberg, foreword by Bryan S. Turner

Temple University Press, 2005

There is little doubt among scientists and the general public that homelessness, mental illness, and addiction are inter-related. In Of Others Inside, Darin Weinberg examines how these inter-relations have taken form in the United States. He links the establishment of these connections to the movement of mental health and addiction treatment from redemptive processes to punitive ones and back again, and explores the connection between social welfare, rehabilitation, and the criminal justice system.

Seeking to offer a new sociological understanding of the relationship between social exclusion and mental disability, Of Others Inside considers the general social conditions of homelessness, poverty, and social marginality in the U.S. Weinberg also explores questions about American perceptions of these conditions, and examines in great detail the social reality of mental disability and drug addiction without reducing people's suffering to simple notions of biological fate or social disorder.

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Off He Goes!

Growing Up with Brachial Plexus Palsy

Written by Susan B Tomford; Illustrated by Yuo-Chyung Lin and Lynda J-S Yang, MD, PhD

Michigan Publishing Services, 2018

Spend the day with Wimbo – as he actively participates in daily activities despite his Brachial Plexus Palsy. Accompany him through his day as he prepares to take on the world!

Attractive colorful multimedia images merge with easy-to-read text to make this young elephant’s story appeal to all pre-school children.

This board book is the product of the faculty and staff of the University of Michigan Brachial Plexus and Peripheral Nerve Program, inspired by the plight of orphan elephants in Africa and The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust that helps orphaned calves reintegrate back into the wild as well as our patients who actively participate despite Brachial Plexus Palsy. Our clinical program strives to provide the best interdisciplinary care for patients through collaboration, research, and innovation – as we hope to improve the function and quality of life for all persons with brachial plexus and peripheral nerve dysfunction.

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Old Age in a New Age

The Promise of Transformative Nursing Homes

Beth Baker

Vanderbilt University Press, 2007

On investigative visits to nursing homes across the nation, Beth Baker has witnessed profound changes. Culture change leaders are tearing up everything—the floor plans, the flow charts, the schedules, the lousy menus, the attitudes, the rules—and starting from scratch. They are creating extraordinary places where people live in dignity and greet the day with contentment, assisted by employees who feel valued and appreciated. Perhaps most surprising, these homes prove that a high quality of life does not have to cost more. Some of the best homes in the nation serve primarily low-income people who are on Medicaid.

In Old Age in a New Age, Baker tell the story of a better way to live in old age. Although each home is different, they share common values: respecting individual choices; empowering staff; fostering a strong community of elders, staff, family members, and volunteers; redesigning buildings from a hospital model to a home (where pets and children are part of everyday life); and honoring people when they die. Her visits to more than two dozen facilities include those associated with the Eden Alternative, Green House, Kendal, and the Pioneer Network. Whether these transformational homes become the norm or the domain of a lucky few is the question that faces the next generation of elders, the baby boomers.

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Old Paint

A Medical History of Childhood Lead-Paint Poisoning in the United States to 1980

English, Peter C.

Rutgers University Press, 2001

In the early twentieth century lead had many domestic uses: in solder for cans, as a gasoline additive to prevent “knocking” in engines, in water pipes, and, most prominently, in interior paint prized for its durability and ability to hold color. Far from being the toxic hazard we recognize today, lead was a valuable commodity. However, by the end of the century, lead had largely disappeared from our environment as physicians discovered the threat it posed to children’s health and mental development.

Old Paint documents the history of lead-paint poisoning in the United States and the evolving responses of public health officials and the lead-paint industry to this hazard up to 1980, by which time lead had been banned from gasoline and paint. Peter C. English traces lead poisoning from a rare, but acute problem confined to a small group of children to the discovery by the end of the 1940s of the dangers of the crumbling lead-painted interiors of inner-city dwellings. He draws on a wide range of primary materials not only to illuminate our understanding of how this health hazard changed over time, but also to explore how diseases are constructed and evolve.

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On Duty

Power, Politics, and the History of Nursing in New Jersey

Ward, Frances

Rutgers University Press, 2009

In 1886, Newark City Hospital opened a training school for nurses in New Jersey. With the dawn of a new century women began to demand rights that had been denied them, and nurses too demanded changes in health care and higher education. For the first time, On Duty offers a highly readable account of the struggle for professional autonomy by New Jersey nurses and reveals how their political and legislative battles mirrored the struggle of women throughout the country to redefine their roles in society.

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On Hysteria

The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820

Sabine Arnaud

University of Chicago Press, 2015

These days, hysteria is known as a discredited diagnosis that was used to group and pathologize a wide range of conditions and behaviors in women. But for a long time, it was seen as a legitimate category of medical problem—and one that, originally, was applied to men as often as to women.

In On Hysteria, Sabine Arnaud traces the creation and rise of hysteria, from its invention in the eighteenth century through nineteenth-century therapeutic practice. Hysteria took shape, she shows, as a predominantly aristocratic malady, only beginning to cross class boundaries (and be limited to women) during the French Revolution. Unlike most studies of the role and status of medicine and its categories in this period, On Hysteria focuses not on institutions but on narrative strategies and writing—the ways that texts in a wide range of genres helped to build knowledge through misinterpretation and recontextualized citation.

Powerfully interdisciplinary, and offering access to rare historical material for the first time in English, On Hysteria will speak to scholars in a wide range of fields, including the history of science, French studies, and comparative literature.

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On Monsters and Marvels

Ambroise Pare

University of Chicago Press, 1983

Ambroise Paré, born in France around 1510, was chief surgeon to both Charles IX and Henri III. In one of the first attempts to explain birth defects, Paré produced On Monsters and Marvels, an illustrated encyclopedia of curiosities, of monstrous human and animal births, bizarre beasts, and natural phenomena. Janice Pallister's acclaimed English translation offers a glimpse of the natural world as seen by an extraordinary Renaissance natural philosopher.

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On Suffering

Pathways to Healing and Health

Beverley M. Clarke

Dartmouth College Press, 2011

Currently in medicine, theories of pain regard pain and suffering as one and the same. It is assumed that if pain ceases, suffering stops. These theories are not substantiated in clinical practice, where some patients report little pain and extreme suffering and other individuals have a lot of pain and virtually no suffering. Based on the results of a scientific questionnaire, as well as evidence from and conversations with hundreds of patients, Beverley M. Clarke argues convincingly that suffering is often separate from pain, has universal measurable characteristics, and requires suffering-specific treatments that are sensitive to the patient’s individual psychology and cultural background. According to Clarke, suffering occurs when individuals who have experienced a life change because of medical issues perceive a threat to their idea of self and personhood. This kind of suffering, based on a lost “dream of self,” affects every aspect of an individual’s life. Treating the patient as a whole person—an approach that Clarke strongly advocates—is an issue overlooked in the majority of chronic care and traumatic injury treatments, focused as they are on pain reduction. Clarke believes passionately that the management of suffering in medicine is the responsibility of all health care practitioners. Until they come to identify and understand suffering as distinct from pain, the entire health care system will continue to carry the financial and moral burden of incomplete diagnoses, inappropriate referrals for care, ineffective treatment interventions, and lost human potential.

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On the Frontlines of Crisis

Intensive Care and the Challenge of COVID-19

Jason Rodriquez

Rutgers University Press, 2025

On the Frontlines of Crisis is a powerful account of the experiences of healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. As hospitals worldwide became overwhelmed by an influx of critically ill patients, those working in intensive care units (ICUs) were thrust into an unprecedented battle against a deadly virus about which little was understood. Rodriquez takes readers into the heart of two Massachusetts ICUs to learn about the people who put their lives on the line and faced severe challenges as they treated critically ill patients at the peak of the pandemic.

A dramatic spike in mental health distress among these healthcare workers was a consequence of the pandemic, but was also a result of the changing dynamics within the healthcare system itself. Here, Rodriquez examines the impact of the development of the contemporary focus on “clinical empathy.” This clinical method, while intended to improve patient care, had profound implications for healthcare workers during the pandemic, often blurring the lines between professional distance and personal involvement, increasing the emotional demands on staff and heightened their vulnerability to anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, and burnout. Through the personal stories of those who were in the ICU, On the Frontlines of Crisis offers a sobering reflection on the social and emotional costs of caring for patients.

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On the Heels of Ignorance

Psychiatry and the Politics of Not Knowing

Owen Whooley

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Psychiatry has always aimed to peer deep into the human mind, daring to cast light on its darkest corners and untangle its thorniest knots, often invoking the latest medical science in doing so. But, as Owen Whooley’s sweeping new book tells us, the history of American psychiatry is really a record of ignorance. On the Heels of Ignorance begins with psychiatry’s formal inception in the 1840s and moves through two centuries of constant struggle simply to define and redefine mental illness, to say nothing of the best way to treat it. Whooley’s book is no antipsychiatric screed, however; instead, he reveals a field that has muddled through periodic reinventions and conflicting agendas of curiosity, compassion, and professional striving. On the Heels of Ignorance draws from intellectual history and the sociology of professions to portray an ongoing human effort to make sense of complex mental phenomena using an imperfect set of tools, with sometimes tragic results.

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On the Ragged Edge of Medicine

Doctoring Among the Dispossessed

Patricia Kullberg

Oregon State University Press, 2017

On the Ragged Edge of Medicine offers a glimpse into a medical practice for the homeless and urban poor. Told through fifteen patient vignettes, and drawn from the author’s decades of experience in Portland, Oregon, this revealing memoir illuminates the impact of poverty on the delivery of health services and the ways in which people adapt and survive (or don’t survive) in conditions of abuse and deprivation. Kullberg’s stories show the direct and sometimes devastating effects of poverty on public health, poignantly demonstrating that medicine is as much a social enterprise as a scientific one.

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Open Wound

The Tragic Obsession of Dr. William Beaumont

Jason Karlawish

University of Michigan Press, 2013

A shotgun misfires inside the American Fur Company store in Northern Michigan, and Alexis St. Martin's death appears imminent. It's 1822, and, as the leaders of Mackinac Island examine St. Martin's shot-riddled torso, they decide not to incur a single expense on behalf of the indentured fur trapper. They even go so far as to dismiss the attention of U.S. Army Assistant Surgeon William Beaumont, the frontier fort's only doctor.

Beaumont ignores the orders and saves the young man's life. What neither the doctor nor his patient understands—yet—is that even as Beaumont's care of St. Martin continues for decades, the motives and merits of his attention are far from clear. In fact, for what he does to his patient, Beaumont will eventually stand trial and be judged.

Rooted deeply in historic fact, Open Wound artfully fictionalizes the complex, lifelong relationship between Beaumont and his illiterate French Canadian patient. The young trapper's injury never completely heals, leaving a hole into his stomach that the curious doctor uses as a window to understand the mysteries of digestion. Eager to rise up from his humble origins and self-conscious that his medical training occurred as an apprentice to a rural physician rather than at an elite university, Beaumont seizes the opportunity to experiment upon his patient's stomach in order to write a book that he hopes will establish his legitimacy and secure his prosperity. As Jason Karlawish portrays him, Beaumont, always growing hungrier for more wealth and more prestige, personifies the best and worst aspects of American ambition and power.

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Opioid Reckoning

Love, Loss, and Redemption in the Rehab State

Amy C. Sullivan

University of Minnesota Press, 2021

Examines the complexity and the humanity of the opioid epidemic

America’s opioid epidemic continues to ravage families and communities, despite intense media coverage, federal legislation, criminal prosecutions, and harm reduction efforts to prevent overdose deaths. More than 450,000 Americans have died from opioid overdoses since the late 1990s. In Opioid Reckoning, Amy C. Sullivan explores the complexity of the crisis through firsthand accounts of people grappling with the reverberating effects of stigma, treatment, and recovery.

Nearly everyone in the United States has been touched in some way by the opioid epidemic, including the author and her family. Sullivan uses her own story as a launching point to learn how the opioid epidemic challenged longstanding recovery protocols in Minnesota, a state internationally recognized for pioneering addiction treatment. By centering the voices of many people who have experienced opioid use, treatment, recovery, and loss, Sullivan exposes the devastating effects of a one-size-fits-all approach toward treatment of opioid dependency. Taking a clear-eyed, nonjudgmental perspective of every aspect of these issues—drug use, parenting, harm reduction, medication, abstinence, and stigma—Opioid Reckoning questions current treatment models, healthcare inequities, and the criminal justice system. Sullivan also imagines a future where anyone suffering an opioid-use disorder has access to the individualized care, without judgment, available to those with other health problems.

Opioid Reckoning presents a captivating look at how the state that invented “rehab” addresses the challenges of the opioid epidemic and its overdose deaths while also taking readers into the intimate lives of families, medical and social work professionals, grassroots activists, and many others impacted by the crisis who contribute their insights and potential solutions. In sharing these stories and chronicling their lessons, Sullivan offers a path forward that cultivates empathy, love, and hope for anyone affected by chaotic drug use and its harms.

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Opposing Ambitions

Gender and Identity in an Alternative Organization

Sherryl Kleinman

University of Chicago Press, 1996

"Renewal" is a holistic health center run by baby boomers whose political ideals were shaped by the counterculture movements of the 1960s. Through interviews and observation, Sherryl Kleinman takes us inside Renewal and shows us how its members struggled to maintain a view of themselves as progressive and alternative even as they sought conventional legitimacy.

In Opposing Ambitions we meet the members of Renewal as individuals; learn about the differences in power, prestige, and respect they are accorded; why they talked endlessly about money; and how they related to each other. Kleinman shows how members' attempts to see themselves as unconventional, but also as serious operators of a legitimate health care organization, led them to act in ways that undermined their egalitarian goals. She draws out the lessons Renewal offers for understanding the problems women face in organizations, the failure of social movements to live up to their ideals, and how it is possible for progressives to avoid reproducing the inequalities they claim to oppose.

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Ordinary Medicine

Extraordinary Treatments, Longer Lives, and Where to Draw the Line

Sharon R. Kaufman

Duke University Press, 2015

Most of us want and expect medicine’s miracles to extend our lives. In today’s aging society, however, the line between life-giving therapies and too much treatment is hard to see—it’s being obscured by a perfect storm created by the pharmaceutical and biomedical industries, along with insurance companies. In Ordinary Medicine Sharon R. Kaufman investigates what drives that storm’s “more is better” approach to medicine: a nearly invisible chain of social, economic, and bureaucratic forces that has made once-extraordinary treatments seem ordinary, necessary, and desirable. Since 2002 Kaufman has listened to hundreds of older patients, their physicians and family members express their hopes, fears, and reasoning as they faced the line between enough and too much intervention. Their stories anchor Ordinary Medicine. Today’s medicine, Kaufman contends, shapes nearly every American’s experience of growing older, and ultimately medicine is undermining its own ability to function as a social good. Kaufman’s careful mapping of the sources of our health care dilemmas should make it far easier to rethink and renew medicine’s goals.

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Organ Transplantation Policy

James F. Blumstein and Frank A. Sloan, eds.

Duke University Press, 1989

Organ transplantation as a high-cost surgical and medical procedure poses an extraordinarily rich and complex set of social, ethical, and policy issues.
A June 1988 symposium at Vanderbilt University gathered leaders in a wide variety of fields to synthesize the current state of knowledge concerning organ transplantation policy and to access policy options. Collected here are the revised papers presented at that symposium; also included is one influential earlier paper on the same topic. Together, they constitute a major contribution to the debate on organ transplantation policy and its moral, legal, financial, and political implications.

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Origins and Development of Medical Imaging

T. Doby and G. Alker

Southern Illinois University Press, 1997

In this newest volume in the Medical Humanities Series, T. Doby and G. Alker trace the development of our ability to visualize the inside of the human body.

For thousands of years, horror of the dead, superstition, and oppressive decrees prevented our ancestors from looking inside the human body; in ancient civilizations, diagnostics were based on imagination and theory, with only limited observation. So people developed suppositions about health and disease without knowing how the liver, heart, brain, and blood vessels looked or functioned. In tracing the history of medical imaging, Doby and Alker establish that it was not until the Renaissance and the detailed drawings of human anatomy by da Vinci and Vesalius that successful internal imaging of the human body was born.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Roentgen’s discovery of the X-ray provided the first miraculous look into the living body. From that instant, medical imaging developed at an ever-increasing pace, evolving to more recent discoveries in nuclear medicine, CT scanning, and ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging.

As Doby and Alker note, we can expect our efforts to be understood in the future only if we examine past events with an appreciation of the difficulties and challenges that faced our predecessors. Despite almost unbelievable advances in current medical technology, we must still rely on our own resources and common sense as human beings in understanding what technology can and cannot do for us.

A comprehensive set of appendixes pictorially depicting the history of imaging round out the volume.

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Osiris, Volume 13

Beyond Joseph Needham: Science, Technology, and Medicine in East and Southeast Asia

Edited by Morris Low

University of Chicago Press, 2000

Devoted to the history of non-Western science, technology, and medicine, this path-breaking volume goes beyond the legacy of the late historian of Chinese science, Joseph Needham, by covering an unprecedented range of countries and by adopting new approaches. The seventeen chapters address topics in China, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand. However, the contributors do not view the histories of these countries in isolation. Many adopt a cross-cultural approach by tracing interaction with other Asian countries and the West. The volume begins with four chapters that provide a "big picture" overview of science and civilization in Asia. These are followed by more focused essays, which deal with aspects of science, technology, and medicine in specific countries.

Specialist and non-specialist readers alike will leave this volume with a strong sense of the political and economic imperatives behind knowledge systems in Eastern Asia, their cultural contexts, and how they have coexisted along with those in the West.

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Osiris, Volume 31

History of Science and the Emotions

Edited by Otniel E. Dror, Bettina Hitzer, Anja Laukötter, and Pilar León-Sanz

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2016

What new insights become available for historians when emotions are included as an analytical category? This volume of Osiris explores the historical interrelationships between science and its cultures and cultures of emotions. It argues that a dialogue between the history of emotions and the history of science leads to a rethinking of our categories of analysis, our subjects, and our periodizations. The ten case studies in the volume explore these possibilities and interrelationships across North America and Europe, between the twelfth and the twentieth centuries, in a variety of scientific disciplines. They analyze how scientific communities approached and explained the functions of emotions; how the concomitant positioning of emotions in or between body-mind-intersubjectivity took place; how emotions infused practices and how practices generated emotions; and, ultimately, how new and emerging identities of and criteria for emotions created new knowledge, new technologies, and new subjectivities.

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Osler's A Way of Life and Other Addresses, with Commentary and Annotations

Sir William Osler. Edited by Shigeaki Hinohara and Hisae Niki.

Duke University Press, 2001

Sir William Osler (1849–1919) had a long and distinguished career as a physician and professor at McGill University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Johns Hopkins University, and finally, as the Regius Chair in Medicine at Oxford University. Over the course of his professional life, Osler gave many addresses—mostly to medical students—on medical ethics, medicine and the humanities, the relationship between the medical practitioner and the patient, and, as the titular essay makes clear, on the “way of life” he advocated for the ethical physician. He remains an inspiration to many contemporary medical practitioners; there are active Osler Societies throughout the world.
While Osler’s talks were frequently published during his lifetime and they have been published individually and in different compilations since his death, none contain the over 1500 annotations that appear here, notes that serve to explain the many philosophical, biblical, historical, and literary allusions contained in Osler’s writings.
This thoroughly explicated selection of Sir William Osler’s writings will be cherished by physicians, medical students, nurses, philosophers, theologians, and ethicists in this—and future—generations.

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Others' Milk

The Potential of Exceptional Breastfeeding

Wilson, Kristin J.

Rutgers University Press, 2018

Breastfeeding rarely conforms to the idealized Madonna-and-baby image seen in old artwork, now re-cast in celebrity breastfeeding photo spreads and pro-breastfeeding ad campaigns. The personal accounts in Others’ Milk illustrate just how messy and challenging and unpredictable it can be—an uncomfortable reality in the contemporary context of high-stakes motherhood in which “successful” breastfeeding proves one’s maternal mettle.

Exceptional breastfeeders find creative ways to feed and care for their children—such as by inducing lactation, sharing milk, or exclusively pumping. They want to adhere to the societal ideal of giving them “the best” but sometimes have to face off with dogmatic authorities in order to do so. Kristin J. Wilson argues that while breastfeeding is never going to be the feasible choice for everyone, it should be accessible to anyone.

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Our Aging Bodies

Merrill, Gary F

Rutgers University Press, 2015

People in developed countries are living longer and, just as the aged population around the world is steadily growing, the number of adults eighty-five and older in the United States is projected to quadruple to twenty-one million people by 2050. The aging of our population has huge implications for baby boomers and their children, and has generated a greater interest in the causes and effects of aging.

Our Aging Bodies provides a clear, scientifically based explanation of what happens to all the major organ systems and bodily processes—such as the cardiovascular and digestive systems—as people age. The first section is an overview of secondary aging—changes that occur with age that are related to disease and the environment—and include the effect of such things as diet, humor, and exercise. Readers will also learn about primary aging—intrinsic changes that occur with the aging of specific organs and body systems (including the prostate, the heart, the digestive system, and the brain). Throughout the book, Gary F. Merrill weaves in personal anecdotes and stories that help clarify and reinforce the facts and principles of the underlying scientific processes and explanations. Our Aging Bodies is accessible to a general reader interested in the aging phenomenon, or baby boomers wanting to be more informed when seeing their doctor and discussing changes to their bodies as they age.

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Our Intelligent Bodies

Gary F. Merrill

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Human intelligence isn’t just located in the brain. Our bodies are marvelously sophisticated and complex, with a variety of autonomic systems that help maintain our health without us ever having to think about them. But how exactly do all these physiological structures actually work?

In Our Intelligent Bodies, physiology professor Gary F. Merrill takes you on a guided tour through the human body. You’ll learn how our eyes are designed to detect unimaginably small bursts of light and how our ears contain bundles of tiny hairs, each one attuned to different sound frequencies. You’ll also discover how our hearts are smart enough to compensate for skipped beats and irregular rhythms and how our pulmonary system adjusts for low oxygen levels. You’ll even find out why the gut is sometimes called the “second brain,” its reflexes controlled by millions of neurons.

Written in a fun, easy-to-comprehend style and filled with illuminating analogies, Our Intelligent Bodies also brings readers up to date on cutting-edge research into the wonders of human physiology. It will give you a new appreciation for the smart decisions our bodies are making when our brains aren’t paying attention.

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Our Marvelous Bodies

An Introduction to the Physiology of Human Health

Merrill, Gary F

Rutgers University Press, 2008

Our Marvelous Bodies offers a unique perspective on the structure, function, and care of the major systems of the human body. Unlike other texts that use a strictly scientific approach, physiologist Gary F. Merrill relays medical facts alongside personal stories that help students relate to and apply the information.

Readers learn the basics of feedback control systems, homeostasis, and physiological gradients. These principles apply to an understanding of the body’s functioning under optimal, healthy conditions, and they provide insight into states of acute and chronic illness. Separate chapters are devoted to each of the body’s systems in detail: nervous, endocrine, cardiovascular, respiratory, renal, gastrointestinal, musculoskeletal, reproductive, and immune. Through a series of real-life examples, the book also shows the importance of maintaining careful medical records for health care professionals, scientists, and patients alike.

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