Results by title
1415 books match the query 'Medical' and 87 start with s
Safe in a Midwife's Hands
Birthing Traditions from Africa to the American SouthLinda Janet Holmes
The Ohio State University Press, 2023
Salud Latina
Structural Inequality and the Social Determinants of Latino Health in the United StatesYoshira D. Macías Mejía
Michigan State University Press, 2027
Latinos living in the United States continue to face institutional racism and systemic oppression in many aspects of their lives. This volume focuses on discriminatory policies and practices in the health sector and reveals how they compound contemporary health inequities among Latinos. Through a combination of rigorous data analysis and personal narratives, the contributors explore critical dimensions of Latino health, including systemic disparities in healthcare access and insurance, the effects of state immigration policies on health outcomes, unique challenges facing undocumented immigrants, adolescent socio-emotional development, aging populations, Latina women’s physical and mental health, farmworker occupational hazards, and pathways toward health equity. Together, the chapters show that Latinos in the United States continue to face four fundamental barriers to health equity, namely immigrant legal status restrictions, anti-immigrant policies, inadequate quality care from healthcare systems lacking cultural competency, and limited occupational protections. This timely work provides essential evidence for policymakers, public health practitioners, and researchers seeking to understand and address persistent health disparities affecting America's largest ethnic minority population.
Saving Babies?
The Consequences of Newborn Genetic ScreeningStefan Timmermans and Mara Buchbinder
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Saving Sickly Children
The Tuberculosis Preventorium in American Life, 1909-1970Connolly, Cynthia A
Rutgers University Press, 2008
In this book, Cynthia A. Connolly provides a provocative analysis of public health and family welfare through the lens of the tuberculosis preventorium. This unique facility was intended to prevent TB in indigent children from families labeled irresponsible or at risk for developing the disease. Yet, it also held deeply rooted assumptions about class, race, and ethnicity. Connolly goes further to explain how the child-saving themes embedded in the preventorium movement continue to shape children's health care delivery and family policy in the United States.
Scaling Preservice Training in Comprehensive Contraception and Abortion Care and Research across Ethiopia
A Case Study of a Five-Year Project with Schools of Medicine and MidwiferySolomon W. Beza
Michigan Publishing Services, 2019
The case study is produced by UM-CIRHT with funding from an anonymous donor.
Science and Medicine in Twentieth-Century China
Research and EducationJohn Z. Bowers, J. William Hess, and Nathan Sivin, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1988
Science in Print
Essays on the History of Science and the Culture of PrintEdited by Rima D. Apple, Gregory J. Downey, and Stephen L. Vaughn; Foreword by James A. Secord
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012
Ever since the threads of seventeenth-century natural philosophy began to coalesce into an understanding of the natural world, printed artifacts such as laboratory notebooks, research journals, college textbooks, and popular paperbacks have been instrumental to the development of what we think of today as “science.” But just as the history of science involves more than recording discoveries, so too does the study of print culture extend beyond the mere cataloguing of books. In both disciplines, researchers attempt to comprehend how social structures of power, reputation, and meaning permeate both the written record and the intellectual scaffolding through which scientific debate takes place.
Science in Print brings together scholars from the fields of print culture, environmental history, science and technology studies, medical history, and library and information studies. This ambitious volume paints a rich picture of those tools and techniques of printing, publishing, and reading that shaped the ideas and practices that grew into modern science, from the days of the Royal Society of London in the late 1600s to the beginning of the modern U.S. environmental movement in the early 1960s.
Scientific Characters
Rhetoric, Politics, and Trust in Breast Cancer ResearchLisa Keränen
University of Alabama Press, 2010
Screening The Body
Tracing Medicine’s Visual CultureLisa Cartwright
University of Minnesota Press, 1995
Moving images are used as diagnostic tools and locational devices every day in hospitals, clinics, and laboratories. But how and when did they come to be established and accepted sources of knowledge about the body in medical culture? How are the specialized techniques and codes of these imaging techniques determined, and whose bodies are studied, diagnosed, and treated with the help of optical recording devices?
Screening the Body traces the fascinating history of scientific film during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to show that early experiments with cinema are important precedents of contemporary medical techniques such as ultrasound and PET scanning. Lisa Cartwright brings to light eccentric projects in the history of science and medicine, such as Thomas Edison's sensational attempt to image the brain with X rays before a public audience, and the efforts of doctors to use the motion picture camera to capture movements of the body, from the virtually imperceptible flow of blood to epileptic seizures.Drawing on feminist film theory, cultural studies, the history of film, and the writings of Foucault, Cartwright illustrates how this scientific cinema was part of a broader tendency in society toward the technological surveillance, management, and physical transformation of the individual body and the social body. She unveils an area of film culture that has rarely been discussed but that will leave readers with a new way of seeing the everyday practice of diagnostic imaging that we all inevitably encounter in clinics and hospitals.
Second Chances
Surviving AIDS in UgandaSusan Reynolds Whyte, editor
Duke University Press, 2014
Contributors. Phoebe Kajubi, David Kyaddondo, Lotte Meinert, Hanne O. Mogensen, Godfrey Etyang Siu, Jenipher Twebaze, Michael A. Whyte, Susan Reynolds Whyte
Secrets of Life with Brachial Plexus Palsy
Written by Denise Justice; Illustrated by Susan Eatmon; Edited by Holly Wagner
Michigan Publishing Services, 2020
Secrets of Life with Brachial Plexus Palsy is the story of a baby girl who grows up with dreams and ambitions like everybody else. Some of her dreams are to play like other children, to show others that there is nothing that she cannot do, and to pursue any career that she chooses when she grows up. Life with this condition can be challenging, and as the years pass, Marie uncovers secrets that allow her to overcome the stigma of her Brachial Plexus Palsy – secrets she would like to share with you…
Let Marie show you that living life with Brachial Plexus Palsy is an exciting journey!
Seeds of Change
The Story of ACORN, America's Most Controversial Antipoverty Community Organizing GroupJohn Atlas
Vanderbilt University Press, 2010
Seeds of Change goes beyond the headlines of the last Presidential campaign to describe what really happened in ACORN's massive voter registration drives, why it triggered an unrelenting attack by Fox News and the Republican Party, and how it confronted its internal divisions and scandals.
Based on Atlas's own eyewitness original reporting, as the only journalist to have access to ACORN's staff and board meetings, this book documents the critical transition from founder Wade Rathke, a white New Orleans radical to Bertha Lewis, a Brooklyn African American activist.
The story begins in the 1970s, when a small group of young men and women, led by a charismatic college dropout, began a quest to help the powerless help themselves. In a tale full of unusual characters and dramatic conflicts, the book follows the ups and downs of ACORN's organizers and members as they confront big corporations and unresponsive government officials in Albuquerque, Brooklyn, Chicago, Detroit, Little Rock, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and the Twin Cities.
The author follows the course of local and national campaigns to organize unions, fight the subprime mortgage crisis, promote living wages for working people, struggle for affordable housing and against gentrification, and help Hurricane Katrina's survivors return to New Orleans.
The book dispels the conservative myth that we can only help the poor through private soup kitchens and charity and the liberal myth that the solution rests simply with more government services. Seeds of Change, not only provides a gripping look at ACORN's four decades of effective organizing, but also offers a hopeful analysis of the potential for a revival of real American democracy.
An offering of The Progressive Book Club.
Seen But Not Heard
What Medical Records Don’t Tell Us About Women’s LivesJennifer M. Silva
Russell Sage Foundation, 2026
Medical clinicians, who are already overworked and burned out, are increasingly expected to understand and treat systemic social issues like poverty and racism. One aspect of this is documenting patient’s social risk factors in electronic health records (EHRs). But EHRs do not aways give the full story. Critically, they omit patients’ voices and perspectives about their lives, care, and whether their needs are being met. In Seen But Not Heard, sociologist Jennifer M. Silva and epidemiologist Annemarie G. Hirsch explore the gaps between what clinicians document in EHRs and women’s lived experiences.
Drawing on interviews with 87 non-college-educated, economically disadvantaged women living in rural America and their health records from a large, non-profit health system, Silva and Hirsch find that the stories that medical records provide and the stories that women tell about themselves differ dramatically. Medical charts often translate women’s suffering into sterile diagnostic codes, prescriptions, and treatment plans. Some women felt heard by their clinicians, believed they received adequate care. Many of these women thought their clinicians went above and beyond to help meet their needs by offering them information on how to apply for benefits like food stamps or childcare subsidies and helping them obtain necessary items like mattress covers and winter coats. More often, however, women felt that clinicians were detached from their everyday struggles to survive, whether that meant keeping their families intact even in the face of violence or finding money to pay the never-ending string of bills.
Silva and Hirsch argue that because the system of healthcare delivery interprets social problems as individual failings it often reproduces long-standing injurious stereotypes of women as hysterical, recalcitrant, impure, and gluttonous. For some healthcare providers, knowledge about patients’ social risk factors can become a source of control and punishment, such as denying patients care or reporting patients to child welfare services. Patients described clinicians mobilizing harmful stereotypes about marriage and motherhood, race, and poverty during their appointments. Some of the women’s most traumatic experiences in the healthcare system were completely missing from their EHRs. These troubling experiences ultimately deter women from accessing healthcare, discourages them from sharing their experiences with clinicians, and in some cases, makes their health and social problems worse. Silva and Hirsch offer several policies and practices that would improve women’s experiences in clinical encounters, such as training clinicians in trauma-informed and culturally responsive care, as well as national investments in housing, food security, transportation, and environmental justice.
Seen But Not Heard is a disturbing but necessary examination of the ways vulnerable women are often failed by the healthcare system and offers solutions that will allow healthcare workers to better address the structural barriers faced by their patients.
Selected Papers on Analysis of Algorithms
Donald E. Knuth
CSLI, 2000
Self-Defense
A Myth-Busting Guide to Immune HealthDaniel M. Davis
University of Chicago Press, 2025
A world-renowned scientist offers a much-needed analysis of what it takes to have good immune health—helping readers navigate what can really help, what is a complete myth, and why.
Does orange juice help ward off colds? And how does our age affect our ability to recover from one? When it comes to immunity, are we really what we eat? Or how much we eat? We are surrounded by big questions and big claims about enhancing our immune systems, so how do we tell the fiction from the facts? And, ultimately, what can we do to reduce our chances of getting sick?
World-leading immunologist Daniel M. Davis offers answers in this authoritative, highly accessible, myth-busting guide to the effects of stress, age, exercise, weight, nutrition, sleep, vaccines, and mental health on our immune health. Taking us to the cutting edge of immunology research and explaining both what we know and how we know it, Self-Defense helps readers spot phony claims and make informed choices. Davis shows us that everyone’s immune system is entirely unique, and that’s why we should be wary of one-size-fits-all “cures.” We learn how exercise, for example, has all sorts of different, even opposing, short- and long-term effects on our immune health. And while our gut microbes are vitally important, it’s unlikely that yogurt drinks can really boost your immune system to stop you getting ill.
An eye-opening window into some of the astonishing possibilities for the future, when it comes to distinguishing bogus and beneficial health claims about everything from vitamin D to inflammation and cancer therapies, Davis’s book may be your best self-defense.
Self-Defense
A Myth-Busting Guide to Immune HealthDaniel M. Davis
University of Chicago Press, 2025
A world-renowned scientist offers a much-needed analysis of what it takes to have good immune health—helping readers navigate what can really help, what is a complete myth, and why.
Does orange juice help ward off colds? And how does our age affect our ability to recover from one? When it comes to immunity, are we really what we eat? Or how much we eat? We are surrounded by big questions and big claims about enhancing our immune systems, so how do we tell the fiction from the facts? And, ultimately, what can we do to reduce our chances of getting sick?
World-leading immunologist Daniel M. Davis offers answers in this authoritative, highly accessible, myth-busting guide to the effects of stress, age, exercise, weight, nutrition, sleep, vaccines, and mental health on our immune health. Taking us to the cutting edge of immunology research and explaining both what we know and how we know it, Self-Defense helps readers spot phony claims and make informed choices. Davis shows us that everyone’s immune system is entirely unique, and that’s why we should be wary of one-size-fits-all “cures.” We learn how exercise, for example, has all sorts of different, even opposing, short- and long-term effects on our immune health. And while our gut microbes are vitally important, it’s unlikely that yogurt drinks can really boost your immune system to stop you getting ill.
An eye-opening window into some of the astonishing possibilities for the future, when it comes to distinguishing bogus and beneficial health claims about everything from vitamin D to inflammation and cancer therapies, Davis’s book may be your best self-defense.
Selling Science
Polio and the Promise of Gamma GlobulinMawdsley, Stephen E
Rutgers University Press, 2016
Drawing on oral history interviews, medical journals, newspapers, meeting minutes, and private institutional records, Selling Science sheds light on the ethics of scientific conduct, and on the power of marketing to shape public opinion about medical experimentation.
Sex in an Age of Technological Reproduction
<i>ICSI<i/> and <i>Taboos<i/>Carl Djerassi
University of Wisconsin Press, 2008
Sex, Sickness, and Slavery
Illness in the Antebellum SouthMarli F. Weiner with Mazie Hough
University of Illinois Press, 2014
Sexual Visions
Images Of Gender In Science And Medicine Between The Eighteenth And Twentieth CenturiesLudmilla Jordanova
University of Wisconsin Press, 1993
Sexualizing Cancer
HPV and the Politics of Cancer PreventionLaura Mamo
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Starting in 2005, people in the US and Europe were inundated with media coverage announcing the link between cervical cancer and the sexually transmitted virus HPV. Within a year, product ads promoted a vaccine targeting cancer’s viral cause, and girls and women became early consumers of this new cancer vaccine. An understanding of HPV’s broadening association with other cancers led to the identification of new at-risk populations—namely boys and men—and ignited a plethora of gender and sexual issues related to cancer prevention.
Sexualizing Cancer is the first book dedicated to the emergence and proliferation of the HPV vaccine along with the medical capacity to screen for HPV—crucial landmarks in the cancer prevention arsenal based on a novel connection between sex and chronic disease. Interweaving accounts from the realms of biomedical science, public health, and social justice, Laura Mamo chronicles cervical cancer’s journey out of exam rooms and into public discourse. She shows how the late twentieth-century scientific breakthrough that identified the human papilloma virus as having a causative role in the onset of human cancer galvanized sexual politics, struggles for inclusion, new at-risk populations, and, ultimately, a new regime of cancer prevention. Mamo reveals how gender and other equity arguments from within scientific, medical, and advocate communities shaped vaccine guidelines, clinical trial funding, research practices, and clinical programs, with consequences that reverberate today. This is a must-read history of medical expansion—from a “woman’s disease” to a set of cancers that affect all genders—and of lingering sexualization, with specific gendered, racialized, and other contours along the way.
Shaping Nursing Science and Improving Health
The Michigan LegacyShaké Ketefian, editor
Michigan Publishing Services, 2016
The work covers selectively the development of nursing science over a period of some thirty years which was undertaken by nursing faculty and the School’s PhD Alumni. The account of the strategic development of a program of research across bio-behavioral phenomena, health promotion/risk reduction, women’s health and nursing and health care systems is instructive. Substantive contributions have been made across the selected areas; of note also is the impact of translational science on health outcomes of individuals and communities. The accounts of the purposeful development of health informatics in nursing and leadership as scholarship are also highly developed. The book is a valuable contribution to the literature on how nursing research at Michigan is helping transform the lives of patients, families and communities.
Shaping the Motherhood of Indigenous Mexico
Vania Smith-Oka
Vanderbilt University Press, 2013
The cash transfer program is Oportunidades, which enrolls more than a fifth of Mexico's population. It expects mothers to become involved in their children's lives at three nodes--health, nutrition, and education. If women do not comply with the standards of modern motherhood, they are dropped from the program and lose the bi-monthly cash payments. Smith-Oka explores the everyday implementation of the program and its unintended consequences.
The mothers are often berated by clinicians for having too many children (Smith-Oka provides background on the history of eugenics and population control in Mexico) and for other examples of their "backward" ways. An entire chapter focuses on the humor indigenous women use to cope with disrespectful comments. Ironically, this form of resistance allows the women to accept the situation that controls their behavior.
Shattering Culture
American Medicine Responds to Cultural DiversityMary-Jo DelVecchio Good
Russell Sage Foundation, 2012
Shock Therapy
A History of Electroconvulsive Treatment in Mental IllnessShorter, Edward
Rutgers University Press, 2007
In this book, Edward Shorter and David Healy trace the controversial history of ECT and other "shock" therapies. Drawing on case studies, public debates, extensive interviews, and archival research, the authors expose the myths about ECT that have proliferated over the years. By showing ECT's often life-saving results, Shorter and Healy endorse a point of view that is hotly contested in professional circles and in public debates, but for the nearly half of all clinically depressed patients who do not respond to drugs, this book brings much needed hope.
Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty
Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women WorkersM. Murphy
Duke University Press, 2006
Sick building syndrome embodied a politics of uncertainty that continues to characterize contemporary American environmental debates. Murphy explores the production of uncertainty by juxtaposing multiple histories, each of which explains how an expert or lay tradition made chemical exposures perceptible or imperceptible, existent or nonexistent. They show how uncertainty emerged from a complex confluence of feminist activism, office worker protests, ventilation engineering, toxicology, popular epidemiology, corporate science, and ecology. In an illuminating case study, she reflects on EPA scientists’ efforts to have their headquarters recognized as a sick building. Murphy brings all of these histories together in what is not only a thorough account of an environmental health problem but also a much deeper exploration of the relationship between history, materiality, and uncertainty.
Sickening
Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United StatesAnne Pollock
University of Minnesota Press, 2021
An event-by-event look at how institutionalized racism harms the health of African Americans in the twenty-first century
A crucial component of anti-Black racism is the unconscionable disparity in health outcomes between Black and white Americans. Sickening examines this institutionalized inequality through dramatic, concrete events from the past two decades, revealing how unequal living conditions and inadequate medical care have become routine.
From the spike in chronic disease after Hurricane Katrina to the lack of protection for Black residents during the Flint water crisis—and even the life-threatening childbirth experience for tennis star Serena Williams—author Anne Pollock takes readers on a journey through the diversity of anti-Black racism operating in healthcare. She goes beneath the surface to deconstruct the structures that make these events possible, including mass incarceration, police brutality, and the hypervisibility of Black athletes’ bodies. Ultimately, Sickening shows what these shocking events reveal about the everyday racialization of health in the United States.
Concluding with a vital examination of racialized healthcare during the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter rebellions of 2020, Sickening cuts through the mind-numbing statistics to vividly portray healthcare inequalities. In a gripping and passionate style, Pollock shows the devastating reality and consequences of systemic racism on the lives and health of Black Americans.
Sickness and Health in America
Readings in the History of Medicine and Public HealthEdited by Judith W. Leavitt and Ronald L. Numbers
University of Wisconsin Press, 1997
Silent Cells
The Secret Drugging of Captive AmericaAnthony Ryan Hatch
University of Minnesota Press, 2019
A critical investigation into the use of psychotropic drugs to pacify and control inmates and other captives in the vast U.S. prison, military, and welfare systems
For at least four decades, U.S. prisons and jails have aggressively turned to psychotropic drugs—antidepressants, antipsychotics, sedatives, and tranquilizers—to silence inmates, whether or not they have been diagnosed with mental illnesses. In Silent Cells, Anthony Ryan Hatch demonstrates that the pervasive use of psychotropic drugs has not only defined and enabled mass incarceration but has also become central to other forms of captivity, including foster homes, military and immigrant detention centers, and nursing homes.
Silent Cells shows how, in shockingly large numbers, federal, state, and local governments and government-authorized private agencies pacify people with drugs, uncovering patterns of institutional violence that threaten basic human and civil rights. Drawing on publicly available records, Hatch unearths the coercive ways that psychotropics serve to manufacture compliance and docility, practices hidden behind layers of state secrecy, medical complicity, and corporate profiteering.
Psychotropics, Hatch shows, are integral to “technocorrectional” policies devised to minimize public costs and increase the private profitability of mass captivity while guaranteeing public safety and national security. This broad indictment of psychotropics is therefore animated by a radical counterfactual question: would incarceration on the scale practiced in the United States even be possible without psychotropics?
Silent Violence
Global Health, Malaria, and Child Survival in TanzaniaVinay R. Kamat
University of Arizona Press, 2013
Malaria control, according to Kamat, has become increasingly medicalized, a trend that overemphasizes biomedical and pharmaceutical interventions while neglecting the social, political, and economic conditions he maintains are central to Africa’s malaria problem. Kamat offers recent findings on global health governance, neoliberal economic and health policies, and their impact on local communities.
Seeking to link wider social, economic, and political forces to local experiences of sickness and suffering, Kamat analyzes the lived experiences and practices of people most seriously affected by malaria—infants and children. The persistence of childhood malaria is a form of structural violence, he contends, and the resultant social suffering in poor communities is closely tied to social inequalities.
Silent Violence illustrates the evolving nature of local responses to the global discourse on malaria control. It advocates for the close study of disease treatment in poor communities as an integral component of global health funding. This ethnography combines a decade of fieldwork with critical review and a rare anthropological perspective on the limitations of the bureaucratic, technological, institutional, medical, and political practices that currently determine malaria interventions in Africa.
Silicone Survivors
Women's Experiences with Breast ImplantsSusan Zimmermann
Temple University Press, 1998
Some opted for breast implants after mastectomies, others for cosmetic reasons. Some felt empowered by the surgery: "Being a woman, I just like breasts and felt like I got ripped off. ... I did it for myself." Others were pressured by their husbands: "He used to make fun of parts of my body. .... And, he made me believe that if I was ever to leave him, no one would have anything to do with me because I was this deformed type of person."
After surgery, some women were ecstatic, while others had a sense of inner conflict about what they had done to themselves: were they "faking it"? And a few were angry: "I was really angry inside that I had had to put plastic bags filled with chemicals in my body in order for me to feel like I could do the Hoochie Koo on Saturday nights. ... I didn't wear tight clothes; I didn't want my children to find out."
Now, having faced years of medical and personal uncertainty, many have coped by reassessing their lives and their relationships, by sharing information and support with other women with implants, outreach that became a means for self-empowerment.
Skin Shows
Gothic Horror and the Technology of MonstersJack Halberstam
Duke University Press, 1995
Deploying feminist and queer approaches to the monstrous body, Halberstam views the Gothic as a broad-based cultural phenomenon that supports and sustains the economic, social, and sexual hierarchies of the time. She resists familiar psychoanalytic critiques and cautions against any interpretive attempt to reduce the affective power of the monstrous to a single factor. The nineteenth-century monster is shown, for example, as configuring otherness as an amalgam of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Invoking Foucault, Halberstam describes the history of monsters in terms of its shifting relation to the body and its representations. As a result, her readings of familiar texts are radically new. She locates psychoanalysis itself within the gothic tradition and sees sexuality as a beast created in nineteenth century literature. Excessive interpretability, Halberstam argues, whether in film, literature, or in the culture at large, is the actual hallmark of monstrosity.
Sleep Demons
An Insomniac’s MemoirBill Hayes
University of Chicago Press, 2018
An acclaimed journalist and memoirist—and partner of the late neurologist Oliver Sacks—Hayes has been plagued by insomnia his entire life. The science and mythology of sleep and sleeplessness form the backbone to Hayes’s narrative of his personal battles with sleep and how they colored his waking life, as he threads stories of fugitive sleep through memories of growing up in the closet, coming out to his Irish Catholic family, watching his friends fall ill during the early years of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, and finding a lover. An erudite blend of science and personal narrative, Sleep Demons offers a poignant introduction to the topics for which Hayes has since become famous, including art, eros, city life, the history of medical science, and queer identity.
Sleep Paralysis
Night-mares, Nocebos, and the Mind-Body ConnectionAdler, Shelley R
Rutgers University Press, 2011
Shelley R. Adler's fifteen years of field and archival research focus on the ways in which night-mare attacks have been experienced and interpreted throughout history and across cultures and how, in a unique example of the effect of nocebo (placebo's evil twin), the combination of meaning and biology may result in sudden nocturnal death.
Sleep and Wakefulness
Nathaniel Kleitman
University of Chicago Press, 1987
Slow Cures and Bad Philosophers
Essays on Wittgenstein, Medicine, and BioethicsCarl Elliott, ed.
Duke University Press, 2001
As Elliott explains in his introduction, Wittgenstein’s philosophy runs against the grain of most contemporary bioethics scholarship, which all too often ignores the context in which moral problems are situated and pays little attention to narrative, ethnography, and clinical case studies in rendering bioethical judgments. Such anonymous, impersonal, rule-writing directives in which health care workers are advised how to behave is what this volume intends to counteract. Instead, contributors stress the value of focusing on the concrete particulars of moral problems and write in the spirit of Wittgenstein’s belief that philosophy should be useful. Specific topics include the concept of “good dying,” the nature of clinical decision making, the treatment of neurologically damaged patients, the moral treatment of animals, and the challenges of moral particularism.
Inspired by a philosopher who deplored “professional philosophy,” this work brings some startling insights and clarifications to contemporary ethical problems posed by the realities of modern medicine.
Contributors. Larry Churchill, David DeGrazia, Cora Diamond, James Edwards, Carl Elliott, Grant Gillett, Paul Johnston, Margaret Olivia Little, James Lindemann Nelson, Knut Erik Tranoy
Small
Life and Death on the Front Lines of Pediatric SurgeryCatherine Musemeche
Dartmouth College Press, 2014
Smoking Privileges
Psychiatry, the Mentally Ill, and the Tobacco Industry in AmericaHirshbein, Laura D
Rutgers University Press, 2015
So Far Away
A Daughter's Memoir of Life, Loss, and LoveChristine W. Hartmann
Vanderbilt University Press, 2011
Christine's father, as it turned out, prepared too slowly for old age. Before he had made any decision, fate disabled him through a series of strokes. Confined to a nursing home, severely impaired by dementia and frustrated by his circumstances, his life epitomized the predicament her mother wanted to avoid.
So Far Away gives us an intimate view of a person interacting with and reacting to her parents at the ends of their lives. In a richly detailed, poignant story of family members' separate yet interwoven journeys, it underscores the complexities and opportunities that life presents each one of us.
Socializing Medicine
Health Humanities and East Asian MediaEdited by Pao-chen Tang, Yuqian Yan, and Ling Zhang
Hong Kong University Press, 2025
Socializing Medicine explores the intersections of medicine, health, and East Asian media. Interweaving archival research, audiovisual analyses, and theoretical insights from the emerging field of Health Humanities, the contributors reveal the multifaceted ways in which mass media—including photography, film, television, and live streaming—has been deployed as a tool for controlling medicine and health, privileging those with power and authority since the early twentieth century. Adopting anti-colonial and anti-capitalist perspectives, the contributors in this volume challenge the dominant mediations of health against the backdrop of imperialism, Cold War geopolitical tensions, and neoliberal capitalism. Collectively, they advocate for alternative understandings of medical culture through media productions that envision accessible and equitable healthcare practices.
Sociology and the Field of Public Health
Edward Suchman
Russell Sage Foundation, 1963
Sound Sense
Living and Learning with Hearing LossSara Laufer Batinovich
Gallaudet University Press, 2011
One out of every eight people between the ages of 18 and 67 in the United States has a hearing loss, estimated as 12 percent of the working-age population. Sound Sense: Living and Learning with Hearing Loss addresses the acute need of these people to function at the highest level in these income-earning years, the longest phase in their lives. In nine pointed chapters, author Sara Laufer Batinovich, who also has lost her hearing, shares her experience and knowledge in turning every challenge into an opportunity to become one’s best self-advocate.
Batinovich begins in the workplace, advising on winning a job, keeping it, and developing a long-term career, plus how to reduce stress and establish fulfilling professional relationships with colleagues. She offers tips on communication ranging from having sales people face you for easier speechreading to parsing boarding announcements at airports and play-by-play at ballparks. Her practical handbook also provides step-by-step guidance for getting a hearing aid or a cochlear implant and finding one’s way through prickly insurance claim mazes.
Sound Sense features information on finding a service dog, securing legally mandated accommodations for continuing education, tips on exercise and health, and even sensitive suggestions on strengthening personal relationships. Batinovich’s vivacious style and her own anecdotes add an upbeat, genuine sensibility to her book’s value as a positive guide to living with hearing loss.
Sounds of Tohi
Cherokee Health and Well-Being in Southern AppalachiaLisa J. Lefler and Thomas N. Belt
University of Alabama Press, 2022
Dialogue between a medical anthropologist and a Cherokee linguist about health, well-being, and environmental issues
Sounds of Tohi: Cherokee Health and Well-Being in Southern Appalachia is the result of almost two decades of work by medical anthropologist Lisa J. Lefler and Cherokee elder and traditionalist Thomas N. Belt. The narrative consists of a dialogue between them that displays traditional Indigenous knowledge as well as the importance of place for two people from cultures and histories that intersect in the mountains of Southern Appalachia. Together, Lefler and Belt decolonize thinking about health, well-being, and environmental issues through the language and experiences of people whose identity is inextricably linked to the mountains and landscape of western North Carolina.
Lefler and Belt discuss several critical cultural concepts that explain the science of relationships with this world, with the spirit world, and with people. They explore tohi, the Cherokee concept of health, which offers a more pervasive understanding of relationships in life as balanced and moving forward in a good way. They converse about the importance of matrilineality, particularly in light of community healing, the epistemologies of Cherokee cosmography, and decolonizing counseling approaches.
The discussions here offer a different way of approaching the issues that face Americans in this difficult time of division. Lefler and Belt share their urgency to take action against the wholesale exploitation of public lands and the shared environment, to work to perpetuate tribal languages, to preserve the science that can make a difference in how people treat one another, and to create more forums that are inclusive of Native and marginalized voices and that promote respect and appreciation of one another and the protection of sacred places. Throughout, they rely on the preservation of traditional knowledge, or Native science, via Native language to provide insight as to why people should recognize a connection to the land.
Sourcebook for Ancient Mesopotamian Medicine
JoAnn Scurlock
SBL Press, 2014
In this collection JoAnn Scurlock assembles and translates medical texts that provided instructions for ancient doctors and pharmacists. Scurlock unpacks the difficult, technical vocabulary that describes signs and symptoms as well as procedures and plants used in treatments. This fascinating material shines light on the development of medicine in the ancient Near East, yet these tablets were essentially inaccessible to anyone without an expertise in cuneiform. Scurlock’s work fills this gap by providing a key resource for teaching and research.
Features:
- Accessible translations and transliterations for both specialists and non-specialists
- Texts include a range of historical periods and regions
- Therapeutic, pharmacological, and diagnostic texts
Southwestern Medical Dictionary
Spanish-English, English-SpanishMargarita Artschwager Kay
University of Arizona Press, 2001
A staple of southwestern health care for more than twenty years, this dictionary can make a difference in patient care. Now available in a revised edition, it focuses on vocabulary used in health contexts by Spanish-speaking people in order to help patients tell their stories and medical practitioners to understand them. Unlike other bilingual dictionaries that emphasize scientific terms, this one focuses on standard Spanish terms as well as regional expressions peculiar to Mexican Spanish—language encountered in Chicago as easily as in Phoenix.
In the Spanish-to-English section, Spanish terms are followed by English translations and sample sentences to help health care practitioners understand how a patient might use them:
acedías, heartburn, pain in lower esophagus perceived as in the heart. Uno tiene la tendencia a sufrir de acedías después de comer chile. One has a tendency to suffer heartburn after eating chile. (syn: acidez, agruras del estómago)
In the English-to-Spanish section, English words are translated into simple Spanish terms along with English synonyms.
Now available in a revised edition, this handy reference features:
• more than 3,000 entries
• new entries that reflect current health problems and treatments
• inclusion of cognates
• Spanish definitions of English words
• anatomical drawings with bilingual labels
• more material on medicinal plants, including an appendix of poisonous and non-poisonous plants
• lists of food items and kinship terms
This book is an indispensable reference for all health care professionals who see patients of Mexican origin. Combining idiomatic precision with technical accuracy, it can help break down language barriers on either side of the border.
Speaking for the Dying
Life-and-Death Decisions in Intensive CareSusan P. Shapiro
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Speaking for the Dying tells their story, drawing on daily observations over more than two years in two intensive care units in a diverse urban hospital. From bedsides, hallways, and conference rooms, you will hear, in their own words, how physicians really talk to families and how they respond. You will see how decision makers are selected, the interventions they weigh in on, the information they seek and evaluate, the values and memories they draw on, the criteria they weigh, the outcomes they choose, the conflicts they become embroiled in, and the challenges they face. Observations also provide insight into why some decision makers authorize one aggressive intervention after the next while others do not—even on behalf of patients with similar problems and prospects. And they expose the limited role of advance directives in structuring the process decision makers follow or the outcomes that result.
Research has consistently found that choosing life or death for another is one of the most difficult decisions anyone can face, sometimes haunting families for decades. This book shines a bright light on a role few of us will escape and offers steps that patients and loved ones, health care providers, lawyers, and policymakers could undertake before it is too late.
Special Care
Medical Decisions at the Beginning of LifeFred M. Frohock
University of Chicago Press, 1986
But there is a dark underside to the exercise of these skills. A growing number of babies live only to be tethered to life-support systems, unconscious or suffering incessant pain for years and sometimes for the duration of their lives. The ethical issues raised by these children are among the most difficult in our society. Should life be maintained no matter what its quality? Or is there a point at which treatment should be stopped on humane grounds? Who is to make decisions on continuing or ending therapy for damaged children? Is the law a suitable instrument for regulating medical decisions in intensive care nurseries? Should the growing cost of intensive care influence therapy decisions?
Special Care explores the moral and legal issues in neonatal intensive care. Fred M. Frohock spent four months in a special care nursery, observing the daily actions of doctors and nurses and interviewing staff and parents of patients. This engaging, human drama is told through the author's own journal entries interspersed with generous excerpts from taped interviews that display the practical reasoning of staff and parents as they address the moral problems raised by intensive care medicine. Several case studies of infants highlight the often contradictory directions in which medical staffs are pulled and the painful decisions that doctors and parents together are often called upon to make. The result is a book that reconstructs the ordinary life of a neonatal nursery and presents the moral views of those who are most intimately involved in therapy decisions.
This book is an urgently needed entry in the current discussions of treatment for badly damaged babies. Frohock argues that our tradition of rights language, which rests on the premise that we know what a human being is, is inappropriate when dealing with the paradoxes of decision making in neonatal nurseries. Calling for a new moral vocabulary better adapted to the world of medicine, he introduces the notion of harm in place of rights, a concept drawn from medicine's Hippocratic oath that pledges to "do no harm," as a way to begin framing questions and making decisions. Special Care will interest anyone who wants to understand medical decisions at the margins of human life.
Speech and Song at the Margins of Global Health
Zulu Tradition, HIV Stigma, and AIDS Activism in South AfricaSteven P. Black
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Speechreading
A Way To Improve UnderstandingHarriet Kaplan
Gallaudet University Press, 1985
Speechreading: A Way to Improve Understanding discusses the nature and process of speechreading, its benefits, and its limitations. This useful book clarifies commonly-held misconceptions about speechreading. The beginning chapters address difficult communication situations and problems related to the speaker, the speechreader, and the environment. It then offers strategies to manage them.
Speechreading provides practical exercises illustrating the use ofthese communication strategies in actual situations. It is an excellent book for late-deafened adults, families and friends, parents of children with hearing loss, and professionals and students.
Spiritual Caregiving
Healthcare As A MinistryVerna Benner Carson
Templeton Press, 2004
With today's cumbersome insurance procedures, government regulations, endless paperwork, and concerns about malpractice rates, many health care professionals are asking: "Why am I doing this? Am I making a difference to my patients? Is there a better way—and if so, what is it?" In this book, Carson and Koenig examine the state of the health care system with the goal of providing healthcare professionals and caregivers the inspiration and practical tools to reclaim their sense of purpose.
The book begins with an evaluation of the current system from the perspective of the spiritual vision that initially motivated and nourished many caregivers. The authors then pose a vision of a health care system that supports and nurtures the spirituality of patients and their families, of which some elements already exist.
An overview is provided on the preparation necessary for health care professionals to offer spiritual care when there are major implications—for people with chronic illnesses, psychiatric issues, devastating injuries, and those preparing for surgery, facing death, and those living with chronic pain. Also explored are ways that health professionals and caregivers can maintain their own spiritual health even as they work to bring about healing, comfort, and solace to others.
Woven throughout the book are the personal narratives of physicians, nurses, chaplains, health care educators, community resource workers, administrators, therapists, and psychologists—all from a wide range of religious traditions. Their examples inspire and assist professionals in renewing the spiritual focus of health care.