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Psychedelic New York: A History of LSD in the City (Intoxicating Histories)
by Chris ElcockAs LSD moves towards the medical mainstream, it continues to evoke powerful memories of the psychedelic sixties and west coast counterculture. In this lively account, Chris Elcock follows a different branch of psychedelic history – one that is sprawling, layered, and centred on New York City. A major hub for the production and consumption of LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs, New York spawned a unique psychedelic culture that reverberated through the city, from psychoanalytic circles to artists’ studios, Greenwich Village to Central Park. Based on years of archival research, interviews with former acid heads, and a range of cultural artifacts, Psychedelic New York shows how the postwar city was at the forefront of LSD medical research, the burgeoning of psychedelic art, drug-accompanied spiritual seeking, and a proliferation of drug subcultures. Elcock recounts stories of New Yorkers such as Holocaust survivor Nina Graboi and artist Isaac Abrams, whose lives were dramatically altered by their psychedelic experiences, while offering new insights into Timothy Leary’s role in turning on the city with psilocybin.Enlivened by personal stories and rooted in thoughtful analysis, Psychedelic New York is a multifaceted history of LSD and the urban psychedelic experience.
Disparate Remedies: Making Medicines in Modern India (Intoxicating Histories #7)
by Nandini BhattacharyaAt present India is a leading producer, distributor, and consumer of generic medicines globally. Disparate Remedies traces the genealogy of this development and examines the public cultures of medicine in the country between 1870 and 1960.The book begins by discussing the expansion of medical consumerism in late nineteenth-century India when British-owned firms extended their sales into remote towns. As a result, laboratory-produced drugs competed with traditional remedies through side-by-side production of Western and Indian drugs by pharmaceutical companies. The emergent middle classes, the creation of a public sphere, and nationalist politics transformed the medical culture of modern India and generated conflict between Western and Indigenous medical systems and their practitioners. Nandini Bhattacharya demonstrates that these disparate therapies were sustained through the tropes of purity or adulteration, potency or lack of it, and epistemic heritage, even when their material configuration often differed little.Uniquely engaging with the cultures of both consumption and production in the country, Disparate Remedies follows the evolution of medicine in colonial India as it confronted Indian modernity and changing public attitudes surrounding health and drugs.
Chronic Conditions
by Karen EngleImagine a house whose wiring is spliced and patchy with knob and tube, coiled like a serpent ready to strike and spark at any moment. Even if you have a fire trap behind your walls, the lights will turn on. In her memoir of a life lived in physical pain, Karen Engle asks whether and how language can capture what it’s like to be in a body that appears to work from the outside, when its internal systems operate through an ad hoc assemblage of garbled messaging, reroutings, and shaky foundations. A series of narrative reflections capture the myriad ways in which the chronic conditions its suffering subject. Contrary to claims that pain obliterates language – long a trope of writing about illness – Engle contends that the person with chronic pain is not hampered by a scarcity of language, but rather its excess: enervation by the unending waves of utterance. From a history of the word chronic and its shifting significance to meditations on multiple diagnoses and interactions with medical personnel, Chronic Conditions is a doctor’s case file through the looking glass of a creative writer, scholar, and patient. Engle explores, through medical research, literature, and art, how it feels to become attuned to the rhythms of perpetual and mysterious physical pain. At stake here is the search for a kind of writing that does not instrumentalize pain for allegorical or transcendental purposes. Chronic pain is not a sign of weakness, nor is it an opportunity for personal growth, Engle argues. Instead, it is entirely ordinary and deeply affecting.
COVID-19: A History (Canadian Essentials)
by Jacalyn DuffinFor two years the COVID-19 pandemic has upended the world. The physician and medical historian Jacalyn Duffin presents a global history of the virus, with a focus on Canada.Duffin describes the frightening appearance of the virus and its identification by scientists in China; subsequent outbreaks on cruise ships; the relentless spread to Europe, the Americas, Africa, and elsewhere; and the immediate attempts to confront it. COVID-19 next explores the scientific history of infections generally, and the discovery of coronaviruses in particular. Taking a broad approach, the book explains the advent of tests, treatments, and vaccines, as well as the practical politics behind interventions, including quarantines, barrier technologies, lockdowns, and social and financial supports. In concluding chapters Duffin analyzes the outcome of successive waves of COVID-19 infection around the world: the toll of human suffering, the successes and failures of control measures, vaccine rollouts, and grassroots opposition to governments’ attempts to limit the spread and mitigate social and economic damages.Closing with the fraught search for the origins of COVID-19, Duffin considers the implications of an “infodemic” and provides an cautionary outlook for the future.
Remedicalizing Cannabis: Science, Industry, and Drug Policy (Intoxicating Histories)
by Suzanne TaylorWhen cannabis tincture was withdrawn from the medical establishment in the UK in 1973, cannabis became regulated solely as an illicit drug. Within a decade cannabis-based drugs were back in the clinic. The UK is one of the biggest producers of medicinal cannabis, but few patients have access to these medicines. High-profile cases of parents campaigning for access to cannabis oil for severe and rare forms of epilepsy in their children are the most recent in a long line of controversies over cannabis and cannabis-based medicines.With mounting questions about patient access, the effectiveness of international drug control systems, and the role of expert advice, it is crucial to understand how we have arrived at this situation. While the historical literature has focused on cannabis as an illicit substance, Remedicalizing Cannabis considers the botanical product and its potential to yield medical applications. Investigating the remedicalization of cannabis, Taylor explores the process whereby boundaries shift between illicit drug and licit medicine. Basing her arguments on archival material from expert committees, researchers, and activists and in-depth interviews with key players, Suzanne Taylor traces the issues and interests involved in this process, demonstrating the important roles of changing scientific knowledge, expert advice, industry, clinical trials, and patient activism.Remedicalizing Cannabis investigates the evolving tensions that have brought us to the current situation and demonstrates the role of history in understanding today’s debates about cannabis.
Patterns of Plague: Changing Ideas about Plague in England and France, 1348–1750 (McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society)
by Lori JonesFor centuries, recurrent plague outbreaks took a grim toll on populations across Europe and Asia. While medical interventions and treatments did not change significantly from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth century, understandings of where and how plague originated did.Through an innovative reading of medical advice literature produced in England and France, Patterns of Plague explores these changing perceptions across four centuries. When plague appeared in the Mediterranean region in 1348, physicians believed the epidemic’s timing and spread could be explained logically and the disease could be successfully treated. This confidence resulted in the widespread and long-term circulation of plague tracts, which described the causes and signs of the disease, offered advice for preventing infection, and recommended therapies in a largely consistent style. What, where, and especially who was blamed for plague outbreaks changed considerably, however, as political, religious, economic, intellectual, medical, and even publication circumstances evolved.Patterns of Plague sheds light on what was consistent about plague thinking and what was idiosyncratic to particular places and times, revealing the many factors that influence how people understand and respond to epidemic disease.
Mixing Medicines: The Global Drug Trade and Early Modern Russia (Intoxicating Histories)
by Clare GriffinEarly modern Russians preferred one method of treating the sick above all others: prescribing drugs. The Moscow court sourced pharmaceuticals from Asia, Africa, Western Europe, and the Americas, in addition to its own sprawling empire, to heal its ailing tsars.Mixing Medicines explores the dynamic and complex world of early modern Russian medical drugs, from its enthusiasm for newly imported American botanicals to its disgust at Western European medicines made from human corpses. Clare Griffin draws from detailed apothecary records to shed light on the early modern Russian Empire’s role in the global trade in medical drugs. Chapters follow the trade and use of medical ingredients through networks that linked Moscow to Western Europe, Asia, and the Americas; the transformation of natural objects, such as botanicals and chemicals, into medicines; the documentation and translation of medical knowledge; and Western European influence on Russian medical practices. Looking beyond practitioners, texts, and ideas to consider how materials of medicine were used by one of the early modern world’s major empires provides a novel account of the global history of early modern medicine.Mixing Medicines offers unique insight into how the dramatic reshaping of global trade touched the day-to-day lives of the people living in early modern Russia.
The Smile Gap: A History of Oral Health and Social Inequality (McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society)
by Catherine CarstairsAs recently as fifty years ago most people expected to lose their teeth as they aged. Few children benefited from braces to straighten their teeth, and cosmetic procedures to change the appearance of smiles were largely unknown. Today, many Canadians enjoy straight, white teeth and far more of them are keeping their teeth for the entirety of their lives. Yet these advances have not reached everyone.The Smile Gap examines the enormous improvements that have taken place over the past century. The use of fluorides, emphasis on toothbrushing, the rise of cosmetic dentistry, and better access to dental care have had a profound effect on the oral health and beauty of Canadians. Yet while the introduction of employer-provided dental insurance in the 1970s has allowed for regular visits to the dentist for many people, a significant number of Canadians still lack access to good oral health care, especially disabled Canadians, those on social assistance, the working poor, the elderly, and new immigrants. At the same time, an attractive smile has become increasingly important in the workplace and in relationships. People with damaged and missing teeth are at a substantial disadvantage, not just because of the pain and suffering caused by poor oral health, but because we live in a society that prizes good teeth and warm smiles.The first history of oral health in Canada, The Smile Gap reveals that despite the gains made, too many Canadians go without any dental care, with damaging consequences for their oral health, general physical health, and self-image. To complete our health care system, it is time to close the gap.
Drugging France: Mind-Altering Medicine in the Long Nineteenth Century (Intoxicating Histories)
by Sara E. BlackIn the nineteenth century, drug consumption permeated French society to produce a new norm: the chemical enhancement of modern life. French citizens empowered themselves by seeking pharmaceutical relief for their suffering and engaging in self-medication. Doctors and pharmacists, meanwhile, fashioned themselves as gatekeepers to these potent drugs, claiming that their expertise could shield the public from accidental harm. Despite these efforts, the unanticipated phenomenon of addiction laid bare both the embodied nature of the modern self and the inherent instability of the notions of individual free will and responsibility.Drugging France explores the history of mind-altering drugs in medical practice between 1840 and 1920, highlighting the intricate medical histories of opium, morphine, ether, chloroform, cocaine, and hashish. While most drug histories focus on how drugs became regulated and criminalized as dangerous addictive substances, Sara Black instead traces the spread of these drugs through French society, demonstrating how new therapeutic norms and practices of drug consumption transformed the lives of French citizens as they came to expect and even demand pharmaceutical solutions to their pain. Through self-experimentation, doctors developed new knowledge about these drugs, transforming exotic botanical substances and unpredictable chemicals into reliable pharmaceutical commodities that would act on the mind and body to modify pain, sensation, and consciousness.From the pharmacy counter to the boudoir, from the courtroom to the operating theatre, from the battlefield to the birthing chamber, Drugging France explores how everyday encounters with drugs reconfigured how people experienced their own minds and bodies.
Transforming Medical Education: Historical Case Studies of Teaching, Learning, and Belonging in Medicine (McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society)
by Delia Gavrus and Susan LambIn recent decades, researchers have studied the cultures of medicine and the ways in which context and identity shape both individual experiences and structural barriers in medical education. The essays in this collection offer new insights into the deep histories of these processes, across time and around the globe.Transforming Medical Education compiles twenty-one historical case studies that foreground processes of learning, teaching, and defining medical communities in educational contexts. The chapters are organized around the themes of knowledge transmission, social justice, identity, pedagogy, and the surprising affinities between medical and historical practice. By juxtaposing original research on diverse geographies and eras – from medieval Japan to twentieth-century Canada, and from colonial Cameroon to early Republican China – the volume disrupts traditional historiographies of medical education by making room for schools of medicine for revolutionaries, digital cadavers, emotional medical students, and the world’s first mandatory Indigenous community placement in an accredited medical curriculum. This unique collection of international scholarship honours historian, physician, and professor Jacalyn Duffin for her outstanding contributions to the history of medicine and medical education.An invaluable scholarly resource and teaching tool, Transforming Medical Education offers a provocative study of what it means to teach, learn, and belong in medicine.
Religion in Global Health and Development: The Case of Twentieth-Century Ghana
by Benjamin Bronnert WalkerThe COVID-19 pandemic has made evident that the field of global health – its practices, norms, and failures – has the power to shape the lives of billions. Global health perspectives on the role of religion, however, are strikingly limited. Uncovering the points where religion and global health have connected across the twentieth century, focusing on Ghana, provides an opportunity to challenge narrow approaches.In Religion in Global Health and Development Benjamin Walker shows that the religious features of colonial state architecture were still operating by the turn of the twenty-first century. Walker surveys the establishment of colonial development projects in the twentieth century, with a focus on the period between 1940 and 1990. Crossing the colonial-postcolonial divide, analyzing local contexts in conjunction with the many layers of international organizations, and identifying surprisingly neglected streams of personnel and funding (particularly from Dutch and West German Catholics), this in-depth history offers new ways of conceptualizing global health.Patchworks of international humanitarian intervention, fragmented government services, local communities, and the actions of many foreign powers combined to create health services and the state in Ghana. Religion in Global Health and Development shows that religion and religious actors were critical to this process – socially, culturally, and politically.
Pandemic Societies
by Jean-Louis Denis, Catherine Régis, and Daniel WeinstockAt the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many thought the changes taking place would be fleeting. It is now widely recognized that COVID-19 will not be the last pandemic in our highly interconnected world, and “pandemic societies” will be with us for some time.Pandemic Societies brings together experts in a wide range of academic disciplines to reflect on how their fields might be transformed in this new context. While the pandemic forces global institutions, such as the World Health Organization, to reimagine the ways in which they function, it also reaches into our everyday lives to change how we organize culture, performing arts, sports, tourism, and cities. Exploring how COVID-19 has altered people’s daily experiences – the ways they meet to play, to perform, and to entertain themselves – this book also pulls the lens back to take in the broader institutional and political contexts in which these quotidian activities are carried out.Examining the profound ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed every aspect of our lives, Pandemic Societies attempts to understand how we might act to steer this pandemic society, and how to reinvent institutions and practices that we think of as intrinsically face to face.
Without Compassion, There Is No Healthcare: Leading with Care in a Technological Age
by Brian D. Hodges, Gail Paech, and Jocelyn BennettNew technologies are transforming healthcare work and changing how patients interact with healthcare providers. As artificial intelligence systems, robotics, and data analytics become more sophisticated, some clinical tasks will become obsolete and others will be reconfigured. While it is not possible to predict these developments precisely, it is important to understand their inevitability and to prepare for the changes that lie ahead. Without Compassion, There Is No Healthcare argues that compassion must be upheld as the bedrock and guiding purpose of healthcare work. Emerging technologies have the potential to subvert this purpose but also to enable and expand it, creating new conduits for compassionate care. Cultivating these benefits and guarding against potential threats will require vigilance and determination from healthcare providers, educators, leaders, patients, and advocates. The contributors to this book show the way forward, bringing a diverse range of expertise to confront these challenges. Avoiding platitudes and simple dichotomies, they examine what compassion in healthcare means and how it can be practised, now and in the uncertain future. Without Compassion, There Is No Healthcare is a call to action. Drawing together a decade of evidence and insight generated by a community of leading scholars and practitioners committed to promoting compassionate care, it offers steady principles and practices to steer the way through times of technological change.
Ethnopsychiatry (McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society #56)
by Henri F. EllenbergerWhat is the relationship between culture and mental health? Is mental illness universal? Are symptoms of mental disorders different across social groups? In the late 1960s these questions gave rise to a groundbreaking series of articles written by the psychiatrist Henri Ellenberger, who would go on to publish The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry in 1970. Fifty years later they are presented for the first time in English translation, introduced by historian of science Emmanuel Delille. Ethnopsychiatry explores one of the most controversial subjects in psychiatric research: the role of culture in mental health. In his articles Ellenberger addressed the complex clinical and theoretical problems of cultural specificity in mental illness, collective psychoses, differentiations within cultural groups, and biocultural interactions. He was especially attuned to the correlations between rapid cultural transformations in postwar society, urbanization, and the frequency of mental illness. Ellenberger drew from a vast and varied primary and secondary literature in several languages, as well as from his own findings in clinical practice, which included work with indigenous peoples. In analyzing Ellenberger's contributions Delille unveils the transnational and interdisciplinary origins of transcultural psychiatry, which grew out of knowledge networks that crisscrossed the globe. The book has a rich selection of appendices, including Ellenberger's lecture notes on a case of peyote addiction and his correspondence with anthropologist and psychoanalyst Georges Devereux. These original essays, and their masterful contextualization, provide a compelling introduction to the foundations of transcultural psychiatry and one of its most distinguished and prolific researchers.
Challenging Choices: Canada's Population Control in the 1970s (McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society #55)
by Erika Dyck Maureen LuxBetween the decriminalization of contraception in 1969 and the introduction of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, a landmark decade in the struggle for women's rights, public discourse about birth control and family planning was transformed. At the same time, a transnational conversation about the "population bomb" that threatened global famine caused by overpopulation embraced birth control technologies for a different set of reasons, revisiting controversial ideas about eugenics, heredity, and degeneration. In Challenging Choices Erika Dyck and Maureen Lux argue that reproductive politics in 1970s Canada were shaped by competing ideologies on global population control, poverty, personal autonomy, race, and gender. For some Canadians the 1970s did not bring about an era of reproductive liberty but instead reinforced traditional power dynamics and paternalistic structures of authority. Dyck and Lux present case studies of four groups of Canadians who were routinely excluded from progressive, reformist discourse: Indigenous women and their communities, those with intellectual and physical disabilities, teenage girls, and men. In different ways, each faced new levels of government regulation, scrutiny, or state intervention as they negotiated their reproductive health, rights, and responsibilities in the so-called era of sexual liberation. While acknowledging the reproductive rights gains that were made in the 1970s, the authors argue that the legal changes affected Canadians differently depending on age, social position, gender, health status, and cultural background. Illustrating the many ways to plan a modern family, these case studies reveal how the relative merits of life and choice were pitted against each other to create a new moral landscape for evaluating classic questions about population control.
An Ambulance on Safari: The ANC and the Making of a Health Department in Exile (McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society #53)
by Melissa Diane ArmstrongDuring the apartheid era, thousands of South African political activists, militants, and refugees fled arrest by crossing into neighbouring southern African countries. Although they had escaped political oppression, many required medical attention during their period of exile. An Ambulance on Safari describes the efforts of the African National Congress (ANC) to deliver emergency healthcare to South African exiles and, in the same stroke, to establish political legitimacy and foster anti-apartheid sentiment on an international stage. Banned in South Africa from 1960 to 1990, the ANC continued its operations underground in anticipation of eventual political victory, styling itself as a "government in waiting." In 1977 it created its own Health Department, which it presented as an alternative medical service and the nucleus of a post-apartheid healthcare system. By publicizing its own democratic policies as well as the racist practices of healthcare delivery in South Africa, the Health Department won international attention for its cause and provoked widespread condemnation of the apartheid state. While the global campaign was unfolding successfully, the department's provision of healthcare on the ground was intermittent as patients confronted a fledgling medical system experiencing various growing pains. Still, the legacy of the department would be long, as many medical professionals who joined the post-apartheid Department of Health in South Africa had been trained in exile during the liberation struggle. With careful attention to both the international publicity campaign and on-the-ground medical efforts, An Ambulance on Safari reveals the intricate and significant political role of the ANC's Health Department and its influence on the anti-apartheid movement.
Toward the Health of a Nation: The Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation - The First Seventy Years
by Leslie A. BoehmCanadians view their healthcare – recognized throughout the world as an exemplary system – as iconic and integral to their identity. In Toward the Health of a Nation Leslie Boehm recounts the first seventy years in the life of one of the foundations of Canada's healthcare system, the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto. Boehm – a graduate of IHPME, and an instructor there throughout his career – charts the institute's history from its inception in 1947 as the Department of Hospital Administration to the present day. The first program of its kind in Canada, and one of the few in the world, the school was founded at a time when the issue of healthcare was becoming a significant part of national and provincial discussions and policies. Initially concentrating on hospital management and professional degrees, it has expanded to offer academic degrees and facilitate important research into health systems, policies, and outcomes. In Toward the Health of a Nation Boehm demonstrates the excellence of the program, its faculty, and its graduates, as well as their accomplishments in major government initiatives and royal commissions. In the seventy years since IHPME's inception healthcare has grown to become a major part of government and business activity, and it will only increase in coming years. An in-depth history of a major program in graduate health education, Toward the Health of a Nation highlights how important healthcare is to a modern, functional society.
A New Field in Mind: A History of Interdisciplinarity in the Early Brain Sciences (McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society #52)
by Frank W. StahnischIn recent decades, developments in research technologies and therapeutic advances have generated immense public recognition for neuroscience. However, its origins as a field, often linked to partnerships and projects at various brain-focused research centres in the United States during the 1960s, can be traced much further back in time. In A New Field in Mind Frank Stahnisch documents and analyzes the antecedents of the modern neurosciences as an interdisciplinary field. Although postwar American research centres, such as Francis O. Schmitt's Neuroscience Research Program at MIT, brought the modern field to prominence, Stahnisch reveals the pioneering collaborations in the early brain sciences at centres in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in the first half of the twentieth century. One of these, Heinrich Obersteiner's institute in Vienna, began its work in the 1880s. Through case studies and collective biographies, Stahnisch investigates the evolving relationships between disciplines – anatomy, neurology, psychiatry, physiology, serology, and neurosurgery – which created new epistemological and social contexts for brain research. He also shows how changing political conditions in Central Europe affected the development of the neurosciences, ultimately leading to the expulsion of many physicians and researchers under the Nazi regime and their migration to North America. An in-depth and innovative study, A New Field in Mind tracks the emergence and evolution of neuroscientific research from the late nineteenth century to the postwar period.
Radical Treatment: Wilder Penfield's Life in Neuroscience
by Richard LeblancWilder Penfield (1891–1976) is famous for his contributions to the understanding of epilepsy and for his discoveries of the relationship between the structure and function of the human brain. His operations, which involved stimulating the cerebral cortex of awake patients with a fine electrode, assured the complete removal of lesions that caused epilepsy. Less widely known is his use of the same technique to localize the interpretation of language, the recording of memories, and the ability to interpret the present in light of past experience. Radical Treatment follows the evolution of Penfield's thinking from his description of brain scars at the beginning of his career to his last thoughts on the human condition. Through a review of his clinical charts, intraoperative sketches, manuscript notes, and other archival material held at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, this book presents a fascinating narrative of the development of Penfield's career and the processes that led to each of his great discoveries. Richard Leblanc vividly conveys the collaborative nature of Penfield's work at the Royal Victoria Hospital and at the MNI, which led to his greatest discoveries. Revealing the duality of a life in science, Leblanc shows that while Penfield was instrumental in establishing the localization of specific functions to distinct regions of the brain, he concurrently stressed the integrative action of the nervous system. Written by the leading authority on the history of Penfield's Montreal Neurological Institute, Radical Treatment is an insightful account of the scientific accomplishments of one of the twentieth century's most influential neuroscientists.
Panaceia's Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany (Synthesis Ser.)
by Alisha Rankin"PanaceiaOCOs Daughters" provides the first book-length study of noblewomenOCOs healing activities in early modern Europe. Drawing on rich archival sources, Alisha Rankin demonstrates that numerous German noblewomen were deeply involved in making medicines and recommending them to patients, and many gained widespread fame for their remedies. Turning a common historical argument on its head, Rankin maintains that noblewomenOCOs pharmacy came to prominence not in spite of their gender but because of it. aRankin demonstrates the ways in which noblewomenOCOs pharmacy was bound up in notions of charity, class, religion, and household roles, as well as in expanding networks of knowledge and early forms of scientific experimentation. The opening chapters place noblewomenOCOs healing within the context of cultural exchange, experiential knowledge, and the widespread search for medicinal recipes in early modern Europe. Case studies of renowned healers Dorothea of Mansfeld and Anna of Saxony then demonstrate the value their pharmacy held in their respective roles as elderly widow and royal consort, while a study of the long-suffering Duchess Elisabeth of Rochlitz emphasizes the importance of experiential knowledge and medicinal remedies to the patientOCOs experience of illness.
Saving Babies?: The Consequences of Newborn Genetic Screening
by Stefan Timmermans Mara BuchbinderIt has been close to six decades since Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA and more than ten years since the human genome was decoded. Today, through the collection and analysis of a small blood sample, every baby born in the United States is screened for more than fifty genetic disorders. Though the early detection of these abnormalities can potentially save lives, the test also has a high percentage of false positives--inaccurate results that can take a brutal emotional toll on parents before they are corrected. Now some doctors are questioning whether the benefits of these screenings outweigh the stress and pain they sometimes produce. In Saving Babies?, Stefan Timmermans and Mara Buchbinder evaluate the consequences and benefits of state-mandated newborn screening--and the larger policy questions they raise about the inherent inequalities in American medical care that limit the effectiveness of this potentially lifesaving technology. Drawing on observations and interviews with families, doctors, and policy actors, Timmermans and Buchbinder have given us the first ethnographic study of how parents and geneticists resolve the many uncertainties in screening newborns. Ideal for scholars of medicine, public health, and public policy, this book is destined to become a classic in its field.
Forgive and Remember: Managing Medical Failure
by Charles L. BoskOn its initial publication, Forgive and Remember emerged as the definitive study of the training and lives of young surgeons. Now with an extensive new preface, epilogue, and appendix by the author, reflecting on the changes that have taken place since the book's original publication, this updated second edition of Charles L. Bosk's classic study is as timely as ever.
Reasons of Conscience: The Bioethics Debate in Germany
by Stefan SperlingThe implicit questions that inevitably underlie German bioethics are the same ones that have pervaded all of German public life for decades: How could the Holocaust have happened? And how can Germans make sure that it will never happen again? In "Reasons of Conscience," Stefan Sperling considers the bioethical debates surrounding embryonic stem cell research in Germany at the turn of the twenty-first century, highlighting how the countryOCOs ongoing struggle to come to terms with its past informs the decisions it makes today. aaaaaaaaaaaSperling brings the reader unmatched access to the offices of the German parliament to convey the role that morality and ethics play in contemporary Germany. He describes the separate and interactive workings of the two bodies assigned to shape German bioethicsOCothe parliamentary Enquiry Commission on Law and Ethics in Modern Medicine and the executive branchOCOs National Ethics CouncilOCotracing each institutionOCOs genesis, projected image, and operations, and revealing that the content of bioethics cannot be separated from the workings of these institutions. Sperling then focuses his discussion around three core categoriesOCotransparency, conscience, and Germany itselfOCoarguing that without fully considering these, we fail to understand German bioethics. He concludes with an assessment of German legislators and regulatorsOCO attempts to incorporate criteria of ethical research into the German Stem Cell Law. "
Vaccine Nation: America's Changing Relationship with Immunization
by Elena Conis&“A strikingly honest, fair-minded, and informed chronicle of the vaccine controversy in the United States.&”—Age of Autism By setting the complex story of American vaccination within the country&’s broader history, Vaccine Nation goes beyond the simple story of the triumph of science over disease and provides a new and perceptive account of the role of politics and social forces in medicine.Vaccine Nation opens in the 1960s, when government scientists—triumphant following successes combating polio and smallpox—considered how the country might deploy new vaccines against what they called the &“milder&” diseases, including measles, mumps, and rubella. In the years that followed, Conis reveals, vaccines fundamentally changed how medical professionals, policy administrators, and ordinary Americans came to perceive the diseases they were designed to prevent. She brings this history up to the present with an insightful look at the past decade&’s controversy over the implementation of the Gardasil vaccine for HPV, which sparked extensive debate because of its focus on adolescent girls and young women. Through this and other examples, Conis demonstrates how the acceptance of vaccines and vaccination policies has been as contingent on political and social concerns as on scientific findings. In Vaccine Nation, Conis delivers &“a fascinating account of how routine childhood immunization came to be both a public health success story and a source of bitter controversy&” (James Colgrove, author of Epidemic City and State of Immunity). &“At a moment when, as Conis says, children&’s participation in public life depends on their immunization status, she favors a nuanced view of our complicated relationship with &‘the jab.&’&”—Los Angeles Times
The Pox of Liberty: How the Constitution Left Americans Rich, Free, and Prone to Infection
by Werner TroeskenThe United States is among the wealthiest nations in the world. But that wealth hasn't translated to a higher life expectancy, an area where the United States still ranks thirty-eighth--behind Cuba, Chile, Costa Rica, and Greece, among many others. Some fault the absence of universal health care or the persistence of social inequalities. Others blame unhealthy lifestyles. But these emphases on present-day behaviors and policies miss a much more fundamental determinant of societal health: the state. Werner Troesken looks at the history of the United States with a focus on three diseases--smallpox, typhoid fever, and yellow fever--to show how constitutional rules and provisions that promoted individual liberty and economic prosperity also influenced, for good and for bad, the country’s ability to eradicate infectious disease. Ranging from federalism under the Commerce Clause to the Contract Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment, Troesken argues persuasively that many institutions intended to promote desirable political or economic outcomes also hindered the provision of public health. We are unhealthy, in other words, at least in part because our political and legal institutions function well. Offering a compelling new perspective, The Pox of Liberty challenges many traditional claims that infectious diseases are inexorable forces in human history, beyond the control of individual actors or the state, revealing them instead to be the result of public and private choices.