Title: Understanding heart disease 
Author: Selzer, Arthur
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Medicine | Science
Publisher's Description: Diseases of the heart are the leading cause of death in the Western world. Health professionals and the general public alike eagerly watch advances in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of heart disease. Yet the more spectacular aspects of medical progress in the field are often reported prematurely and their potential benefits exaggerated.Written in clear, accessible language, this book presents an authoritative and balanced picture of how heart diseases are recognized and managed. From his many years of experience, Dr. Selzer believes a well-informed patient can cooperate more successfully with a physician, and his book includes information vital to anyone confronting heart problems and cardiac emergencies.   [brief]
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Title: Hypochondria: woeful imaginatings 
Author: Baur, Susan
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Medicine | Science
Publisher's Description: Writing with grace, humor, and an expert's eye for revealing detail, Susan Baur illuminates the processes by which hypochondriacs come to adopt and maintain illness as a way of life.
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Title: Blood saga: hemophilia, AIDS, and the survival of a community
Author: Resnik, Susan 1940-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Science | Sociology | Medicine | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: For thousands of years boys known as "bleeders" faced an early, painful death from hemophilia. Dubbed "the Royal Disease" because of its identification with Queen Victoria, the world's most renowned carrier, hemophilia is a genetic disease whose sufferers had little recourse until the mid-twentieth century. In the first book to chronicle the emergence and transformation of the hemophilia community, Susan Resnik sets her story within our national political landscape - where the disease is also a social, psychological, and economic experience. Blood Saga includes many players and domains: men with hemophilia and their families, medical personnel, science researchers, and the author herself, who was Director of Education of the National Hemophilia Foundation in the early 1980s. At that time the "miracle treatment" of freeze-dried pooled plasma blood products enabled men with hemophilia to lead full, normal lives. Then the AIDS virus infiltrated the treatment system and over fifty percent of the hemophilia community became HIV-positive. But rather than collapsing, this community refocused its priorities, extended its reach, and helped shape blood safety policies to prevent further tragedy.The hemophilia community includes people from every socioeconomic and ethnic group, and Resnik's narrative and use of oral histories never lose touch with those affected by the disease. Her extensive informant interviewing allows much of this social history to be told by participants on all levels: parents, wives, nurses, doctors, government agency directors, health care providers, and many others.Gene insertion therapy now holds the promise of a cure for hemophilia in the near future. Scientific breakthroughs inevitably become intertwined with the industry and academic medical centers that govern the national health care system. And in that system, says Resnik, costs and safety are sometimes contending issues. She makes clear that the lessons learned in Blood Saga apply to all of us.   [brief]
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Title: Cholera in post-revolutionary Paris: a cultural history
Author: Kudlick, Catherine Jean
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | European History | Medicine
Publisher's Description: Cholera terrified and fascinated nineteenth-century Europeans more than any other modern disease. Its symptoms were gruesome, its sources were mysterious, and it tended to strike poor neighborhoods hardest. In this insightful cultural history, Catherine Kudlick explores the dynamics of class relations through an investigation of the responses to two cholera epidemics in Paris.While Paris climbed toward the height of its urban and industrial growth, two outbreaks of the disease ravaged the capital, one in 1832, the other in 1849. Despite the similarity of the epidemics, the first outbreak was met with general frenzy and far greater attention in the press, popular literature and personal accounts, while the second was greeted with relative silence. Finding no compelling evidence for improved medical knowledge, changes in the Paris environment, or desensitization of Parisians, Kudlick looks to the evolution of the French revolutionary tradition and the emergence of the Parisian bourgeoisie for answers.   [brief]
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Title: Heavy drinking: the myth of alcoholism as a disease
Author: Fingarette, Herbert
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Science | Medicine
Publisher's Description: Heavy Drinking informs the general public for the first time how recent research has discredited almost every widely held belief about alcoholism, including the very concept of alcoholism as a single disease with a unique cause. Herbert Fingarette presents constructive approaches to heavy drinking, . . . [more]
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Title: Sentinel for health: a history of the Centers for Disease Control
Author: Etheridge, Elizabeth W
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Medicine
Publisher's Description: In the only history of its kind, Etheridge traces the development of the Centers for Disease Control from its inception as a malaria control unit during World War II through the mid-1980s . The eradication of smallpox, the struggle to identify an effective polio vaccine, the unraveling of the secrets of Legionnaires' disease, and the shock over the identification of the HIV virus are all chronicled here. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and source documents, Etheridge vividly recreates the vital decision-making incidents that shaped both the growth of this institution as well as the state of public health in this country for the last five decades.We follow the development of the institution as it was transformed by the will and the imagination of remarkable individuals such as Dr. Joseph Mountin, one of the first heads of the CDC. Often characterized as abrasive and impatient, Mountin pushed the CDC to become a vital player in eradicating the threat of communicable disease in the United States. Others such as Dr. Andrew Langmuir brought the expertise necessary to establish epidemiology as one of the primary functions of the CDC.Created to serve the states and to answer any call for help whether routine or extraordinary, the CDC is now widely recognized as one of the world's premier public health institutions.   [brief]
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Title: Disrupted lives: how people create meaning in a chaotic world
Author: Becker, Gaylene
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Anthropology | Medicine | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Our lives are full of disruptions, from the minor - a flat tire, an unexpected phone call - to the fateful - a diagnosis of infertility, an illness, the death of a loved one. In the first book to examine disruption in American life from a cultural rather than a psychological perspective, Gay Becker follows hundreds of people to find out what they do after something unexpected occurs. Starting with bodily distress, she shows how individuals recount experiences of disruption metaphorically, drawing on important cultural themes to help them reestablish order and continuity in their lives. Through vivid and poignant stories of people from different walks of life who experience different types of disruptions, Becker examines how people rework their ideas about themselves and their worlds, from the meaning of disruption to the meaning of life itself.Becker maintains that to understand disruption, we must also understand cultural definitions of normalcy. She questions what is normal for a family, for health, for womanhood and manhood, and for growing older. In the United States, where life is expected to be orderly and predictable, disruptions are particularly unsettling, she contends. And, while continuity in life is an illusion, it is an effective one because it organizes people's plans and expectations.Becker's phenomenological approach yields a rich, compelling, and entirely original narrative. Disrupted Lives acknowledges the central place of discontinuity in our existence at the same time as it breaks new ground in understanding the cultural dynamics that underpin life in the United States. FROM THE BOOK :"The doctor was blunt. He does not mince words. He did a [semen] analysis and he came back and said, 'This is devastatingly poor.' I didn't expect to hear that. It had never occurred to me. It was such a shock to my sense of self and to all these preconceptions of my manliness and virility and all of that. That was a very, very devastating moment and I was dumbfounded. . . . In that moment it totally changed the way that I thought of myself."   [brief]
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Title: Targeting autism: what we know, don't know, and can do to help young children with autism and related disorders
Author: Cohen, Shirley
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Sociology | Social Problems | Education | Psychology | Psychiatry | Medicine
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Title: Childbirth and authoritative knowledge: cross-cultural perspectives
Author: Davis-Floyd, Robbie
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Anthropology | Women's Studies | Medicine
Publisher's Description: This benchmark collection of cross-cultural essays on reproduction and childbirth extends and enriches the work of Brigitte Jordan, who helped generate and define the field of the anthropology of birth. The authors' focus on authoritative knowledge - the knowledge that counts, on the basis of which decisions are made and actions taken - highlights the vast differences between birthing systems that give authority of knowing to women and their communities and those that invest it in experts and machines. Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge offers first-hand ethnographic research conducted by anthropologists in sixteen different societies and cultures and includes the interdisciplinary perspectives of a social psychologist, a sociologist, an epidemiologist, a staff member of the World Health Organization, and a community midwife. Exciting directions for further research as well as pressing needs for policy guidance emerge from these illuminating explorations of authoritative knowledge about birth. This book is certain to follow Jordan's Birth in Four Cultures as the definitive volume in a rapidly expanding field.   [brief]
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Title: AIDS: the burdens of history 
Author: Fee, Elizabeth
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Medicine | Science
Publisher's Description: The AIDS epidemic has posed more urgent historical questions than any other disease of modern times. How have societies responded to epidemics in the past? Why did the disease emerge when and where it did? How has it spread among members of particular groups? And how will the past affect the future - in particular, what does the history of medical science and public health tell us about our ability to control the epidemic and eventually to cure the disease?Historical methods of inquiry change, and people who use these methods often disagree on theory and practice. Indeed, the contributors to this volume hold a variety of opinions on controversial historiographic issues. But they share three important principles: cautious adherence to the "social constructionist" view of past and present; profound skepticism about historicism's idea of progress; and wariness about "presentism," the distortion of the past by seeing it only from the point of view of the present.Each of the twelve essays addresses an aspect of the burdens of history during the AIDS epidemic. By "burdens" is meant the inescapable significance of events in the past for the present. All of these events are related in some way to the current epidemic and can help clarify the complex social and cultural responses to the crisis of AIDS.This collection illuminates present concerns directly and forcefully without sacrificing attention to historical detail and to the differences between past and present situations. It reminds us that many of the issues now being debated - quarantine, exclusion, public needs and private rights - have their parallels in the past. This will be an important book for social historians and general readers as well as for historians of medicine.   [brief]
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Title: The corporate practice of medicine: competition and innovation in health care
Author: Robinson, James C 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Politics | Public Policy | Medicine | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: One of the country's leading health economists presents a provocative analysis of the transformation of American medicine from a system of professional dominance to an industry under corporate control. James Robinson examines the economic and political forces that have eroded the traditional medical system of solo practice and fee-for-service insurance, hindered governmental regulation, and invited the market competition and organizational innovations that now are under way. The trend toward health care corporatization is irreversible, he says, and it parallels analogous trends toward privatization in the world economy.The physician is the key figure in health care, and how physicians are organized is central to the health care system, says Robinson. He focuses on four forms of physician organization to illustrate how external pressures have led to health care innovations: multispecialty medical groups, Independent Practice Associations (IPAs), physician practice management firms, and physician-hospital organizations. These physician organizations have evolved in the past two decades by adopting from the larger corporate sector similar forms of ownership, governance, finance, compensation, and marketing.In applying economic principles to the maelstrom of health care, Robinson highlights the similarities between competition and consolidation in medicine and in other sectors of the economy. He points to hidden costs in fee-for-service medicine - overtreatment, rampant inflation, uncritical professional dominance regarding treatment decisions - factors often overlooked when newer organizational models are criticized.Not everyone will share Robinson's appreciation for market competition and corporate organization in American health care, but he challenges those who would return to the inefficient and inequitable era of medicine from which we've just emerged. Forcefully written and thoroughly documented, The Corporate Practice of Medicine presents a thoughtful - and optimistic - view of a future health care system, one in which physician entrepreneurship is a dynamic component.   [brief]
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Title: Jews, medicine, and medieval society Joseph Shatzmiller
Author: Shatzmiller, Joseph
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Medieval History | European History | Medieval Studies | Medicine
Publisher's Description: Jews were excluded from most professions in medieval, predominantly Christian Europe. Bigotry was widespread, yet Jews were accepted as doctors and surgeons, administering not only to other Jews but to Christians as well. Why did medieval Christians suspend their fear and suspicion of the Jews, allowing them to inspect their bodies, and even, at times, to determine their survival? What was the nature of the doctor-patient relationship? Did the law protect Jewish doctors in disputes over care and treatment?Joseph Shatzmiller explores these and other intriguing questions in the first full social history of the medieval Jewish doctor. Based on extensive archival research in Provence, Spain, and Italy, and a deep reading of the widely scattered literature, Shatzmiller examines the social and economic forces that allowed Jewish medical professionals to survive and thrive in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe. His insights will prove fascinating to scholars and students of Judaica, medieval history, and the history of medicine.   [brief]
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Title: Beyond second opinions: making choices about fertility treatment 
Author: Turiel, Judith Steinberg 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Science | Sociology | Gender Studies | Medicine
Publisher's Description: Beyond Second Opinions is both an exposé of the risks, errors, and distortions surrounding fertility medicine and an authoritative guide for people seeking treatment. Accessible, comprehensive, and extremely well-informed, this book takes the reader beyond hype to the hard data on diagnoses and treatments. Judith Steinberg Turiel, a consumer health activist and herself a veteran of fertility treatments, uses the most up-to-date medical literature to shed new light on difficult decisions patients face today and on reproductive questions society must begin to address now. Those who are seeking a more balanced perspective to help them make better, more informed decisions will find a wealth of information about current reproductive interventions - from simple fertility pills to dazzling experimental options - as well as a discussion of the non-medical forces (economic and political) that shape an individual's treatment choices and reproductive outcomes. Despite quantities of information showered upon patients, they remain woefully misinformed; some fertility treatments may actually reduce chances for a successful pregnancy and threaten a patient's health. Turiel looks beyond surface claims to the real information, often uncovering counterintuitive findings and sometimes scandalous revelations. She exposes a realm of unregulated expansion, unscientific experimentation, and recent scandal over stolen embryos. Weaving together first-hand accounts, compelling stories, a range of scientific information, and lively anecdotes, Turiel addresses the persistent gulfs that separate medical professionals and health care consumers. In the process she arms laypeople with what they might not learn about infertility practices from doctors, patient education brochures, and the newspaper.   [brief]
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Title: Managing the medical arms race: public policy and medical device innovation 
Author: Foote, Susan Bartlett
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Politics | Medicine | Public Policy | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: The allure of medical innovation is powerful - it holds out the promise of perfect health, the end of pain, the deferral of death. Our insatiable appetite for costly new technologies, fed by a profusion of innovations and the profits they generate, has led to what has been dubbed the medical arms race. During the last several decades government has been called upon to manage the escalation of this race.Foote has written the first comprehensive examination of the profound influence of government policies on medical innovation. She explains how these policies have proliferated to affect every stage of the innovative process in medical device technology - from the first research idea to the patient's bedside. Drawing on case studies of technologies as diverse as lasers, cardiac pacemakers, CT scanners, and IUDs, she traces the interaction between the industry and government institutions, including the National Institutes of Health, the FDA, and the Medicare and Medicaid programs.Public policies during the 1950s and 1960s, Foote discovers, tended to promote innovation, while the regulation and cost controls of the 1970s and 1980s began to inhibit it. For the 1990s and beyond she proposes incremental policy improvements that will rationalize and streamline government intervention. She cautions that we must recognize the limits of medical technology and public policy to cure all ills.Medical innovation is a crucial part of health care reform, a subject of increasing complexity and controversy. Written clearly and accessibly, Managing the Medical Arms Race is an invaluable source for medical, industry, and policy professionals, but it also has much to say to anybody concerned with how we as a society choose to take care of our health.   [brief]
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Title: Old, alone, and neglected: care of the aged in the United States and Scotland 
Author: Kayser-Jones, Jeanie Schmit
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Anthropology | Aging | Medical Anthropology | Medicine
Publisher's Description: As the median age of the population increases, the care and housing of the elderly in the U.S. are of increasing concern. Jeanie Kayser-Jones compares a typical private institution in the U.S. with a government-owned home in Scotland.Her analysis compels attention to the systematic abuse of the inst . . . [more]
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Title: Writing at the margin: discourse between anthropology and medicine
Author: Kleinman, Arthur
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Sociology | Medicine | Asian Studies | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: One of the most influential and creative scholars in medical anthropology takes stock of his recent intellectual odysseys in this collection of essays. Arthur Kleinman, an anthropologist and psychiatrist who has studied in Taiwan, China, and North America since 1968, draws upon his bicultural, multidisciplinary background to propose alternative strategies for thinking about how, in the postmodern world, the social and medical relate. Writing at the Margin explores the border between medical and social problems, the boundary between health and social change. Kleinman studies the body as the mediator between individual and collective experience, finding that many health problems - for example the trauma of violence or depression in the course of chronic pain - are less individual medical problems than interpersonal experiences of social suffering. He argues for an ethnographic approach to moral practice in medicine, one that embraces the infrapolitical context of illness, the responses to it, the social institutions relating to it, and the way it is configured in medical ethics.Previously published in various journals, these essays have been revised, updated, and brought together with an introduction, an essay on violence and the politics of post-traumatic stress disorder, and a new chapter that examines the contemporary ethnographic literature of medical anthropology.   [brief]
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Title: Second sight 
Author: Hine, Robert V 1921-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Autobiographies and Biographies | Medicine
Publisher's Description: He knew he was going blind. Yet he finished graduate school, became a history professor, and wrote books about the American West. Then, nearly fifty, Robert Hine lost his vision completely. Fifteen years later, a risky eye operation restored partial vision, returning Hine to the world of the sighted. "The trauma seemed instructive enough" for him to begin a journal.That journal is the heart of Second Sight, a sensitively written account of Hine's journey into darkness and out again. The first parts are told simply, with little anguish. The emotion comes when sight returns; like a child he discovers the world anew - the intensity of colors, the sadness of faces grown older, the renewed excitement of sex and the body.With the understanding and insights that come from living on both sides of the divide, Hine ponders the meaning of blindness. His search is enriched by a discourse with other blind writers, humorist James Thurber, novelist Eleanor Clark, poet Jorge Luis Borges, among others. With them he shares thoughts on the acceptance and advantages of blindness, resentment of the blind, the reluctance with sex, and the psychological depression that often follows the recovery of sight.Hine's blindness was the altered state in which to learn and live, and his deliverance from blindness the spur to seek and share its lessons. What he found makes a moving story that embraces all of us - those who can see and those who cannot.   [brief]
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Title: American medicine: the quest for competence
Author: Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Medicine | Science | Medical Anthropology | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: What does it mean to be a good doctor in America today? How do such challenges as new biotechnologies, the threat of malpractice suits, and proposed health-care reform affect physicians' ability to provide quality care?These and many other crucial questions are examined in this book, the first to fully explore the meaning and politics of competence in modern American medicine. Based on Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good's recent ethnographic studies of three distinct medical communities - physicians in rural California, academics and students involved in Harvard Medical School's innovative "New Pathway" curriculum, and oncologists working on breast cancer treatment - the book demonstrates the centrality of the issue of competence throughout the medical world. Competence, it shows, provides the framework for discussing the power struggles between rural general practitioners and specialists, organizational changes in medical education, and the clinical narratives of high-technology oncologists. In their own words, practitioners, students, and academics describe what competence means to them and reveal their frustration with medical-legal institutions, malpractice, and the limitations of peer review and medical training.Timely and provocative, this study is essential reading for medical professionals, academics, anthropologists, and sociologists, as well as health-care policymakers.   [brief]
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Title: White plague, black labor: tuberculosis and the political economy of health and disease in South Africa
Author: Packard, Randall M 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Anthropology | Medicine | Medical Anthropology | African Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: Why does tuberculosis, a disease which is both curable and preventable, continue to produce over 50,000 new cases a year in South Africa, primarily among blacks? In answering this question Randall Packard traces the history of one of the most devastating diseases in twentieth-century Africa, against the background of the changing political and economic forces that have shaped South African society from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. These forces have generated a growing backlog of disease among black workers and their families and at the same time have prevented the development of effective public health measures for controlling it. Packard's rich and nuanced analysis is a significant contribution to the growing body of literature on South Africa's social history as well as to the history of medicine and the political economy of health.   [brief]
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Title: No safe place: toxic waste, leukemia, and community action
Author: Brown, Phil
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Sociology | American Studies | Ecology | Medicine | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: Toxic waste, contaminated water, cancer clusters - these phrases suggest deception and irresponsibility. But more significantly, they are watchwords for a growing struggle between communities, corporations, and government. In No Safe Place , sociologists, public policy professionals, and activists will learn how residents of Woburn, Massachusetts discovered a childhood leukemia cluster and eventually sued two corporate giants. Their story gives rise to questions important to any concerned citizen: What kind of government regulatory action can control pollution? Just how effective can the recent upsurge of popular participation in science and technology be? Phil Brown, a medical sociologist, and Edwin Mikkelsen, psychiatric consultant to the plaintiffs, look at the Woburn experience in light of similar cases, such as Love Canal, in order to show that toxic waste contamination reveals fundamental flaws in the corporate, governmental, and scientific spheres.The authors strike a humane, constructive note amidst chilling odds, advocating extensive lay involvement based on the Woburn model of civic action. Finally, they propose a safe policy for toxic wastes and governmental/corporate responsibility. Woburn, the authors predict, will become a code word for environmental struggles.   [brief]
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