Title: When abortion was a crime: women, medicine, and law in the United States, 1867-1973 
Author: Reagan, Leslie J
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Women's Studies | United States History | Medicine
Publisher's Description: As we approach the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade , it's crucial to look back to the time when abortion was illegal. Leslie Reagan traces the practice and policing of abortion, which although illegal was nonetheless widely available, but always with threats for both doctor and patient. In a time when many young women don't even know that there was a period when abortion was a crime, this work offers chilling and vital lessons of importance to everyone.The linking of the words "abortion" and "crime" emphasizes the difficult and painful history that is the focus of Leslie J. Reagan's important book. Her study is the first to examine the entire period during which abortion was illegal in the United States, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and ending with Roe v. Wade in 1973. Although illegal, millions of abortions were provided during these years to women of every class, race, and marital status. The experiences and perspectives of these women, as well as their physicians and midwives, are movingly portrayed here.Reagan traces the practice and policing of abortion. While abortions have been typically portrayed as grim "back alley" operations, she finds that abortion providers often practiced openly and safely. Moreover, numerous physicians performed abortions, despite prohibitions by the state and the American Medical Association. Women often found cooperative practioners, but prosecution, public humiliation, loss of privacy, and inferior medical care were a constant threat.Reagan's analysis of previously untapped sources, including inquest records and trial transcripts, shows the fragility of patient rights and raises provocative questions about the relationship between medicine and law. With the right to abortion again under attack in the United States, this book offers vital lessons for every American concerned with health care, civil liberties, and personal and sexual freedom.   [brief]
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Title: The making of a social disease;: tuberculosis in nineteenth-century France 
Author: Barnes, David S
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | History and Philosophy of Science | Medicine | European History
Publisher's Description: In this first English-language study of popular and scientific responses to tuberculosis in nineteenth-century France, David Barnes provides a much-needed historical perspective on a disease that is making an alarming comeback in the United States and Europe. Barnes argues that French perceptions of the disease - ranging from the early romantic image of a consumptive woman to the later view of a scourge spread by the poor - owed more to the power structures of nineteenth-century society than to medical science. By 1900, the war against tuberculosis had become a war against the dirty habits of the working class.Lucid and original, Barnes's study broadens our understanding of how and why societies assign moral meanings to deadly diseases.   [brief]
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Title: Impure science: AIDS, activism, and the politics of knowledge 
Author: Epstein, Steven
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Social Science | Medicine | Public Policy | History and Philosophy of Science | Sociology
Publisher's Description: In the short, turbulent history of AIDS research and treatment, the boundaries between scientist insiders and lay outsiders have been crisscrossed to a degree never before seen in medical history. Steven Epstein's astute and readable investigation focuses on the critical question of "how certainty is constructed or deconstructed," leading us through the views of medical researchers, activists, policy makers, and others to discover how knowledge about AIDS emerges out of what he calls "credibility struggles."Epstein shows the extent to which AIDS research has been a social and political phenomenon and how the AIDS movement has transformed biomedical research practices through its capacity to garner credibility by novel strategies. Epstein finds that nonscientist AIDS activists have gained enough of a voice in the scientific world to shape NIH?sponsored research to a remarkable extent. Because of the blurring of roles and responsibilities, the production of biomedical knowledge about AIDS does not, he says, follow the pathways common to science; indeed, AIDS research can only be understood as a field that is unusually broad, public, and contested. He concludes by analyzing recent moves to democratize biomedicine, arguing that although AIDS activists have set the stage for new challenges to scientific authority, all social movements that seek to democratize expertise face unusual difficulties.Avoiding polemics and accusations, Epstein provides a benchmark account of the AIDS epidemic to date, one that will be as useful to activists, policy makers, and general readers as to sociologists, physicians, and scientists.   [brief]
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Title: The Languages of psyche: mind and body in Enlightenment thought: Clark Library lectures, 1985-1986 
Author: Rousseau, G. S. (George Sebastian)
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | Medicine | History and Philosophy of Science | European History | European Literature
Publisher's Description: The Languages of Psyche traces the dualism of mind and body during the "long eighteenth century," from the Restoration in England to the aftermath of the French Revolution. Ten outstanding scholars investigate the complex mind-body relationship in a variety of Enlightenment contexts - science, medicine, philosophy, literature, and everyday society. No other recent book provides such an in-depth, suggestive resource for philosophers, literary critics, intellectual and social historians, and all who are interested in Enlightenment studies.   [brief]
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Title: Life without disease: the pursuit of medical utopia 
Author: Schwartz, William B 1922-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Science | Medicine | Economics and Business | History and Philosophy of Science | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: The chaotic state of today's health care is the result of an explosion of effective medical technologies. Rising costs will continue to trouble U.S. health care in the coming decades, but new molecular strategies may eventually contain costs. As life expectancy is dramatically extended by molecular medicine, a growing population of the aged will bring new problems. In the next fifty years genetic intervention will shift the focus of medicine in the United States from repairing the ravages of disease to preventing the onset of disease. Understanding the role of genes in human health, says Dr. William B. Schwartz, is the driving force that will change the direction of medical care, and the age-old dream of life without disease may come close to realization by the middle of the next century. Medical care in 2050 will be vastly more effective, Schwartz maintains, and it may also be less expensive than the resource-intensive procedures such as coronary bypass surgery that medicine relies on today.Schwartz's alluring prospect of a medical utopia raises urgent questions, however. What are the scientific and public policy obstacles that must be overcome if such a goal is to become a reality? Restrictions on access imposed by managed care plans, the corporatization of charitable health care institutions, the increasing numbers of citizens without health insurance, the problems with malpractice insurance, and the threatened Medicare bankruptcy - all are the legacy of medicine's great progress in mastering the human body and society's inability to assimilate that mastery into existing economic, ethical, and legal structures. And if the average American life span is 130 years, a genuine possibility by 2050, what social and economic problems will result?Schwartz examines the forces that have brought us to the current health care state and shows how those same forces will exert themselves in the decades ahead. Focusing on the inextricable link between scientific progress and health policy, he encourages a careful examination of these two forces in order to determine the kind of medical utopia that awaits us. The decisions we make will affect not only our own care, but also the system of care we bequeath to our children.   [brief]
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Title: The king's midwife: a history and mystery of Madame du Coudray 
Author: Gelbart, Nina Rattner
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | European History | Women's Studies | Autobiographies and Biographies | French Studies | History and Philosophy of Science | Medicine
Publisher's Description: This unorthodox biography explores the life of an extraordinary Enlightenment woman who, by sheer force of character, parlayed a skill in midwifery into a national institution. In 1759, in an effort to end infant mortality, Louis XV commissioned Madame Angélique Marguerite Le Boursier du Coudray to travel throughout France teaching the art of childbirth to illiterate peasant women. For the next thirty years, this royal emissary taught in nearly forty cities and reached an estimated ten thousand students. She wrote a textbook and invented a life-sized obstetrical mannequin for her demonstrations. She contributed significantly to France's demographic upswing after 1760.Who was the woman, both the private self and the pseudonymous public celebrity? Nina Rattner Gelbart reconstructs Madame du Coudray's astonishing mission through extensive research in the hundreds of letters by, to, and about her in provincial archives throughout France. Tracing her subject's footsteps around the country, Gelbart chronicles du Coudray's battles with finance ministers, village matrons, local administrators, and recalcitrant physicians, her rises in power and falls from grace, and her death at the height of the Reign of Terror. At a deeper level, Gelbart recaptures du Coudray's interior journey as well, by questioning and dismantling the neat paper trail that the great midwife so carefully left behind. Delightfully written, this tale of a fascinating life at the end of the French Old Regime sheds new light on the histories of medicine, gender, society, politics, and culture.   [brief]
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Title: Tobacco war: inside the California battles 
Author: Glantz, Stanton A
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: American Studies | California and the West | Public Policy | Politics | Social Problems | Economics and Business | Medicine | Environmental Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Tobacco War charts the dramatic and complex history of tobacco politics in California over the past quarter century. Beginning with the activities of a small band of activists who, in the 1970s, put forward the radical notion that people should not have to breathe second-hand tobacco smoke, Stanton Glantz and Edith Balbach follow the movement through the 1980s, when activists created hundreds of city and county ordinances by working through their local officials, to the present--when tobacco is a highly visible issue in American politics and smoke-free restaurants and bars are a reality throughout the state. The authors show how these accomplishments rest on the groundwork laid over the past two decades by tobacco control activists who have worked across the U.S. to change how people view the tobacco industry and its behavior. Tobacco War is accessibly written, balanced, and meticulously researched. The California experience provides a graphic demonstration of the successes and failures of both the tobacco industry and public health forces. It shows how public health advocates slowly learned to control the terms of the debate and how they discovered that simply establishing tobacco control programs was not enough, that constant vigilance was necessary to protect programs from a hostile legislature and governor. In the end, the California experience proves that it is possible to dramatically change how people think about tobacco and the tobacco industry and to rapidly reduce tobacco consumption. But California's experience also demonstrates that it is possible to run such programs successfully only as long as the public health community exerts power effectively. With legal settlements bringing big dollars to tobacco control programs in every state, this book is must reading for anyone interested in battling and beating the tobacco industry.   [brief]
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