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This social history is an ideal model for evaluating our current definition of public health. Rosenkrantz perceptively traces the development of the Massachusetts State Board of Health--established in 1869 as the first state institution in the United States responsible for preventing unnecessary mortality and promoting all aspects of public health.
From Harvard University comes essays sampling topics at the forefront of academia in the twenty-first century. Eminent faculty members invite readers to explore subjects as diverse as religious literacy, cyberspace security, epidemiology, questions in evolution, the dark side of the American Revolution, and the biology of the human mind.
DuBos et. al. examine the social aspects of the TB epidemic, along with some of the biological factors. They show how TB was romaticized, how it was portrayed as a demon coming to rob the healthy of life, and how it sparked scientific invention - in particular the stethescope. The introduction is wonderful as it lays out the basic parts of the book.
From Embodying Injustice to Embodying Equity: Embodied Truths and the Ecosocial Theory of Disease Distribution -- Embodying (In)justice and Embodied Truths: Using Ecosocial Theory to Analyze Population Health Data -- Challenges: Embodied Truths, Vision, and Advancing Health Justice.
Original essays by distinguished scholars from many disciplines examine the many ways in which diseases have been defined throughout the ages and how they, and their victims, are considered today. Included are chapters on responses to plague in early modern Europe, plagues and morality, AIDS and the tradition of homophobia, and pandemics as natural evolutionary phenomena. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Dirt and Disease is a social, cultural, and medical history of the polio epidemic in the United States. Naomi Rogers focuses on the early years from 1900 to 1920, and continues the story to the present. She explores how scientists, physicians, patients, and their families explained the appearance and spread of polio and how they tried to cope with it. Rogers frames this study of polio within a set of larger questions about health and disease in twentieth-century American culture.
In order for the United States to maintain the global leadership and competitiveness in science and technology that are critical to achieving national goals, we must invest in research, encourage innovation, and grow a strong and talented science and technology workforce. Expanding Underrepresented Minority Participation explores the role of diversity in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) workforce and its value in keeping America innovative and competitive. According to the book, the U.S. labor market is projected to grow faster in science and engineering than in any other sector in the coming years, making minority participation in STEM education at all levels a na...
Much of today's political rhetoric decries the welfare state and our maze of government regulations. Critics hark back to a time before the state intervened so directly in citizens' lives. In The People's Welfare, William Novak refutes this vision of a stateless past by documenting America's long history of government regulation in the areas of public safety, political economy, public property, morality, and public health. Challenging the myth of American individualism, Novak recovers a distinctive nineteenth-century commitment to shared obligations and public duties in a well-regulated society. Novak explores the by-laws, ordinances, statutes, and common law restrictions that regulated almo...
Among the most far-reaching effects of the modern environmental movement was the widespread acknowledgment that human beings were inescapably part of a larger ecosystem. With this book, Linda Nash gives us a wholly original and much longer history of "ecological" ideas of the body as that history unfolded in California’s Central Valley. Taking us from nineteenth-century fears of miasmas and faith in wilderness cures to the recent era of chemical pollution and cancer clusters, Nash charts how Americans have connected their diseases to race and place as well as dirt and germs. In this account, the rise of germ theory and the pushing aside of an earlier environmental approach to illness constituted not a clear triumph of modern biomedicine but rather a brief period of modern amnesia. As Nash shows us, place-based accounts of illness re-emerged in the postwar decades, galvanizing environmental protest against smog and toxic chemicals. Carefully researched and richly conceptual, Inescapable Ecologies brings critically important insights to the histories of environment, culture, and public health, while offering a provocative commentary on the human relationship to the larger world.