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Dr. James Burt believed women’s bodies were broken, and only he could fix them. In the 1950s, this Ohio OB-GYN developed what he called “love surgery,” a unique procedure he maintained enhanced the sexual responses of a new mother, transforming her into “a horny little house mouse.” Burt did so without first getting the consent of his patients. Yet he was allowed to practice for over thirty years, mutilating hundreds of women in the process. It would be easy to dismiss Dr. Burt as a monstrous aberration, a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein. Yet as medical historian Sarah Rodriguez reveals, that’s not the whole story. The Love Surgeon asks tough questions about Burt’s heinous acts and what they reveal about the failures of the medical establishment: How was he able to perform an untested surgical procedure? Why wasn’t he obliged to get informed consent from his patients? And why did it take his peers so long to take action? The Love Surgeon is both a medical horror story and a cautionary tale about the limits of professional self-regulation.
Since its initial publication in 1989 by Garland Publishing, Karen Buhler Wilkerson’s False Dawn: The Rise and Decline of Public Health Nursing remains the definitive work on the creation, work, successes, and failures of public health nursing in the United States. False Dawn explores and answers the provocative question: why did a movement that became a significant vehicle for the delivery of comprehensive health care to individuals and families fail to reach its potential? Through carefully researched chapters, Wilkerson details what she herself called the “rise and fall” narrative of public health nursing: rising to great heights in its patients' homes in the struggle to control infectious diseases, assimilate immigrants, and tame urban areas -- only to flounder during the later growth of hospitals, significant immigration restrictions, and the emergence of chronic diseases as endemic in American society.
The sudden call, the race to the hospital, the high-stakes operation—the drama of transplant surgery is well known. But what happens before and after the surgery? In Transplanting Care, Laura L. Heinemann examines the daily lives of midwestern organ transplant patients and those who care for them, from pretransplant preparations through to the long posttransplant recovery. Heinemann points out that as efforts to control healthcare costs gain urgency—and as new surgical techniques, drug therapies, and home medical equipment advance—most of the transplant process now takes place at home, among kin. Indeed, the transplant system effectively depends on unpaid care labor, typically provided...
How do we know when physicians practice medicine safely? Can we trust doctors to discipline their own? What is a proper role of experts in a democracy? In the Public Interest raises these provocative questions, using medical licensing and discipline to advocate for a needed overhaul of how we decide public good in a society dominated by private interest groups. Throughout the twentieth century, American physicians built a powerful profession, but their drive toward professional autonomy has made outside observers increasingly concerned about physicians’ ability to separate their own interests from those of the general public. Ruth Horowitz traces the history of medical licensure and the me...
Abortion Care as Moral Work brings together the voices of abortion providers, abortion counselors, clinic owners, neonatologists, bioethicists, and historians to discuss how and why providing abortion care is moral work. The collection offers voices not usually heard as clinicians talk about their work and their thoughts about life and death. In four subsections--Providers, Clinics, Conscience, and The Fetus--the contributions in this anthology explore the historical context and present-day challenges to the delivery of abortion care. Contributing authors address the motivations that lead abortion providers to offer abortion care, discuss the ways in which anti-abortion regulations have made it increasingly difficult to offer feminist-inspired services, and ponder the status of the fetus and the ethical frameworks supporting abortion care and fetal research. Together these essays provide a feminist moral foundation to reassert that abortion care is moral work.
The thirteen essays in Educating for Professionalism examine the often conflicting ethical, social, emotional, and intellectual messages that medical institutions send to students about what it means to be a doctor. Because this disconnection between what medical educators profess and what students experience is partly to blame for the current crisis in medical professionalism, the authors offer timely, reflective analyses of the work and opportunities facing medical education if doctors are to win public trust. In their drive to improve medical professionalism within the world of academic medicine, editors Delese Wear and Janet Bickel have assembled thought-provoking essays that elucidate t...
Malaria is one of the leading killers in the world today. Though drugs against malaria have a long history, attempts to develop novel therapeutics spanned the twentieth century and continue today. In this historical study, Leo B. Slater shows the roots and branches of an enormous drug development project during World War II. Fighting around the globe, American soldiers were at high risk for contracting malaria, yet quinine–a natural cure–became harder to acquire. A U.S. government-funded antimalarial program, initiated by the National Research Council, brought together diverse laboratories and specialists to provide the best drugs to the nation's military. This wartime research would deliver chloroquinine–long the drug of choice for prevention and treatment of malaria–and a host of other chemotherapeutic insights. A massive undertaking, the antimalarial program was to biomedical research what the Manhattan Project was to the physical sciences. A volume in the Critical Issues in Health and Medicine series, edited by Rima D. Apple and Janet Golden.
From Residency to Retirement tells the stories of twenty American doctors over the last half century, which saw a period of continuous, turbulent, and transformative changes to the U.S. health care system. The cohort’s experiences are reflective of the generation of physicians who came of age as presidents Carter and Reagan began to focus on costs and benefits of health services. Mizrahi observed and interviewed these physicians in six timeframes ending in 2016. Beginning with medical school in the mid-1970s, these physicians reveal the myriad fluctuations and uncertainties in their professional practice, working conditions, collegial relationships, and patient interactions. In their own w...
Current public health promotion of breastfeeding relies heavily on health messaging and individual behavior change. Women are told that “breast is best” but too little serious attention is given to addressing the many social, economic, and political factors that combine to limit women’s real choice to breastfeed beyond a few days or weeks. The result: women’s, infants’, and public health interests are undermined. Beyond Health, Beyond Choice examines how feminist perspectives can inform public health support for breastfeeding. Written by authors from diverse disciplines, perspectives, and countries, this collection of essays is arranged thematically and considers breastfeeding in r...
Mustard gas is typically associated with the horrors of World War I battlefields and trenches, where chemical weapons were responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. Few realize, however, that mustard gas had a resurgence during the Second World War, when its uses and effects were widespread and insidious. Toxic Exposures tells the shocking story of how the United States and its allies intentionally subjected thousands of their own servicemen to poison gas as part of their preparation for chemical warfare. In addition, it reveals the racialized dimension of these mustard gas experiments, as scientists tested whether the effects of toxic exposure might vary between Asian, Hispanic, black, a...