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The history of medicine is much more than the story of doctors, nurses, and hospitals. Seeking to understand the patient's perspective, historians scour the archives, searching for rare personal accounts. Bringing together a trove of more than 400 family letters by Charles Dwight Willard, Suffering in the Land of Sunshine provides a unique window into the experience of sickness. A Los Angeles civic leader at the turn of the twentieth century, Willard is well known to historians of the West, but exclusively for his public life as a booster and reformer. Willard's evocative story offers fresh insights into several critical issues, including how concepts of gender, class, and race shape patients' representations of their illness, how expectations of cure affect the illness experience, how different cultures constrain the coping strategies of the sick, and why robust health is such an exalted value in certain societies.
This is the first history of public health surveillance in the United States to span more than a century of conflict and controversy. The practice of reporting the names of those with disease to health authorities inevitably poses questions about the interplay between the imperative to control threats to the public's health and legal and ethical concerns about privacy. Authors Amy L. Fairchild, Ronald Bayer, and James Colgrove situate the tension inherent in public health surveillance in a broad social and political context and show how the changing meaning and significance of privacy have marked the politics and practice of surveillance since the end of the nineteenth century.
In 1917, as the United States prepared for war in Europe, Army Surgeon General William C. Gorgas recognized the threat of Mycobacterium tuberculosis to American troops. What the Army needed was some "good tuberculosis men." Despite the efforts of the nations best "tuberculosis men," the disease would become a leading cause of World War I disability discharges and veterans benefits. The fact that tuberculosis patients often experienced cycles in which they recovered their health and then fell ill again challenged government officials to judge the degree to which a person was disabled and required government care and support. This book tracks the impact of tuberculosis on the US Army from the late 1890s, when it was a ubiquitous presence in society, to the 1960s when it became a curable and controllable disease.
In 1905, sanitary conditions in Pennsylvania were appalling. Thousands of children died of preventable and curable diseases, tens of thousands in the coal regions hacked themselves to death from black lung disease, and pollution in the commonwealth’s water killed tens of thousands more. In the wake of an alarming typhoid outbreak in Butler, the Pennsylvania legislature formed a modern state department of health. At its head was Samuel G. Dixon, who would rise to fame as one of the most respected public health experts of his day. While the legislation that created Pennsylvania’s department of health cleared space for its aggressive action, it was Dixon’s deft political touch and keen in...
The Deadly Truth chronicles the complex interactions between disease and the peoples of America from the pre-Columbian world to the present. Grob's ultimate lesson is stark but valuable: there can be no final victory over disease. The world in which we live undergoes constant change, which in turn creates novel risks to human health and life. We conquer particular diseases, but others always arise in their stead. In a powerful challenge to our tendency to see disease as unnatural and its virtual elimination as a real possibility, Grob asserts the undeniable biological persistence of disease. Diseases ranging from malaria to cancer have shaped the social landscape--sometimes through brief, fu...
A study of Australian nurse Sister Elizabeth Kenny and her efforts to have her unorthodox methods of treating polio accepted as mainstream polio care in the United States during the 1940s. A case study of changing clinical care, and an examination of the hidden politics of philanthropies and medical societies.
Fairchild has unearthed a curious fact about this ubiquitous rite of immigration - it was rarely undertaken to exclude immigrants.".
Tuberculosis is one of the world's deadliest infectious diseases, killing nearly two million people every year, now more than at any other time in history. While the developed world has nearly forgotten about TB, it continues to wreak havoc across much of the globe. In this interdisciplinary study of global efforts to control TB, Christian McMillen examines the disease's remarkable staying power by offering a probing look at key locations, developments, ideas, and medical successes and failures since 1900. He explores TB and race in east Africa, in South Africa, and on Native American reservations in the first half of the twentieth century, investigates the unsuccessful search for a vaccine, uncovers the origins of drug-resistant tuberculosis in Kenya and elsewhere in the decades following World War II, and details the tragic story of the resurgence of TB in the era of HIV/AIDS. Discovering Tuberculosis tells the story of why controlling TB has been, and continues to be, so difficult.
In The Weariness, the Fever, and the Fret Katherine McCuaig takes an in-depth look at the campaign against TB, from its beginnings as part of the turn-of-the-century urban social reform movement to the 1950s and the discovery of antibiotics that could cure it. Although the bacillus that causes it had been discovered in 1882, at the turn of the century TB was, as Osler observed, "a social disease with a medical aspect." With "fresh air, good food, good houses, and hope" as the only available treatment, fighting the disease meant not only eliminating the germ but attacking the underlying social problems that predisposed an individual to disease - alcoholism and poor living and working conditio...
Life expectancy and income among the first countries to begin health transitions -- Which countries should be studied? -- A colonizer and the country colonized : Japan and Korea -- Very low income is not a barrier : Sri Lanka -- Two neighbors : Panama and Costa Rica -- Capitalism and communism, dictatorship and democracy : Cuba and Jamaica -- The Soviet and Chinese models of social development -- Oil-rich lands -- The Latin American case : income inequality and health in Mexico -- Limiting mortality from fecal disease, malaria, and tuberculosis.