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Jacalyn Duffin's History of Medicine has for ten years been one of the leading texts used to teach medical and nursing students the history of their profession. It has also been widely used in history courses and by general readers. An accessible overview of medical history, this new edition is greatly expanded, including more information on medicine in the United States, Great Britain, and in other European countries. The book continues to be organized conceptually around the major fields of medical endeavor such as anatomy, pharmacology, obstetrics, and psychiatry and has grown to include a new chapter on public health. Years of pedagogic experience, medical developments, and reader feedback have led to new sections throughout the book on topics including bioethics, forensics, genetics, reproductive technology, clinical trials, and recent outbreaks of BSE, West Nile Virus, SARS, and anthrax. Up to date and filled with pithy examples and teaching tools such as a searchable online bibliography, History of Medicine continues to demonstrate the power of historical research to inform current health care practice and enhance cultural understanding.
The third edition of this bestselling introduction to medical history has been thoroughly updated to include recent scholarship and new events in major fields of medical endeavor.
Modern culture tends to separate medicine and miracles, but their histories are closely intertwined. The Roman Catholic Church recognizes saints through canonization based on evidence that they worked miracles, as signs of their proximity to God. Physicianhistorian Jacalyn Duffin has examined Vatican sources on 1400 miracles from six continents and spanning four centuries. Overwhelmingly the miracles cited in canonizations between 1588 and 1999 are healings, and the majority entail medical care and physician testimony. These remarkable records contain intimate stories of illness, prayer, and treatment, as told by people who rarely leave traces: peasants and illiterates, men and women, old an...
This book is an exploration of illness and healing experiences in contemporary society through the veneration of saints: primarily the twin doctors Saints Cosmas and Damian. It also follows the author's personal journey from her role as a hematologist who inadvertently served as an expert witness in a miracle to her research as a historian on the origins, meaning and functions of saints. Sources include interviews with devotees in both North America and Europe. Cosmas and Damian were martyred around the year 300 A.D. in what is now Syria. Called the "Anargyroi" (without silver) because they charged no fees, they became patrons of medicine, surgery, and pharmacy as their cult spread widely ac...
In 1964–65, an international team of thirty-eight scientists and assistants, led by Montreal physician Stanley Skoryna, sailed to the mysterious Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to conduct an unprecedented survey of its biosphere. Born of Cold War concerns about pollution, overpopulation, and conflict, and initially conceived as the first of two trips, the project was designed to document the island's status before a proposed airport would link the one thousand people living in humanity's remotest community to the rest of the world – its germs, genes, culture, and economy. Based on archival papers, diaries, photographs, and interviews with nearly twenty members of the original team, Stanley's Dr...
René Théophile Hyacinthe Laennec (1781-1826) is best known for his invention of the stethoscope, one of medicine's most powerful symbols. Histories, novels, and films have cloaked his life in hagiography and legend. Jacalyn Duffin's fascinating new biography relies on a vastly expanded foundation of primary source material, including thousands of pages of handwritten patient records, lecture notes, unpublished essays, and letters. She situates Laennec, the scientist and teacher, within the broader social and intellectual currents of post-Revolutionary France. Her work uncovers a complex character who participated actively in the dramatic changes of his time. Laennec's famous Treatise on Me...
In Lovers and Livers, Jacalyn Duffin provides a lively overview of the ideas around disease.
Jacalyn Duffin's History of Medicine has for ten years been one of the leading texts used to teach medical and nursing students the history of their profession. It has also been widely used in history courses and by general readers. An accessible overview of medical history, this new edition is greatly expanded, including more information on medicine in the United States, Great Britain, and in other European countries. The book continues to be organized conceptually around the major fields of medical endeavor such as anatomy, pharmacology, obstetrics, and psychiatry and has grown to include a new chapter on public health. Years of pedagogic experience, medical developments, and reader feedback have led to new sections throughout the book on topics including bioethics, forensics, genetics, reproductive technology, clinical trials, and recent outbreaks of BSE, West Nile Virus, SARS, and anthrax. Up to date and filled with pithy examples and teaching tools such as a searchable online bibliography, History of Medicine continues to demonstrate the power of historical research to inform current health care practice and enhance cultural understanding.
For two years the COVID-19 pandemic has upended the world. The physician and medical historian Jacalyn Duffin presents a global history of the virus, with a focus on Canada. Duffin describes the frightening appearance of the virus and its identification by scientists in China; subsequent outbreaks on cruise ships; the relentless spread to Europe, the Americas, Africa, and elsewhere; and the immediate attempts to confront it. COVID-19 next explores the scientific history of infections generally, and the discovery of coronaviruses in particular. Taking a broad approach, the book explains the advent of tests, treatments, and vaccines, as well as the practical politics behind interventions, incl...
By drawing on the latest discoveries in virology, microbiology, and immunology, Mirko Grmek depicts the AIDS epidemic not as an isolated incident but as part of the long, but far from peaceful, coexistence of humans and viruses.