Books in the Critical Issues in Health and Medicine Series series

Public health demonstration projects have been touted as an innovative solution to the US's health care crisis. Yet, such projects actually have a long but little-known history, dating back to the 1920s. This new book reveals the key role that these local health programs had in influencing how Americans perceived their personal health choices and the well-being of their communities.

Medical historian Michelle L. McClellan traces the story of the female alcoholic from the late-nineteenth through the twentieth century. She draws on a range of sources to demonstrate the persistence of the belief that alcohol use is antithetical to an idealized feminine role, particularly one that glorifies motherhood.

The ability to obtain health care is fundamental to the security, stability, and well-being of poor families. Drawing upon statistical data and interviews with over five hundred families in Oregon, this work assesses the ways in which welfare reform affects the well-being of adults and children who leave the program for work.

Viewing death as a natural event, hospices seek to enable people to live as fully and painlessly as possible. Award-winning medical historian Emily Abel provides insight into several important issues surrounding the growth of hospice care. Using a unique set of records, this book expands our understanding of the history of US hospices.

The first book to utilize women's own writings about miscarriage to explore the individual understandings of pregnancy loss and the multiple social and medical forces that helped to shape those perceptions. What emerges from Shannon Withycombe's work is unlike most medicalization narratives.

Traces the growth of depression as an object of medical study and as a consumer commodity. This book addresses gender issues in the construction of depression, explores key questions of how its diagnosis was developed, how it has been used, and how we should question its application in American society.