Books in the Science, Technology and Medicine in Modern History series

The volume focuses on the relationship between migration, health and illness in a global context from c.1820 to the present day. It takes a wide range of finely-grained case studies to examine epidemic disease and its containment, chronic illness and mental breakdown and the health management of migrant populations in the modern world.

The Politics of Addiction examines power and policy-making in the context of a bitter conflict between private and publicly employed doctors treating addiction. Regulation was used by both the profession and the state to shape the treatment of addiction and who could provide it, with the media feeding into the process.

In recent years a number of scholars have analyzed the management of BSE, also known as 'mad cow disease'. Thus far, no one has paid attention to the fact that BSE and other transmissible spongiform encephalopathy's (TSEs) are allegedly caused by a novel agent - a prion - distinct from all other known infectious agents such as bacteria and viruses.

Alternative medicine is a fifty billion dollar per year industry. It reaches a provocative conclusion: alternative therapies' whole-body approach might be just what medicine really needs right now to help crack the tough, chronic conditions seemingly untouched by the revolutions of surgery, antiseptics, antibiotics, vaccines and molecular biology.

Through an examination that uses previously unavailable archives and little-used primary literature, this book places the twentieth-century mental hygiene movement within the broad sweep of modern British psychiatry, offering its own reinterpretation of important elements of this history.