Books in the Studies in Social Medicine series

In a country riven by regional differences, All Health Politics Is Local shatters the notion of a shared national health agenda. It shows that health has always been political and shaped not just by formal policy but also by grassroots community battles.

Offers the first history of fatigue, one that is scrupulously researched but also informed by Emily Abel's own experiences as a cancer survivor. With her engaging and informative style, Abel gives us a synthetic history of fatigue and outlines how it has been ignored or misunderstood by medical professionals and American society as a whole.

Highlighting the rise of Parents Anonymous and connecting their activism to the sexual abuse moral panic that swept America in the 1980s, Mical Raz argues that these panics and policies - as well as biased viewpoints regarding race, class, and gender - played a powerful role shaping perceptions of child abuse.

By comparing institutions in Hawai'i and Louisiana designed to incarcerate individuals with a highly stigmatized disease, this work provides a study of the complex relationship between US imperialism and public health policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Every day, thousands of people quietly face decisions as agonizing as those made famous in the Terri Schiavo case. Throughout that controversy, all kinds of people--politicians, religious leaders, legal and medical experts--made emphatic statements about the facts and offered even more certain opinions about what should be done. To many, courts were either ordering Terri's death by starvation or vindicating her constitutional rights. Both sides called for simple answers. If That Ever Happens to Me details why these simple answers were not right for Terri Schiavo and why they are not right for end-of-life decisions today.Lois Shepherd looks behind labels like "e;starvation,"e; "e;care,"e; or "e;medical treatment"e; to consider what care and feeding really mean, when feeding tubes might be removed, and why disability groups, the faithful, and even the dying themselves often suggest end-of-life solutions that they might later regret. For example, Shepherd cautions against living wills as a pat answer. She provides evidence that demanding letter-perfect documents can actually weaken, rather than bolster, patient choice. The actions taken and decisions made during Terri Schiavo's final years will continue to have repercussions for thousands of others--those nearing death, their families, health-care professionals, attorneys, lawmakers, clergy, media, researchers, and ethicists. If That Ever Happens to Me is an excellent choice for anyone interested in end-of-life law, policy, and ethics--particularly readers seeking a deeper understanding of the issues raised by Terri Schiavo's case.

For most of the first half of the twentieth century, tuberculosis ranked among the top three causes of mortality among urban African Americans. Often afflicting an entire family or large segments of a neighborhood, the plague of TB was as mysterious as it was fatal. Samuel Kelton Roberts Jr. examines how individuals and institutions--black and white, public and private--responded to the challenges of tuberculosis in a segregated society. Reactionary white politicians and health officials promoted "e;racial hygiene"e; and sought to control TB through Jim Crow quarantines, Roberts explains. African Americans, in turn, protested the segregated, overcrowded housing that was the true root of the tuberculosis problem. Moderate white and black political leadership reconfigured definitions of health and citizenship, extending some rights while constraining others. Meanwhile, those who suffered with the disease--as its victims or as family and neighbors--made the daily adjustments required by the devastating effects of the "e;white plague."e;Exploring the politics of race, reform, and public health, Infectious Fear uses the tuberculosis crisis to illuminate the limits of racialized medicine and the roots of modern health disparities. Ultimately, it reveals a disturbing picture of the United States' health history while offering a vision of a more democratic future.

Over the last twenty years, type 2 diabetes skyrocketed to the forefront of global public health concern. In this book, Mari Armstrong-Hough examines the rise and response to the disease in two societies: the United States and Japan. Both societies have faced rising rates of diabetes, but their social and biomedical responses to its ascendance have diverged.

In this collection of essays, Lawrence O. Gostin, an internationally recognized scholar of AIDS law and policy, confronts the most pressing and controversial issues surrounding AIDS in America and around the world. He shows how HIV/AIDS affects the entire population - infected and uninfected - by influencing social norms, the economy, and the US's role as a world leader.

One of medicine's most remarkable therapeutic triumphs was the discovery of insulin in 1921. But the author demonstrates that the transformation of the disease from fatal condition into a chronic illness is tinged with irony and one which illuminates the human consequences of medical intervention.

Is there a place for complementary and alternative therapies in modern health care? This book discusses the need for establishing rules and standards to facilitate appropriate integration of conventional and complementary and alternative medical CAM therapies.

In February 2003, an undocumented immigrant teen, Jesica Santillan, from Mexico lay dying in a prominent American hospital due to a stunning medical oversight. This volume draws together experts from various fields to understand the dramatic events, the major players, and the core issues at stake.

Nurses have used a variety of tools, instruments and machines to appraise, treat and comfort patients. Tracing the relationship between nursing and technology from 1870 to the present, this text shows that technology has helped shape dilemmas in nursing and advance the profession's development.