Forgotten Healers Strocchia, Sharon T
2019, 2019-12-17, Letnik:
24
eBook
In Renaissance Italy women from all walks of life played a central role in health care and the early development of medical science. Observing that the frontlines of care are often found in the ...household and other spaces thought of as female, Sharon Strocchia encourages us to rethink women's place in the history of medicine.
Meticulously researched and beautifully written,Fit to Be Citizens?demonstrates how both science and public health shaped the meaning of race in the early twentieth century. Through a careful ...examination of the experiences of Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, Natalia Molina illustrates the many ways local health officials used complexly constructed concerns about public health to demean, diminish, discipline, and ultimately define racial groups. She shows how the racialization of Mexican Americans was not simply a matter of legal exclusion or labor exploitation, but rather that scientific discourses and public health practices played a key role in assigning negative racial characteristics to the group. The book skillfully moves beyond the binary oppositions that usually structure works in ethnic studies by deploying comparative and relational approaches that reveal the racialization of Mexican Americans as intimately associated with the relative historical and social positions of Asian Americans, African Americans, and whites. Its rich archival grounding provides a valuable history of public health in Los Angeles, living conditions among Mexican immigrants, and the ways in which regional racial categories influence national laws and practices. Molina's compelling study advances our understanding of the complexity of racial politics, attesting that racism is not static and that different groups can occupy different places in the racial order at different times.
Influenza and Public Health Gunn, Jennifer; Giles-Vernick, Tamara; Craddock, Susan
2010, 20100923, 2010-09-23
eBook
Major influenza pandemics pose a constant threat. As evidenced by recent H5N1 avian flu and novel H1N1, influenza outbreaks can come in close succession, yet differ in their transmission and impact. ...With accelerated levels of commercial and population mobility, new forms of flu virus can also spread across the globe with unprecedented speed. Responding quickly and adequately to each outbreak becomes imperative on the part of governments and global public health organizations, but the difficulties of doing so are legion. One tool for pandemic planning is analysis of responses to past pandemics that provide insight into productive ways forward.
This book investigates past influenza pandemics in light of today's, so as to afford critical insights into possible transmission patterns, experiences, mistakes, and interventions. It explores several pandemics over the past century, from the infamous 1918 Spanish Influenza, the avian flu epidemic of 2003, and the novel H1N1 pandemic of 2009, to lesser-known outbreaks such as the 1889-90 influenza pandemic and the Hong Kong Flu of 1968. Contributors to the volume examine cases from a wide range of disciplines, including history, sociology, epidemiology, virology, geography, and public health, identifying patterns that cut across pandemics in order to guide contemporary responses to infectious outbreaks.
The founders of the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese (HKCM) had the lofty vision of helping to bring Western science and medicine to China, which, they hoped, would contribute to the larger ...objective of modernizing the nation. That this latter goal was partly realized through the non-medical efforts of its first and most famous graduate, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, is a well-known story. Faith C. S. Ho’s Western Medicine for Chinese brings the focus back to the primary mission of HKCM by analyzing its role in the transfer of medical knowledge and practices across cultures. It offers a detailed account of how the pioneering staff of the college and the fifty-nine graduates besides Dr. Sun overcame significant obstacles to enable Western medicine to gain wider acceptance among Chinese and to facilitate the establishment of such services by the Hong Kong government. Some of these Chinese doctors went on to practise medicine in China, but arguably the college had made the most lasting impact on Hong Kong. Ho observes that the timing of the founding (1887) and the closing (1915) of the college could not have been more strategic. The late nineteenth-century beginning allowed enough time for HKCM to lay a solid foundation for medical training in the city. Later, the college was ready to play a pivotal role in the establishment of the University of Hong Kong, which had important implications for subsequent social developments in the city.
Drawing on New Testament studies and recent scholarship on the expansion of the Christian church, Gary B. Ferngren presents a comprehensive historical account of medicine and medical philanthropy in ...the first five centuries of the Christian era.
Ferngren first describes how early Christians understood disease. He examines the relationship of early Christian medicine to the natural and supernatural modes of healing found in the Bible. Despite biblical accounts of demonic possession and miraculous healing, Ferngren argues that early Christians generally accepted naturalistic assumptions about disease and cared for the sick with medical knowledge gleaned from the Greeks and Romans.
Ferngren next explores the origins of medical philanthropy in the early Christian church. Rather than viewing illness as punishment for sins, early Christians believed that the sick deserved both medical assistance and compassion. Even as they were being persecuted, Christians cared for the sick both within and outside of their community. Their long experience in medical charity led to the creation of the first hospitals, a singular Christian contribution to health care.
Medicine and Health Care in Early Christianity is essential reading for scholars and students in the history of medicine and religious studies.
In Galen's Theory of Black Bile: Hippocratic Tradition, Manipulation, Innovation Keith Stewart analyses Galen's characterisation of black bile to understand the different ways it is used in his ...arguments that cannot always be reconciled with the content of his sources.
Mirko D. Grmek (1924-2000) is one of the most significant figures in the history of medicine, and has long been considered a pioneer of the field. The singular trajectory that took Grmek from ...Yugoslavia to the academic culture of post-war France placed him at the crossroads of different intellectual trends and made him an influential figure during the second half of the twentieth century. Yet, scholars have rarely attempted to articulate his distinctive vision of the history of science and medicine with all its tensions, contradictions, and ambiguities. This volume brings together and publishes for the first time in English a range of Grmek’s writings, providing a portrait of his entire career as a historian of science and an engaged intellectual figure. Pathological Realities pieces together Grmek’s scholarship that reveals the interconnections of diseases, societies, and medical theories.
Straddling the sciences and the humanities, Grmek crafted significant new concepts and methods to engage with contemporary social problems such as wars, genocides and pandemics. Uniting some major strands of his published work that are still dispersed or simply unknown, this volume covers the deep epistemological changes in historical conceptions of disease as well as major advances within the life sciences and their historiography. Opening with a classic essay – “Preliminaries for a Historical Study of Diseases,” this volume introduces Grmek’s notions of “pathocenosis” and “emerging infections,” illustrating them with historical and contemporary cases. Pathological Realities also showcases Grmek’s pioneering approach to the history of science and medicine using laboratory notebooks as well as his original work on biological thought and the role of ideologies and myths in the history of science. The essays assembled here reveal Grmek’s significant influence and continued relevance for current research in the history of medicine and biology, medical humanities, science studies, and the philosophy of science.
During the first half of the twentieth century, Adolf Meyer was the most authoritative and influential psychiatrist in the United States. In 1908, when the Johns Hopkins Hospital established the ...first American university clinic devoted to psychiatry—still a nascent medical specialty at the time—Meyer was selected to oversee the enterprise. The Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic opened in 1913, and Meyer served as psychiatrist-in-chief at the hospital until 1941.
In Pathologist of the Mind, S. D. Lamb explores how Meyer used his powerful position to establish psychiatry as a clinical science that operated like the other academic disciplines at the country’s foremost medical school. In addition to successfully arguing for a scientific and biological approach to mental illness, Meyer held extraordinary sway over state policies regarding the certification of psychiatrists. He also trained hundreds of specialists who ultimately occupied leadership positions and made significant contributions in psychiatry, neurology, experimental psychology, social work, and public health.
Although historians have long recognized Meyer’s authority, his concepts and methods have never before received a systematic historical analysis. His convoluted theory of “psychobiology,” along with his notoriously ineffective attempts to explain it in print, continue to baffle many clinicians. Pathologist of the Mind aims to rediscover Meyerian psychiatry by eavesdropping on Meyer’s informal and private conversations with his patients and colleagues. Weaving together private correspondence and uniquely detailed case histories, Lamb examines Meyer’s efforts to institute a clinical science of psychiatry in the United States—one that harmonized the expectations of scientific medicine with his concept of the person as a biological organism and mental illness as an adaptive failure. The first historian ever granted access to these exceptional medical records, Lamb offers a compelling new perspective on the integral but misunderstood legacy of Adolf Meyer.
This volume, authored by outstanding papyrologists and historians of ancient medicine, deals with topics focused on the papyrological evidence of ancient medical texts and contexts. The first part ...contains some new reflections on important sources such as the Anonymus Londinensis and the Hippocratic corpus, the second part collects papers about the “doctors’ context”, and the final part is focused on the digitisation of the medical papyri.
This subtle and powerful ethnography examines African healing and its relationship to medical science. Stacey A. Langwick investigates the practices of healers in Tanzania who confront the most ...intractable illnesses in the region, including AIDS and malaria. She reveals how healers generate new therapies and shape the bodies of their patients as they address devils and parasites, anti-witchcraft medicine, and child immunization. Transcending the dualisms between tradition and science, culture and nature, belief and knowledge, Langwick tells a new story about the materiality of healing and postcolonial politics. This important work bridges postcolonial theory, science, public health, and anthropology.
