<a href="http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i43/43b01201.htm">Life in the Fast Lane: The author on the CHE
Uppers. Crank. Bennies. Dexies. Greenies. Black Beauties. Purple Hearts. Crystal. Ice. ...And, of course, Speed. Whatever their street names at the moment, amphetamines have been an insistent force in American life since they were marketed as the original antidepressants in the 1930s. On Speed tells the remarkable story of their rise, their fall, and their surprising resurgence. Along the way, it discusses the influence of pharmaceutical marketing on medicine, the evolving scientific understanding of how the human brain works, the role of drugs in maintaining the social order, and the centrality of pills in American life. Above all, however, this is a highly readable biography of a very popular drug. And it is a riveting story. Incorporating extensive new research, On Speed describes the ups and downs (fittingly, there are mostly ups) in the history of amphetamines, and their remarkable pervasiveness. For example, at the same time that amphetamines were becoming part of the diet of many GIs in World War II, an amphetamine-abusing counterculture began to flourish among civilians. In the 1950s, psychiatrists and family doctors alike prescribed amphetamines for a wide variety of ailments, from mental disorders to obesity to emotional distress. By the late 1960s, speed had become a fixture in everyday life: up to ten percent of Americans were thought to be using amphetamines at least occasionally. Although their use was regulated in the 1970s, it didn't take long for amphetamines to make a major comeback, with the discovery of Attention Deficit Disorder and the role that one drug in the amphetamine family—Ritalin—could play in treating it. Today’s most popular diet-assistance drugs differ little from the diet pills of years gone by, still speed at their core. And some of our most popular recreational drugs—including the "mellow" drug, Ecstasy—are also amphetamines. Whether we want to admit it or not, writes Rasmussen, we’re still a nation on speed.
As the ground war in Vietnam escalated in the late 1960s, the US government leveraged the so-called doctor draft to secure adequate numbers of medical personnel in the armed forces. Among newly ...minted physicians’ few alternatives to military service was the Clinical Associate Training Program at the National Institutes of Health. Though only a small percentage of applicants were accepted, the elite program launched an unprecedented number of remarkable scientific careers that would revolutionize medicine at the end of the twentieth century. Medal Winners recounts this overlooked chapter and unforeseen byproduct of the Vietnam War through the lives of four former NIH clinical associates who would go on to become Nobel laureates. Raymond S. Greenberg traces their stories from their pre-NIH years and apprenticeships through their subsequent Nobel Prize–winning work, which transformed treatment of heart disease, cancer, and other diseases. Greenberg shows how the Vietnam draft unintentionally ushered in a golden era of research by bringing talented young physicians under the tutelage of leading scientists and offers a lesson in what it may take to replicate such a towering center of scientific innovation as the NIH in the 1960s and 1970s.
Nurses and disasters Keeling, Arlene W; Wall, Barbra Mann
2015., 2015, 2015-06-04
eBook
This timely volume describes and analyzes the nursing response to a variety of historic and recent global disasters that occurred between 1885 and 2012, including Hurricane Sandy. The book is unique ...in its discussion of cooperation and conflict in the disaster responses regarding the mobilization of individuals across national borders and continents. It examines how partnerships developed, their implications for policy, and how we can use lessons learned to improve care in the future. The book addresses such questions as: How did local, regional, and national communities mobilize for emergency care? What was the role of local nurses in emergency care after disasters? What was the role of the national or international Red Cross, local and federal governments, physicians, nurses, and other first responders? What was the impact of social attitudes and issues of race, class, and gender on the ways nurses and other health care professionals reacted to the disasters? How did unpreparedness for the type or scope of the disaster affect the response? The book will be of value to a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate students in nursing, social work, history, health policy, women's studies, public health, and urban studies.
Brazil's leadership role in the fight against HIV has brought its public health system widespread praise. But the nation still faces serious health challenges and inequities. Though home to the ...world's second largest African-descendant population, Brazil failed to address many of its public health issues that disproportionately impact Afro-Brazilian women and men. Kia Lilly Caldwell draws on twenty years of engagement with activists, issues, and policy initiatives to document how the country's feminist health movement and black women's movement have fought for much-needed changes in women's health. Merging ethnography with a historical analysis of policies and programs, Caldwell offers a close examination of institutional and structural factors that have impacted the quest for gender and racial health equity in Brazil. As she shows, activists have played an essential role in policy development in areas ranging from maternal mortality to female sterilization. Caldwell's insightful portrait of the public health system also details how its weaknesses contribute to ongoing failures and challenges while also imperiling the advances that have been made.
The second decade of the twenty-first century has witnessed a surging interest in personalized medicine with the concomitant promise to enable more precise diagnosis and treatment of disease and ...illness, based upon an individual’s unique genetic makeup.In this book, my goal is to contribute to a growing body of literature on personalized medicine by tracing and analyzing how this field has blossomed in Asia. In so doing, I aim to illustrate how various social and economic forces shape the co-production of science and social order in global contexts. This book shows that there are inextricable transnational linkages between developing and developed countries and also provides a theoretically guided and empirically grounded understanding of the formation and usage of particular racial and ethnic human taxonomies in local, national and transnational settings.
Among the most far-reaching effects of the modern environmental movement was the widespread acknowledgment that human beings were inescapably part of a larger ecosystem. With this book, Linda Nash ...gives us a wholly original and much longer history of "ecological" ideas of the body as that history unfolded in California's Central Valley. Taking us from nineteenth-century fears of miasmas and faith in wilderness cures to the recent era of chemical pollution and cancer clusters, Nash charts how Americans have connected their diseases to race and place as well as dirt and germs. In this account, the rise of germ theory and the pushing aside of an earlier environmental approach to illness constituted not a clear triumph of modern biomedicine but rather a brief period of modern amnesia. As Nash shows us, place-based accounts of illness re-emerged in the postwar decades, galvanizing environmental protest against smog and toxic chemicals. Carefully researched and richly conceptual,Inescapable Ecologiesbrings critically important insights to the histories of environment, culture, and public health, while offering a provocative commentary on the human relationship to the larger world.
In 1748, as yellow fever raged in Charleston, South Carolina, doctor John Lining remarked, "There is something very singular in the constitution of the Negroes, which renders them not liable to this ...fever." Lining's comments presaged ideas about blackness that would endure in medical discourses and beyond. In this fascinating medical history, Rana A. Hogarth examines the creation and circulation of medical ideas about blackness in the Atlantic World during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She shows how white physicians deployed blackness as a medically significant marker of difference and used medical knowledge to improve plantation labor efficiency, safeguard colonial and civic interests, and enhance control over black bodies during the era of slavery.Hogarth refigures Atlantic slave societies as medical frontiers of knowledge production on the topic of racial difference. Rather than looking to their counterparts in Europe who collected and dissected bodies to gain knowledge about race, white physicians in Atlantic slaveholding regions created and tested ideas about race based on the contexts in which they lived and practiced. What emerges in sharp relief is the ways in which blackness was reified in medical discourses and used to perpetuate notions of white supremacy.
The heart of power Blumenthal, David; Blumenthal, David; Morone, James A
2010., 2010-09-21
eBook
Even the most powerful men in the world are human—they get sick, take dubious drugs, drink too much, contemplate suicide, fret about ailing parents, and bury people they love. Young Richard Nixon ...watched two brothers die of tuberculosis, even while doctors monitored a suspicious shadow on his own lungs. John Kennedy received last rites four times as an adult, and Lyndon Johnson suffered a "belly buster" of a heart attack. David Blumenthal and James A. Morone explore how modern presidents have wrestled with their own mortality—and how they have taken this most human experience to heart as they faced the difficult politics of health care. Drawing on a trove of newly released White House tapes, on extensive interviews with White House staff, and on dramatic archival material that has only recently come to light, The Heart of Power explores the hidden ways in which presidents shape our destinies through their own experiences. Taking a close look at Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, the book shows what history can teach us as we confront the health care challenges of the twenty-first century.
The story of the beliefs and practices called 'magic' starts in ancient Iran, Greece, and Rome, before entering its crucial Christian phase in the Middle Ages. Centering on the Renaissance and ...Marsilio Ficino - whose work on magic was the most influential account written in premodern times - this groundbreaking book treats magic as a classical tradition with foundations that were distinctly philosophical. Besides Ficino, the premodern story of magic also features Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Aquinas, Agrippa, Pomponazzi, Porta, Bruno, Campanella, Descartes, Boyle, Leibniz, and Newton, to name only a few of the prominent thinkers discussed in this book. Because pictures play a key role in the story of magic, this book is richly illustrated.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Frederick Novy was the leader among a new breed of full-time bacteriologists at American medical schools. Although historians have examined bacteriologic work ...done in American health department laboratories, there has been little examination of similar work completed within U.S. medical schools during this period.InFrederick Novy and the Development of Bacteriology in Medicine, medical historian, medical researcher, and clinician Powel H. Kazanjian uses Novy's archived letters, laboratory notebooks, lecture notes, and published works to examine medical research and educational activities at the University of Michigan and other key medical schools during a formative period in modern medical science.
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