While much has been written about immigrant traditions, music, food culture, folklore, and other aspects of ethnic identity, little attention has been given to the study of medical culture, until ...now. In Medical Caregiving and Identity in Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Region, 1880–2000, Karol Weaver employs an impressive range of primary sources, including folk songs, patent medicine advertisements, oral history interviews, ghost stories, and jokes, to show how the men and women of the anthracite coal region crafted their gender and ethnic identities via the medical decisions they made. Weaver examines communities’ relationships with both biomedically trained physicians and informally trained medical caregivers, and how these relationships reflected a sense of “Americanness.” She uses interviews and oral histories to help tell the story of neighborhood healers, midwives, Pennsylvania German powwowers, medical self-help, and the eventual transition to modern-day medicine. Weaver is able to show not only how each of these methods of healing was shaped by its patrons and their backgrounds but also how it helped mold the identities of the new Americans who sought it out.
This book presents a systematic review on traditional Arab herbal medicine including historical background, medical innovations introduced by Arab physicians, common roots of Arab medicine and ...western medicine, methodology of drug discovery and therapy in Arabic and Islamic medicine, a state-of-the-art description of traditional Arab herbal medicine, and evidence-based safety and efficacy of Arab and Islamic medicines. The usage of modern cell biological, biochemical, in vitro and in vivo techniques for the evaluation of medicinal plant safety and efficacy is also discussed. The toxicity of herbal formulations safety, quality assurances, and chemical analytical techniques are introduced in this book.
In this history of American political culture, Keith Wailoo examines why and how pain and compassionate relief has been a battleground for defining the line between society's liberal trends and ...conservative tendencies. Tracing the development of pain theories in politics, medicine, law, and society, and battles over the morality and economics of relief, Wailoo points to a tension at the heart of the conservative-liberal divide.
Beginning with the post–World War II rise of a pain relief economy in response to concerns about recovering soldiers, Wailoo explores the 1960s rise of an expansive liberal pain standard, along with the emerging conviction that subjective pain was real, disabling, and compensable. These concepts were attacked during the Reagan era of the 1980s, when a conservative political backlash led to decreasing disability aid and the growing role of the courts as arbiters in the liberal-conservative struggle to define pain.
Wailoo goes on to identify how, in the 1990s, new fronts in pain politics opened in states like Oregon and Michigan where advocates for death with dignity insisted that end-of-life pain warranted full relief. And, in the 2006 arrest of conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh for doctor shopping for painkillers, Wailoo finds a cautionary tale about deregulation, which spawned an unmanageable market in pain relief products as well as gaps between the overmedicated and the undertreated. Today's debates over who is in pain, who feels another's pain, and what relief they deserve are new chapters of this enduring battle between liberal relief and conservative care.
People in chronic pain have always sought relief—and have always been judged—but who decides whether someone is truly in pain? The story of pain in politics is more than rhetoric; it is a story of ailing bodies, broken lives, illness, and disability that has vexed government agencies and politicians from the World War II era to the present.
Healing elements Craig, Sienna R
2012., 20120723, 2012, 2012-08-22
eBook
Tibetan medicine has come to represent multiple and sometimes conflicting agendas. On the one hand it must retain a sense of cultural authenticity and a connection to Tibetan Buddhism; on the other ...it must prove efficacious and safe according to biomedical standards. Recently, Tibetan medicine has found a place within the multibillion-dollar market for complementary, traditional, and herbal medicines as people around the world seek alternative paths to wellness. Healing Elements explores how Tibetan medicine circulates through diverse settings in Nepal, China, and beyond as commercial goods and gifts, and as target therapies and panacea for biophysical and psychosocial ills. Through an exploration of efficacy – what does it mean to say Tibetan medicine "works"? – this book illustrates a bio-politics of traditional medicine and the meaningful, if contested, translations of science and healing that occur across distinct social ecologies.
This volume rethinks the role of the Sino-Japanese medical classics during the early modern period in light of antiquarianism, languages, and medical philology. Philology in particular allows the ...authors to address the changing meaning of the same term, which often reflected well-known metaphors in the source language that were transposed to the target language. Each essay touches on the reliability of received medical texts and their modern fate.
The Symptom and the Subject takes an in-depth look at how the physical body first emerged in the West as both an object of knowledge and a mysterious part of the self. Beginning with Homer, moving ...through classical-era medical treatises, and closing with studies of early ethical philosophy and Euripidean tragedy, this book rewrites the traditional story of the rise of body-soul dualism in ancient Greece. Brooke Holmes demonstrates that as the body (sma) became a subject of physical inquiry, it decisively changed ancient Greek ideas about the meaning of suffering, the soul, and human nature.
The research of pandemics, epidemics, and pathogens like COVID-19 reaches far beyond the scope of biomedicine. It is not only an objective for the health, political and social sciences, but epidemics ...and pandemics are a matter of geography: foci and vectors of communicable diseases continue to test the efficacy of medical control at state borders.
This volume illuminates these issues from various disciplinary viewpoints. It starts by exploring historical models of quarantine, spatial isolation and detention as precautionary means against the dissemination of disease and contagion by border crossers, migrants and refugees. Besides the patterns of prejudice with which these groups are confronted, the book also deals with various kinds of fear of contamination from outside of the nation state. The contributors address the implementation of medical techniques at state borders in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as well as the presently practiced measures of medical and biometric screening of migrants and refugees. Uniquely, this volume shows that the current border security regimes of Western states exhibit a high share of medicalised techniques of power, which originate both in European modernity and in the medical and biological disciplines developed during the last quarter of the millennium.
Drawing on the collective expertise of a network of international researchers, this interdisciplinary volume is essential reading for those wishing to understand the medicalisation of borders across the globe, from the early eighteenth century up to the present day.
To some, food allergies seem like fabricated cries for attention. For others, they pose a dangerous health threat. Food allergies are bound up with so many personal and ideological concerns that it ...is difficult to determine what is medical and what is myth. This book parses the political, economic, cultural, and genuine health factors of a phenomenon that now dominates our interactions with others and our understanding of ourselves. Surveying the history of food allergy from ancient times to the present, Another Person's Poison also gives readers a clear grasp of new medical findings on allerg.
Doctors of empire Kim, Hoi-eun
Doctors of empire,
2014, 20140723, 2014, 2015-03-18
eBook
In Doctors of Empire, Hoi-eun Kim recounts the story of the almost 1,200 Japanese medical students who rushed to German universities to learn cutting-edge knowledge from the world leaders in ...medicine, and of the dozen German physicians who were invited to Japan to transform the country's medical institutions and education.
