546 results for "Medicine"

Doc or quack: science and anti-science in modern medicine

Gilman, Sander L.
"An examination of the ever-shifting boundary between scientific medicine and quackery. Reaching from the beginnings of scientific medicine in the nineteenth century through to the present, Sander L. Gilman examines the ever-shifting boundary between scientific medicine and quackery, asking if such a fixed boundary can realistically exist within mainstream medical practice. Through detailed case studies – of stomach ulcers and eye disease – as well as the clinical use and abuse of specific therapies, such as acupuncture, Doc or Quack reveals the influence of pharmaceutical companies in determining the nature of medical practice, the pros and cons of increasing specialization, the question of why ‘bad’ science can cure, and the murky issue of ‘race’ and ‘gender’ in scientific medicine. This readable account covers medical practice from the Enlightenment to the present, offering a realistic view of health politics in the usa, Germany and the uk. It’s an essential read for anyone interested in the history and future of scientific medicine in the age of Charles iii and Trump ii." --
Reaktion Books 2025 359 pages

Medicine stories: essays for radicals

Levins Morales, Aurora
In this revised and expanded edition, the author weaves together insights and lessons learned over a lifetime of activism to offer a new theory of social justice. Calling for a politics of integrity that recognizes the complicated wholeness of individual and collective lives, the author delves among the interwoven roots of multiple oppressions, exposing connections, crafting strategies, and uncovering the wellsprings of resilience and joy. Throughout these twenty-eight essays - twenty-one of which are new or extensively revised - she exposes the structures and mechanisms that silence voices and divide movements. The result is a medicine bag full of techniques and perspectives to build a universal solidarity that is flexible, nuanced, and strong enough to fundamentally shift our world toward justice. Intimately personal and globally relevant, this book brings clarity and hope to tangled, emotionally charged social issues in beautiful and accessible language.
Duke University Press 2019-04-26 232 pages

The veterinarian's touch: profiles of life among the animals

Gutkind, Lee
Since James Herriot first began his practice almost a century ago, new technologies and the changing concerns of animal owners have dramatically altered the veterinarian's world. Through a kaleidoscope of contrasting portraits, Lee Gutkind introduces an equally impassioned lot of doctors and their sometimes eccentric patients. Animal lovers will love this journey from tony, expensive Manhattan practices to mucky farms, from cutting-edge animal hospitals to zoos and aquatic parks.
Henry Holt 1998-07-15 226 pages

Bioethical issues, sociological perspectives

Barbara Katz Rothman,Elizabeth M. Armstrong,Rebecca Tiger
This volume deals with the topic of health inequalities and health disparities. The volume is divided into five sections. The first section includes an introductory look at the issue of health care inequalities and disparities and also an introduction to the volume. One of the backdrops to this topic in the United States was The National Healthcare Disparities Report and its focus on the ability of Americans to access health care and variation in the quality of care. Disparities related to socioeconomic status were included, as were disparities linked to race and ethnicity and the report also tried to explore the relationship between race/ethnicity and socioeconomic position, as explained in more detail in the first article in the book.The second article discusses a newer overall approach to issues related to health inequalities and health disparities. The remaining four sections of the book address more specific topics relating to inequalities and disparities. The second section examines racial and ethnic inequalities and disparities. The third section includes articles that address the issue from the perspective of research about health care providers and health care facilities. The last two sections of the book focus on consumers and topics of health care disparities, with Section 4 focused on issues related to substance abuse, mental health and related concerns.Section 5 includes articles looking at issues of vulnerable women, women with breast cancer and people with colorectal cancer. "Inequalities and Disparities in Health Care and Health" is important reading for medical sociologists and people working in other social science disciplines studying health-related issues. The volume also provides vital information for health services researchers, policy analysts and public health researchers. It is a great resource for health services researchers, policy analysts and public health researchers. It offers an in-depth look at bioethics, focusing on health inequalities and disparities.
Elsevier JAI 2008 347 pages

Public Hostage, Public Ransom Ending Institutional America

William Bronston
Public Hostage, Public Ransom starts with the autobiographical story of William Bronston, the activist physician whose early professional California training steels him with a deep moral, professional and cultural bond to the huge 6000 person disabled population he encounters incarcerated in Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, NY, on whose behalf he daily battles to humanize and ultimately catalyze a Federal Class Action Lawsuit against the state to close the deathmaking institution. Prior to the expose of Willowbrook, no small individualized community living arrangements existed across New York state in lieu of 30 massive state institutions. Medicaid funded, these institutions warehoused the 'different' population imposed on their stricken families. Having been closed to admission by public scandal and impossible overcrowding, families were blackmailed to have their dependent member submit to secret viral research whose impact was completely unknown, where rampant disease, gruesome sanitation, lack of adequate food, clothing, carloads of tranquilizing medicine and the most minimal care and supervision was the brutal norm. Ultimately, concerned parents, caring workers, top child development leaders in the field, local and national media were organized to expose and address the bureaucratic evil and ubiquitous violence that dominated the wretched lives inside. This passionate book documents the immense drama, and story arc, of the public mobilization, media expose and Federal judicial process Bronston helped arouse, that forged the path to what ultimately becomes the legal conviction for this systemic human abuse and Justice Ruth Ginsburg's subsequent, monumental Supreme Court Olmstead Decision that framed the rightful foundation for nationwide deinstitutional reform. Dr. Bronston draws the clear line to indict the self serving State bureaucracy and the strategic rationale to end Title 19 of the Social Security Act, the Medicaid system, in order to heal the deep societal wound that the nursing home and assisted living industry, the segregated norm, that compels our universal commoditized and paradigmatic terminus. The human rights movement in America has transformed the lives of all people with special needs as new politics, technology and a profound awareness of the dehumanization of this vast community reached a zenith in the late 1960s and 1970s. It leads to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act that emancipated the devalued and stigmatized populations of labeled people including Mental Retardation, Cerebral palsy, Autism, Epilepsy, Polio, sensory loss, neuromuscular degenerative conditions, on and on, "public hostages", who now age to become society's elders consigned again to profit driven, segregated and congregate institutional lives, funded by Medicaid's billions, America's "public ransom". _ us an artificially created domestic refugee population, torn from every community and devastating America's families has become an accepted paradigm that Dr. Bronston's story intimately charts and passionately indicts. Universal expanded and improved Medicare for all, single payer health care, is the clear solution and ultimate antidote to this crime against humanity we numbly tolerate.
Page Publishing, Incorporated 2021 384 pages

The faith of biology & the biology of faith: order, meaning, and free will in modern medical science

Pollack, Robert
Are there parallels between the "moment of insight" in science and the emergence of the "unknowable" in religious faith? Where does scientific insight come from? Award-winning biologist Robert Pollack argues that an alliance between religious faith and science is not necessarily an argument in favor of irrationality: the two can inform each other's visions of the world. Pollack begins by reflecting on the large questions of meaning and purpose--and the difficulty of finding either in the orderly world described by the data of science. He considers the obligation to find meaning and purpose despite natural selection's claim to be a complete explanation of our presence as a species--a claim that calls upon neither natural intention, nor design, nor Designer. Next, the book focuses on matters of free will, from the choice of a scientist to accept evidence, to the choice of a religious person to accept a revelation, to a patient's loss of free will in medical treatment. Here Pollack addresses questions of ethics and offers a provocative comparison of two difficult texts whose contents remain incompletely understood: the DNA "text" of the human genome and the Hebrew record of Jewish written and oral law. In closing, Pollack considers the promise of genetic medicine in enabling us to glimpse our own future and offers a reconsideration of the possible utility of the so-called placebo effect in curing illness. Whether refuting a DNA-based biological model of Judaism or discussing the Darwinian concept of the species, Pollack, under the banner of free inquiry, presents a genuine, vital, and well-argued assay of the intersection of science and religion.
Columbia University Press 2000 125 pages

1668: the year of the animal in France

Sahlins, Peter
When animals and their symbolic representations—in the Royal Menagerie, in art, in medicine, in philosophy—helped transform the French state and culture. Peter Sahlins's brilliant new book reveals the remarkable and understudied “animal moment” in and around 1668 in which authors (including La Fontaine, whose Fables appeared in that year), anatomists, painters, sculptors, and especially the young Louis XIV turned their attention to nonhuman beings. At the center of the Year of the Animal was the Royal Menagerie in the gardens of Versailles, dominated by exotic and graceful birds. In the unfolding of his original and sophisticated argument, Sahlins shows how the animal bodies of the menagerie and others were critical to a dramatic rethinking of governance, nature, and the human. The animals of 1668 helped to shift an entire worldview in France—what Sahlins calls Renaissance humanimalism toward more modern expressions of classical naturalism and mechanism. In the wake of 1668 came the debasement of animals and the strengthening of human animality, including in Descartes's animal-machine, highly contested during the Year of the Animal. At the same time, Louis XIV and his intellectual servants used the animals of Versailles to develop and then to transform the symbolic language of French absolutism. Louis XIV came to adopt a model of sovereignty after 1668 in which his absolute authority is represented in manifold ways with the bodies of animals and justified by the bestial nature of his human subjects. 1668 explores and reproduces the king's animal collections—in printed text, weaving, poetry, and engraving, all seen from a unique interdisciplinary perspective. Sahlins brings the animals of 1668 together and to life as he observes them critically in their native habitats—within the animal palace itself by Louis Le Vau, the paintings and tapestries of Charles Le Brun, the garden installations of André Le Nôtre, the literary work of Charles Perrault and the natural history of his brother Claude, the poetry of Madeleine de Scudéry, the philosophy of René Descartes, the engravings of Sébastien Leclerc, the transfusion experiments of Jean Denis, and others. The author joins the nonhuman and human agents of 1668—panthers and painters, swans and scientists, weasels and weavers—in a learned and sophisticated treatment that will engage scholars and students of early modern France and Europe and readers broadly interested in the subject of animals in human history.
Zone Books 2017-10-13 491 pages

Parallel lines

Lantos, Peter L.
Memoirs of Lantos, born to the Leipniker family in 1939 in Makó, Hungary. In 1944, after his older brother was taken away, the rest of the family was sent to the ghetto of Szeged, but the Jews there were soon deported. He and his parents were first sent to Strasshof in Austria for a short time, then to Wiener Neustadt and to Bergen-Belsen, where his father died. He and his mother were then sent on a death transport, during which they were liberated by American soldiers. They returned to Hungary and found that his brother had perished. Lantos later studied medicine in England, and in 1969 decided to remain there.
Arcadia Books 2006 246 pages

Finding order in nature: the naturalist tradition from Linnaeus to E.O. Wilson

Farber, Paul Lawrence
Since emerging as a discipline in the middle of the eighteenth century, natural history has been at the heart of the life sciences. It gave rise to the major organizing theory of life--evolution--and continues to be a vital science with impressive practical value. Central to advanced work in ecology, agriculture, medicine, and environmental science, natural history also attracts enormous popular interest. In Finding Order in Nature Paul Farber traces the development of the naturalist tradition since the Enlightenment and considers its relationship to other research areas in the life sciences. Written for the general reader and student alike, the volume explores the adventures of early naturalists, the ideas that lay behind classification systems, the development of museums and zoos, and the range of motives that led collectors to collect. Farber also explores the importance of sociocultural contexts, institutional settings, and government funding in the story of this durable discipline. "The quest for insight into the order of nature leads naturalists beyond classification to the creation of general theories that explain the living world. Those naturalists who focus on the order of nature inquire about the ecological relationships among organisms and also among organisms and their surrounding environments. They ask fundamental questions of evolution, about how change actually occurs over short and long periods of time. Many naturalists are drawn, consequently, to deeper philosophical and ethical issues: What is the extent of our ability to understand nature? And, understanding nature, will we be able to preserve it? Naturalists question the meaning of the order they discover and ponder our moral responsibility for it." -- from the Introduction
Johns Hopkins University Press 2000 136 pages

New World New Mind

Robert Ornstein,Paul Ehrlich
Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich explain that we are causing our own problems because we have created a world where our basic mental functions are no longer suitable. We evolved over a period of millions of years to survive in small tribal families on the wild grassy plains of East Africa. Now the way we live has nothing to do with that time and place, but the mental tools that were developed to survive on the savanna have remained unchanged. These instincts were wonderfully adapted to the environment that shaped them. But that world, the world that made us, is gone. Now these same instincts are causing us to destroy the world that we made. The threats we face are of our own making, and we can unmake them. If people learn how we have come to this point, we can restore our hope for the future. New World New Mind describes the way our minds have evolved, and offers suggestions for how to cope with who we are in the world we live in now. Recent decades have seen remarkable progress in many areas. For example, despite the abject suffering of millions of people, it is nonetheless true that there has been unprecedented alleviation of poverty and disease for the world's poorest people. There are so many promising and astonishing advances in medicine, technology, and the social and physical sciences that if we give ourselves a chance to survive, our species could enter a golden age.
Malor Books 2020-09 320 pages

Ingenious pursuits: building the scientific revolution

Jardine, Lisa
In this fascinating look at the European scientific advances of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, historian Lisa Jardine demonstrates that the pursuit of knowledge occurs not in isolation, but rather in the lively interplay and frequently cutthroat competition between creative minds. The great thinkers of that extraordinary age, including Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, and Christopher Wren, are shown in the context in which they lived and worked. We learn of the correspondences they kept with their equally passionate colleagues and come to understand the unique collaborative climate that fostered virtuoso discoveries in the areas of medicine, astronomy, mathematics, biology, chemistry, botany, geography, and engineering. Ingenious Pursuits brilliantly chronicles the true intellectual revolution that continues to shape our very understanding of ourselves, and of the world around us.
Nan A. Talese 1999 444 pages

Take A Number Mathematics For The Two Billion

Lillian Rosanoff Lieber
Take A Number: Mathematics For The Two Billion is a book written by Lillian Rosanoff Lieber that explores the importance of mathematics in our daily lives. The book focuses on the idea that mathematics is not just a subject to be studied in school, but a fundamental tool that everyone needs to navigate the world around them. Lieber argues that there are two billion people in the world who lack basic mathematical skills, and this has serious consequences for their ability to make informed decisions, manage their finances, and participate fully in society. She uses real-life examples to illustrate how math is used in everything from cooking and shopping to medicine and engineering.The book is divided into three sections. The first section provides an overview of the importance of mathematics and its role in our lives. The second section focuses on basic mathematical concepts, such as fractions, decimals, and percentages, and how they are used in everyday situations. The third section delves into more advanced topics, such as algebra, geometry, and calculus, and their applications in fields like science and technology.Throughout the book, Lieber emphasizes the importance of understanding math and encourages readers to develop their skills through practice and exploration. She also provides tips and strategies for overcoming math anxiety and building confidence in one's abilities.Overall, Take A Number: Mathematics For The Two Billion is a compelling and informative book that highlights the critical role of mathematics in our lives and the need for everyone to have basic math skills.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.
Literary Licensing, LLC 2012-05 230 pages