Download or read book To See with a Better Eye written by Jacalyn Duffin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: René Théophile Hyacinthe Laennec (1781-1826) is best known for his invention of the stethoscope, one of medicine's most powerful symbols. Histories, novels, and films have cloaked his life in hagiography and legend. Jacalyn Duffin's fascinating new biography relies on a vastly expanded foundation of primary source material, including thousands of pages of handwritten patient records, lecture notes, unpublished essays, and letters. She situates Laennec, the scientist and teacher, within the broader social and intellectual currents of post-Revolutionary France. Her work uncovers a complex character who participated actively in the dramatic changes of his time. Laennec's famous Treatise on Mediate Auscultation was his only published book, but two lesser known works were left in manuscript: an early treatise on pathological anatomy and a later set of lectures on disease. The three parts of Duffin's biography correspond to these books. First, she examines Laennec's student research on the emerging science of pathological anatomy, the background for his major achievement. Second, she uses his clinical records to trace the discovery and development of "mediate auscultation" (listening through an instrument, or mediator, to sounds within the human body). The stethoscope allowed clinicians to "see" the organic alterations inside their living patients' bodies. Finally, she explores the impact of auscultation on diagnostic practice and on concepts of disease. Analyzed here for the first time in their entirety, Laennec's Collége de France lectures reveal his criticism of over-enthusiastic extrapolations of his own method at the expense of the patient's story. Originally published in 1998. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Locating Medical History written by Frank Huisman and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2006-10-31 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "With diverse constitutions, a multiplicity of approaches, styles, and aims is both expected and desired. This volume locates medical history within itself and within larger historiographic trends, providing a springboard for discussions about what the history of medicine should be, and what aims it should serve."--Jacket
Download or read book Professionalizing Medicine written by John M. Harris Jr. and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2019-03-28 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This biography of James Edmund Reeves, whose legislative accomplishments cemented American physicians' control of the medical marketplace, illuminates landmarks of American health care: the troubled introduction of clinical epidemiology and development of botanic medicine and homeopathy, the Civil War's stimulation of sanitary science and hospital medicine, the rise of government involvement, the revolution in laboratory medicine, and the explosive growth of phony cures. It recounts the human side of medicine as well, including the management of untreatable diseases and the complex politics of medical practice and professional organizing. Reeves' life provides a reminder that while politics, economics, and science drive the societal trajectory of modern health care, moral decisions often determine its path.
Download or read book A Traffic of Dead Bodies written by Michael Sappol and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Traffic of Dead Bodies enters the sphere of bodysnatching medical students, dissection-room pranks, and anatomical fantasy. It shows how nineteenth-century American physicians used anatomy to develop a vital professional identity, while claiming authority over the living and the dead. It also introduces the middle-class women and men, working people, unorthodox healers, cultural radicals, entrepreneurs, and health reformers who resisted and exploited anatomy to articulate their own social identities and visions. The nineteenth century saw the rise of the American medical profession: a proliferation of practitioners, journals, organizations, sects, and schools. Anatomy lay at the heart of the medical curriculum, allowing American medicine to invest itself with the authority of European science. Anatomists crossed the boundary between life and death, cut into the body, reduced it to its parts, framed it with moral commentary, and represented it theatrically, visually, and textually. Only initiates of the dissecting room could claim the privileged healing status that came with direct knowledge of the body. But anatomy depended on confiscation of the dead--mainly the plundered bodies of African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, and the poor. As black markets in cadavers flourished, so did a cultural obsession with anatomy, an obsession that gave rise to clashes over the legal, social, and moral status of the dead. Ministers praised or denounced anatomy from the pulpit; rioters sacked medical schools; and legislatures passed or repealed laws permitting medical schools to take the bodies of the destitute. Dissection narratives and representations of the anatomical body circulated in new places: schools, dime museums, popular lectures, minstrel shows, and sensationalist novels. Michael Sappol resurrects this world of graverobbers and anatomical healers, discerning new ligatures among race and gender relations, funerary practices, the formation of the middle-class, and medical professionalization. In the process, he offers an engrossing and surprisingly rich cultural history of nineteenth-century America.
Download or read book When Good Drugs Go Bad written by Dan Malleck and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2015-07-15 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the 1800s, opium and cocaine could be easily obtained to treat a range of ailments in Canada. Dependency, when it occurred, was considered a matter of personal vice. Near the end of the century, attitudes shifted and access to drugs became more restricted. How did this happen? Dan Malleck examines the conditions that led to Canada’s current drug laws. Drawing on newspaper accounts, medical and pharmacy journals, professional association files, asylum documents, physicians’ case books, and pharmacy records, Malleck demonstrates how a number of social, economic, and cultural forces converged in the early 1900s to influence lawmakers and criminalize addiction. His research exposes how social concerns about drug addiction had less to do with the long pipe and shadowy den than with lobbying by medical professionals, a growing pharmaceutical industry, and concern about the morality and future of the nation.
Download or read book Writing the Pulse written by Sandra W. Moss MA MD and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2018-03-26 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sphygmograph was one of the promising instruments of precision that captured the imagination of mid- and late-nineteenth-century physicians eager to plumb the secrets of the circulatory system. Literally a pulse writer, the sphygmograph allowed physicians to study a permanent record (sphygmogram) of the contours and rhythms of the pulse wave. The early masters of the sphygmograph were hopeful that images of the pulse at the wrist could reveal much about the action of the heart and major blood vessels that would prove useful in research and practice. Although the sphygmograph proved to be a frustrating instrument and its pulse recordings confusing, it prepared early twentieth-century physicians to embrace more reliable technologies, such as the sphygmomanometer (blood pressure cuff) and the electrocardiograph. This book traces the European invention, development, and application of the sphygmograph before turning to a detailed study of the novel instruments and clinical investigations of three heretofore unremarked American sphygmograph men and the role of the sphygmograph in American medical practice, most notably in the hands of Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi. A final chapter examines the pervasive problems of the sphygmograph in the context of recent literature on apparent failures of technology.
Download or read book The Western Medical Tradition written by W. F. Bynum and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-03-20 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, first published in 2006, is an authoritative description of the important changes in Western medicine over the past two centuries.
Download or read book The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography written by Thomas Söderqvist and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biographies of scientists carry an increasingly prominent role in today's publishing climate. Traditional historical and sociological accounts of science are complemented by narratives that emphasize the importance of the scientific subject in the production of science. Not least is the realization that the role of science in culture is much more accessible when presented through the lives of its practitioners. Taken as a genre, such biographies play an important role in the public understanding of science. In recent years there has been an increasing number of monographs and collections about biography in general and literary biography in particular. However, biographies of scientists, engineers and medical doctors have rarely been the topic of scholarly inquiry. As such this volume of essays will be welcomed by those interested in the genre of science biography, and who wish to re-examine its history, foundational problems and theoretical implications. Borrowing approaches and methods from cultural studies and the history, philosophy and sociology of science, the contributions cover a broad range of subjects, periods and locations. By presenting such a rich diversity of essays, the volume is able to chart the reoccurring conceptual problems and devices that have influenced scientific biographies from classical antiquity to the present day. In so doing it provides a compelling overview of the history of the genre, suggesting that the different valuations given scientific biography over time have been largely fuelled by vested professional interests.
Download or read book Spitting Blood written by Helen Bynum and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2012-11-22 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of tuberculosis is a rich and fascinating one. It is a complex and ancient disease that, after many years of virtual disappearance in the developed world, is now making something of a comeback. Helen Bynum tracks the historical development of the disease, and considers the challenges it presents to the modern world.
Download or read book From Anesthesia to X Rays written by Christiane Nockels Fabbri and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-11-28 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Easy to read and to use, this A-to-Z mini-encyclopedia covers the most important medical innovations of the last 200 years. Medical innovation is an extremely important topic—and one to which relatively little study has been devoted. This volume is designed to introduce readers to the history and development of key advances in the science and practice of medicine. It explores issues in medical history and provides perspective on contemporary scientific research and innovation. It also provides a backdrop against which to evaluate current headlines, such as the discoveries of live samples of smallpox virus in an unused storage room at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and incidents of bubonic plague in China and Colorado. Although the entries in this single-volume resource describe how each innovation works, this is not intended as a technical text. Instead, the focus is on the context in which each innovation was developed and on its lasting importance in the field of medicine. Through these fascinating accounts, readers will be able to trace the evolution and legacy of key innovations and to see how other sectors of society—such as industry and the military—have affected and been affected by advances in the field of medicine.
Download or read book Making Medicine Scientific written by Terrie M. Romano and published by Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM. This book was released on 2003-04-30 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of the English physician and scientist and a history of the advancement of science in the Victorian era. In Victorian Britain, scientific medicine encompassed an array of activities, from laboratory research and the use of medical technologies through the implementation of sanitary measures that drained canals and prevented the adulteration of milk and bread. Although most practitioners supported scientific medicine, controversies arose over where decisions should be made, in the laboratory or in the clinic, and by whom—medical practitioners or research scientists. In this study, Terrie Romano uses the life and eclectic career of Sir John Burdon Sanderson (1829-1905) to explore the Victorian campaign to make medicine scientific. Sanderson, a prototypical Victorian, began his professional work as a medical practitioner and Medical Officer of Health in London, then became a pathologist and physiologist and eventually the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford. His career illustrates the widespread support during this era for a medicine based on science. In Making Medicine Scientific, Romano argues this support was fueled by the optimism characteristic of the Victorian age, when the application of scientific methods to a range of social problems was expected to achieve progress. Dirt and disease as well as the material culture of experimentation —from frogs to photographs—represent the tangible context in which Sanderson lived and worked. Romano’s detailed portrayal reveals a fascinating figure who embodied the untidy nature of the Victorian age’s shift from an intellectual system rooted in religion to one based on science. “A useful entry in the canon of science and public health . . . an antidote to the hubris of recent claims of accomplishment.” —Choice
Download or read book Allergy written by Mark Jackson and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2007-08-15 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It attacks through foods, animals, and innumerable chemical combinations. It is among the most common and potentially lethal afflictions known. It is the allergy, the subject of Mark Jackson’s fascinating chronicle. Jacksoninvestigates how the allergy became the archetypal “disease of civilization,” as it transformed from a fringe malady of the wealthy into one of the greatest medical disorders of the twentieth century. Jackson also examines the social and economic impact of the allergy, as it catalyzed a new health-conscious culture and created the wealth of some of the largest companies in the world today. Whether cats, crabgrass, or cheese is the source of your daily misery, Jackson’s engaging and in-depth account is an invaluable addition to every bookshelf.
Download or read book The Routledge History of Disease written by Mark Jackson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-08-05 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge History of Disease draws on innovative scholarship in the history of medicine to explore the challenges involved in writing about health and disease throughout the past and across the globe, presenting a varied range of case studies and perspectives on the patterns, technologies and narratives of disease that can be identified in the past and that continue to influence our present. Organized thematically, chapters examine particular forms and conceptualizations of disease, covering subjects from leprosy in medieval Europe and cancer screening practices in twentieth-century USA to the ayurvedic tradition in ancient India and the pioneering studies of mental illness that took place in nineteenth-century Paris, as well as discussing the various sources and methods that can be used to understand the social and cultural contexts of disease. Chapter 24 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315543420.ch24
Download or read book Imperfect Pregnancies written by Ilana Löwy and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How has prenatal testing, once offered only for high-risk pregnancies, become standard medical care for pregnant women today? In the 1960s, thanks to the development of prenatal diagnosis, medicine found a new object of study: the living fetus. At first, prenatal testing was proposed only to women at a high risk of giving birth to an impaired child. But in the following decades, such testing has become routine. In Imperfect Pregnancies, Ilana Löwy argues that the generalization of prenatal diagnosis has radically changed the experience of pregnancy for tens of millions of women worldwide. Although most women are reassured that their future child is developing well, others face a stressful period of waiting for results, uncertain prognosis, and difficult decisions. Löwy follows the rise of biomedical technologies that made prenatal diagnosis possible and investigates the institutional, sociocultural, economic, legal, and political consequences of their widespread diffusion. Because prenatal diagnosis is linked to the contentious issue of selective termination of pregnancy for a fetal anomaly, debates on this topic have largely centered on the rejection of human imperfection and the notion that we are now perched on a slippery slope that will lead to new eugenics. Imperfect Pregnancies tells a more complicated story, emphasizing that there is no single standardized way to scrutinize the fetus, but there are a great number of historically conditioned and situated approaches. This book will interest students, scholars, health professionals, administrators, and activists interested in issues surrounding new medical technologies, screening, risk management, pregnancy, disability, and the history and social politics of women’s bodies.
Download or read book Incurable and Intolerable written by Jason Szabo and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-08 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Terminal illness and the pain and anguish it brings are experiences that have touched millions of people in the past and continue to shape our experience of the present. Hospital machines that artificially support life and monitor vital signs beg the question: Is there not anything that medical science can offer as solace? Incurable and Intolerable looks at the history of incurable illness from a variety of perspectives, including those of doctors, patients, families, religious counsel, and policy makers. This compellingly documented and well-written history illuminates the physical, emotional, social, and existential consequences of chronic disease and terminal illness, and offers an original look at the world of palliative medicine, politics, religion, and charity. Revealing the ways in which history can shed new light on contemporary thinking, Jason Szabo encourages a more careful scrutiny of today's attitudes, policies, and practices surrounding "imminent death" and its effects on society.
Download or read book 100 Notable Names from General Practice written by Neil Metcalfe and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2018-12-13 with total page 801 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating book presents 100 biographies of general practitioners, the majority of whom have made key contributions to the development of general practice and medicine, but also some who have influenced society through engineering, literature, music, politics, sport and other fields. Organised into four different time periods and with key themes in each, the reader will gain an insight into the background of these individuals and what led to their decision to enter the speciality, discover their successes and occasional failures, while also learning about significant events in the history of general practice, medical education, medical politics, medical research, the Royal College of General Practitioners and society as a whole. Key features: • Highly readable and visual introduction to the history of general practice • Includes 100 biographies of a variety of general practitioners from 1640 to the present day • Describes both successes and failures in the development of the specialty and how these have helped direct and shape current clinical practice • Key themes covered include academia and research, medical education, medical politics and society • Ideal for anyone wishing to gain a broader insight into the history of this important specialty, as well as those interested in medical biography Written in an accessible style, and illustrated throughout, the book is an invaluable guide for academics, doctors or students with a special interest in general practice, medical education, medical history or social history.
Download or read book Island Doctor written by David A. E. Shephard and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2003 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dr John Mackieson practised medicine in Prince Edward Island from 1821 to 1885. Island Doctor offers an intimate look at the work of this "ordinary" physician and a fascinating glimpse of medicine in the nineteenth century. Based on a study of two casebooks, which include Dr Mackieson records for 257 patients with a variety of illnesses seen from 1826 to 1858 and 115 patients with mental illness seen from 1868 to 1874, two manuscripts, and a diary, David Shephard illustrates the wide variety of representative cases in Dr Mackieson's career and situates his work in the context of medical practice at the time. The book will interest a variety of readers, including general historians, medical historians, social historians, historians with an interest in the Atlantic provinces, physicians, and academic libraries.
