Healing Society: Disease, Medicine, and History – serie

A History of Infectious Diseases and the Microbial World offers readers answers to specific questions, as well as the challenge of a narrative that will stimulate their curiosity and encourage them to ask questions about the theory, practice, and assumptions of modern medicine.This work provides a broad introductory overview of the history of major infectious diseases, including their impact on different populations, the recognition of specific causative agents, and the development of methods used to prevent, control, and treat them. By stressing the major themes in the history of disease, this book allows readers to relate modern concerns to historical materials. It places modern developments concerning infectious diseases within their historical context, illuminating the relationships between patterns of disease and social, cultural, political, and economic factors. Upon completing this volume, readers will be prepared to answer contemporary questions concerning the threat of newly-emerging infectious diseases, potentially devastating pandemics, and the threat of bioterrorism. One will gain a precise understanding of the nature of different kinds of pathogens, the unique mechanisms behind disease transmission, and the means used to control, prevent, and treat infectious disease. Although only a few of these deadly illnesses can be addressed in detail, those that are discussed include: malaria, leprosy, bubonic plague, tuberculosis, syphilis, diphtheria, cholera, yellow fever, poliomyelitis, HIV/AIDS, and influenza.

A History of Infectious Diseases and the Microbial World offers readers answers to specific questions, as well as the challenge of a narrative that will stimulate their curiosity and encourage them to ask questions about the theory, practice, and assumptions of modern medicine.This work provides a broad introductory overview of the history of major infectious diseases, including their impact on different populations, the recognition of specific causative agents, and the development of methods used to prevent, control, and treat them. By stressing the major themes in the history of disease, this book allows readers to relate modern concerns to historical materials. It places modern developments concerning infectious diseases within their historical context, illuminating the relationships between patterns of disease and social, cultural, political, and economic factors. Upon completing this volume, readers will be prepared to answer contemporary questions concerning the threat of newly-emerging infectious diseases, potentially devastating pandemics, and the threat of bioterrorism. One will gain a precise understanding of the nature of different kinds of pathogens, the unique mechanisms behind disease transmission, and the means used to control, prevent, and treat infectious disease. Although only a few of these deadly illnesses can be addressed in detail, those that are discussed include: malaria, leprosy, bubonic plague, tuberculosis, syphilis, diphtheria, cholera, yellow fever, poliomyelitis, HIV/AIDS, and influenza.

While we now recognize that MS is a common neurological disease, as late as the early twentieth century it was considered a relatively rare condition in Europe and the United States. It was only in the late 1860s that MS came to be generally recognized as a distinct disease apart from other paraplegic maladies. One of the important historical questions about MS is whether it was a new disease of the nineteenth century or one that had simply gone unrecognized for a long time. Answering this question is complicated by the different frames or ways physicians understood and explained disease in previous centuries. The way we now conceive, categorize, and explain disease is a relatively recent formulation in the long view of medical history.This work aims to answer some of the fundamental questions of the history of MS. How and why did MS emerge when and where it did, first in a book of pathological anatomy in early nineteenth-century France, then as a distinct disease category in France by 1868? How and why did the perception of MS as a rare disease in the early twentieth century change so that by the middle of that century it was considered a common affliction of the nervous system? How did local conditions shape research on MS? Why did MS emerge as a popular crusade and research priority, rather suddenly, in the late 1940s and early 1950s? How has the experience of people with MS changed from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries? Since there was no consensus about the merits of any treatment until very recently, how does one explain the sometimes aggressive treatment of disease from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century? This book focuses in part on how sociocultural factors allowed MS to emerge into medical awareness and later popular consciousness and how the different scientific and sociocultural frames of disease affected the experience of people with MS. These factors were important in particular ways because of the peculiar disease process of MS, especially its tendency to wax and wane in many patients and in clinical symptoms.

This narrative history of one of the most far-reaching social movements in the 20th century shows how it defied the law and made the use of contraception an acceptable social practice—and a necessary component of modern healthcare.A History of the Birth Control Movement in America tells the extraordinary story of a group of reformers dedicated to making contraception legal, accessible, and acceptable. The engrossing tale details how Margaret Sanger's campaign beginning in 1914 to challenge anti-obscenity laws criminalizing the distribution of contraceptive information grew into one of the most far-reaching social reform movements in American history. The book opens with a discussion of the history of birth control methods and the criminalization of contraception and abortion in the 19th century. Its core, however, is an exciting narrative of the campaign in the 20th century, vividly recalling the arrests and indictments, banned publications, imprisonments, confiscations, clinic raids, mass meetings, and courtroom dramas that publicized the cause across the nation. Attention is paid to the movement's thorny alliances with medicine and eugenics and especially to its success in precipitating a profound shift in sexual attitudes that turned the use of contraception into an acceptable social and medical practice. Finally, the birth control movement is linked to court-won privacy protections and the present-day movement for reproductive rights.

This timely volume illustrates how and why the fight against quackery in modern America has largely failed, laying the blame on an unlikely confluence of scientific advances, regulatory reforms, changes in the medical profession, and the politics of consumption.Throughout the 20th century, anti-quackery crusaders investigated, exposed, and attempted to regulate allegedly fraudulent therapeutic approaches to health and healing under the banner of consumer protection and a commitment to medical science. Quack Medicine: A History of Combating Health Fraud in Twentieth-Century America reveals how efforts to establish an exact border between quackery and legitimate therapeutic practices and medications have largely failed, and details the reasons for this failure.Digging beneath the surface, the book uncovers the history of allegedly fraudulent therapies including pain medications, obesity and asthma cures, gastrointestinal remedies, virility treatments, and panaceas for diseases such as arthritis, asthma, diabetes, and HIV/AIDS. It shows how efforts to combat alleged medical quackery have been connected to broader debates among medical professionals, scientists, legislators, businesses, and consumers, and it exposes the competing professional, economic, and political priorities that have encouraged the drawing of arbitrary, vaguely defined boundaries between good medicine and "quack medicine."

This timely volume illustrates how and why the fight against quackery in modern America has largely failed, laying the blame on an unlikely confluence of scientific advances, regulatory reforms, changes in the medical profession, and the politics of consumption.Throughout the 20th century, anti-quackery crusaders investigated, exposed, and attempted to regulate allegedly fraudulent therapeutic approaches to health and healing under the banner of consumer protection and a commitment to medical science. Quack Medicine: A History of Combating Health Fraud in Twentieth-Century America reveals how efforts to establish an exact border between quackery and legitimate therapeutic practices and medications have largely failed, and details the reasons for this failure.Digging beneath the surface, the book uncovers the history of allegedly fraudulent therapies including pain medications, obesity and asthma cures, gastrointestinal remedies, virility treatments, and panaceas for diseases such as arthritis, asthma, diabetes, and HIV/AIDS. It shows how efforts to combat alleged medical quackery have been connected to broader debates among medical professionals, scientists, legislators, businesses, and consumers, and it exposes the competing professional, economic, and political priorities that have encouraged the drawing of arbitrary, vaguely defined boundaries between good medicine and "quack medicine."

Without Samuel J. Crumbine and his Kansas Department of Health, diseases festering in water sources, food and the common towel would have caused thousands of deaths in the United States. Crumbine and his associates paved the way to better treatment of tuberculosis. This well-written account leads the reader down a path of crucial medical advancements.Samuel J. Crumbine was a medical educator without peer, who used his department of health to disseminate the latest developments he and others throughout the world were achieving in public health. He found it necessary to propagandize a skeptical and sometimes hostile public to accept the germ theory, the idea that invisible microbes were making them ill and that they should clean up their environment and their food and water sources. He had to convince the public to rely on modern medicine, not snake oil and other miracle cures for a healthy living. R. Alton Lee's historical account might offer insight in today's threat of Bird Flu and other recent medical threats for any reader.

This narrative history of one of the most far-reaching social movements in the 20th century shows how it defied the law and made the use of contraception an acceptable social practice—and a necessary component of modern healthcare.A History of the Birth Control Movement in America tells the extraordinary story of a group of reformers dedicated to making contraception legal, accessible, and acceptable. The engrossing tale details how Margaret Sanger's campaign beginning in 1914 to challenge anti-obscenity laws criminalizing the distribution of contraceptive information grew into one of the most far-reaching social reform movements in American history. The book opens with a discussion of the history of birth control methods and the criminalization of contraception and abortion in the 19th century. Its core, however, is an exciting narrative of the campaign in the 20th century, vividly recalling the arrests and indictments, banned publications, imprisonments, confiscations, clinic raids, mass meetings, and courtroom dramas that publicized the cause across the nation. Attention is paid to the movement's thorny alliances with medicine and eugenics and especially to its success in precipitating a profound shift in sexual attitudes that turned the use of contraception into an acceptable social and medical practice. Finally, the birth control movement is linked to court-won privacy protections and the present-day movement for reproductive rights.