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Healing with Poisons

Potent Medicines in Medieval China

By Yan Liu

Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295749013

At first glance, medicine and poison might seem to be opposites. But in China’s formative era of pharmacy (200–800 CE), poisons were strategically deployed as healing agents to cure everything from...

The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence

Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774-1874

By Robert T. Boyd

In the late 1700s when European colonizers arrived on the Northwest Coast, they reported the presence of vigorous, diverse cultures—Tlingit, Haida, Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl), Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka), Coast Salish, and Chinookan—with a population conservatively estimated at more...

The Organic Profit

Rodale and the Making of Marketplace Environmentalism

By Andrew N. Case. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Where did the curious idea of buying one’s way to sustainability come from? In no small part, the answer lies in the story of entrepreneurial health reformer J. I. Rodale, his son Robert Rodale, and...

Medicine and Memory in Tibet

Amchi Physicians in an Age of Reform

By Theresia Hofer

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295743004

Only fifty years ago, Tibetan medicine, now seen in China as a vibrant aspect of Tibetan culture, was considered a feudal vestige to be eliminated through government-led social transformation. Medicine and Memory...

A Family History of Illness

Memory as Medicine

By Brett L. Walker

While in the ICU with a near-fatal case of pneumonia, Brett Walker was asked, “Do you have a family history of illness?”—a standard and deceptively simple question that for Walker, a professional historian, took on...

High

Drugs, Desire, and a Nation of Users

By Ingrid Walker

Whether drinking Red Bull, relieving chronic pain with oxycodone, or experimenting with Ecstasy, Americans participate in a culture of self-medication, using psychoactive substances to enhance or manage our moods. A “drug-free America” seems to be...

Tracing Autism

Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and the Affective Labor of Neuroscience

By Des Fitzgerald

In Tracing Autism, Des Fitzgerald offers an up-close account of the search for a neurological explanation of autism. As autism has gained cultural prominence with more diagnoses and more controversy, its biological causes remain elusive.

Through...

Indian Blood

HIV and Colonial Trauma in San Francisco's Two-Spirit Community

By Andrew J. Jolivette

Finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary "Lammy" Award in LGBTQ Studies

The first book to examine the correlation between mixed-race identity and HIV/AIDS among Native American gay men and transgendered people, Indian Blood provides an analysis...

An Integrative Metaregression Framework for Descriptive Epidemiology

By Abraham D. Flaxman, Theo Vos, Christopher J.L. Murray

To provide the tools and knowledge needed in efforts to improve the health of the world’s populations, researchers collaborated on the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2010. The study produced comprehensive...

Resuscitate!

How Your Community Can Improve Survival from Sudden Cardiac Arrest

By Mickey S. Eisenberg, M.D.

Sudden cardiac arrest is the leading cause of death among adults, yet it need not be fatal. Though survival in most communities is very poor, a few communities achieve rates as high as 50%. Why...

The Clinic and Elsewhere

Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy

By Todd Meyers

Despite increasingly nuanced understandings of the neurobiology of addiction and a greater appreciation of the social and economic conditions that allow drug dependency to persist, there remain many unknowns regarding the individual experience of substance...

The Art of Healing Latinos

Firsthand Accounts from Physicians and Other Health Advocates

By David E. Cordova, Roberto Chiprut

The Art of Healing Latinos collects the wisdom of health professionals who have particular expertise in treating Latino patients. Their knowledge comes from many years of service in fields that range from pediatrics to geriatrics,...

Hope on the Hill

The First Century of Seattle Children's Hospital

By Walt Crowley and David W. Wilma

In the spring of 1898, a 5-year-old Seattle boy named Willis Clise suffered and eventually died of what was called “inflammatory rheumatism.” There was no treatment,and no doctor west of Philadelphia who specialized in childhood...

Health in the Marketplace

Professionalism, Therapeutic Desires, and Medical Commodification in Late-Victorian London

By Takahiro Ueyama

Much like consumers today, late-19th-century Londoners lived in a mass culture of commodified abundance and conspicuous consumption. Their consumer fetishism was fully represented by their avid pursuit of health-related services and medicinal goods--the market was...

Education and Knowledge in Thailand

The Quality Controversy

By Alain Mounier, Phasina Tangchuang

Recent changes in educational policy and approach are moving Thai education away from transmitting and producing knowledge and scholarship, and away from developing and honing individual abilities to think and learn, say the authors. This...

Cocktail

A Play about the Life and HIV Drug Development Work of Dr. Krisana Kraisintu

By Vince J. LiCata

Dr. Krisana Kraisintu was awarded the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay award for public service, Asia's equivalent to the Nobel Peace Prize, in July 2009.

Cocktail is a play about one woman's audacious crusade to fight the AIDS...

Inside the Nonprofit Boardroom

What You Need to Know for Satisfaction and Success

By Charles William Golding

Nonprofit activities are the next - and possibly the most interesting - focus of the Baby Boomer Era. The United States has an estimated two million charitable organizations and this handbook is for current and...

Merchants of Madness

The Methamphetamine Explosion in the Golden Triangle

By Bertil Lintner and Michael Black

For decades, Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle, where the borders of Thailand, Laos, and Burma intersect, has been infamous for its opium and heroin production. But in the 1990s, the drug gangs in the Golden Triangle...

Housing the Twentieth-Century Nation

There was no bigger issue in the twentieth century than housing. In peace or war, people need homes, and a growing population and demands for better standards put architects, planners and sociologists to work. In...

Buddhist Meditation in Stress Management

By Frits Koster

This book gives insight into the many aspects of stress, and shows how we can develop skillful ways to deal with stress and prevent burnout and other stress-related complaints. The author examines the various forms...