In South Florida, the constant heat keeps old wounds from ever healing in corpses that are never found. Instead, the open wounds of the victims become infected and fester over time. The ensuing fever in the dead bodies that are never laid to rest causes the mind of the living to act irrationally, and the soul also becomes contaminated as a result. There are only two cures. One can be institutionalized in the Kreskie Institute, the largest mental health facility in the Southeastern United States, or they can seek revenge. Join the small band of individuals from the coastal city of Morninglory by the Beach and the newly constructed town of Harbour Village who reluctantly team together to find the truth. Their individual interests in discovering the truth is the only thing that stops them from tearing apart their new partnership. When you’re not sure you can even trust your own partner, how can you believe in coma patients committing murders, talking dogs, crooked politicians, ambitious law enforcement officials, messengers from God, and the high priestess of Harbour Village. At the Kreskie Institute, the only thing visible to the naked eye that separates the administration from the patients is the clothes that they wear. The best advice to visitors and employees to the Kreskie Institute is to dress well because it is much more difficult to tell the truth from a lie, and the nearest help is miles away through the swampland of the Spooky Isles. No one can hear you if you scream for help, and even if they could hear you, would they believe you?

Empty Beds explores the early era of change in Indian education ideology as it pertained to student health at Sherman Institute in Southern California between 1902 and 1922. Empty Beds is the first comprehensive study of Indian student health at a nonreservation boarding school. Keller's exciting and provocative new conclusions will inspire a wide range of scholarship in this hitherto bypassed field of inquiry.

The chaotic state of today's health care is the result of an explosion of effective medical technologies. Rising costs will continue to trouble U.S. health care in the coming decades, but new molecular strategies may eventually contain costs. As life expectancy is dramatically extended by molecular medicine, a growing population of the aged will bring new problems. In the next fifty years genetic intervention will shift the focus of medicine in the United States from repairing the ravages of disease to preventing the onset of disease. Understanding the role of genes in human health, says Dr. William B. Schwartz, is the driving force that will change the direction of medical care, and the age-old dream of life without disease may come close to realization by the middle of the next century. Medical care in 2050 will be vastly more effective, Schwartz maintains, and it may also be less expensive than the resource-intensive procedures such as coronary bypass surgery that medicine relies on today. Schwartz's alluring prospect of a medical utopia raises urgent questions, however. What are the scientific and public policy obstacles that must be overcome if such a goal is to become a reality? Restrictions on access imposed by managed care plans, the corporatization of charitable health care institutions, the increasing numbers of citizens without health insurance, the problems with malpractice insurance, and the threatened Medicare bankruptcy—all are the legacy of medicine's great progress in mastering the human body and society's inability to assimilate that mastery into existing economic, ethical, and legal structures. And if the average American life span is 130 years, a genuine possibility by 2050, what social and economic problems will result? Schwartz examines the forces that have brought us to the current health care state and shows how those same forces will exert themselves in the decades ahead. Focusing on the inextricable link between scientific progress and health policy, he encourages a careful examination of these two forces in order to determine the kind of medical utopia that awaits us. The decisions we make will affect not only our own care, but also the system of care we bequeath to our children. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1998.