The history of modern medicine is inseparable from the history of imperialism. Medicine and Empire provides an introduction to this shared history – spanning three centuries and covering British, French and Spanish imperial histories in Africa, Asia and America. Exploring the major developments in European medicine from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century, Pratik Chakrabarti shows that the major developments in European medicine had a colonial counterpart and were closely intertwined with European activities overseas: - The increasing influence of natural history on medicine - The growth of European drug markets - The rise of surgeons in status - Ideas of race and racism - Advancements in sanitation and public health - The expansion of the modern quarantine system - The emergence of Germ theory and global vaccination campaigns Drawing on recent scholarship and primary texts, this book narrates a mutually constitutive history in which medicine was both a 'tool' and a product of imperialism, and provides an original, accessible insight into the deep historical roots of the problems that plague global health today.

The recent financial meltdown has brought notable changes to the global practice of health care changes that have often escaped the American news media. Although Western managed-care corporations previously had strengthened their influence abroad, now many countries are considering new approaches to health care for their citizens.The untold story of how corporations have influenced global health care and the impacts now in America as the system rapidly shifts is Dr. Waitzkin s subject in his provocative new book. We now live in a new era in which the prospects for more humane approaches to health care are taking root. Strengthening access and improving public health are at the heart of the many previously little-noted struggles and actions by individuals, groups, and whole nations to put control back in the hands of patients and practitioners, as Americans of many political stripes seem to universally seek. The impacts of these changes in the United States are considerable, and they are amply illustrated by Dr. Waitzkin as the United States attempts to reorient its own system of care.Selected as the 2012 winner of the Freidson Outstanding Publication Award by the American Sociological Association for its "bold and timely analysis of the global political economy of contemporary crises in health and medical care. By presenting the lessons learned from social medicine (past and present), [it] outlines a macro-sociologically informed response to these crises.""

This collection of essays weaves together several themes related to the social history of health and medicine in colonial India. Its focus ranges from analysing Europe's relationship with India's indigenous medical systems, to case studies of two mental asylums(in Madras and Lucknow), the location of the leprosy asylum, the technological aspects and social implications of the colonial vaccination policy, and to colonial interventions related specifically to cholera and plague in the pilgrimage centres of puri and pandharpur. It also examine indigenous initiatives associated with the Indian drug industry and the Unani medical system and their interactions with the colonial health establishment and modern medicine. Besides charting out hiterto unexplored areas in the history and historiography of colonial medicine and its articulation with indigenous systems, this book demonstrates the rich possibilities of inter-disciplinary research. Of particular interest to the specialist reader, it is also useful to those working on modern India history, cultural studies and sociology.

There are four major dilemmas at work in the rapid decline of the United States' healthcare system: the disappearing primary care sector, healthcare insurance reform, the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on the practice of medicine, and reform of malpractice litigation. In this book, Dr. Robert A. Linden provides a comprehensive explanation of these dilemmas, from the perspective of a primary care physician who has spent 30 years working directly with patients and seeing first-hand how changes in the system have impacted patients and physicians. Dr. Linden sorts out the fragments of information that most readers get through the media and fills in the blanks to provide a clear picture of what's wrong with the U.S. healthcare system, an impartial review of proposed solutions, and a look at what other countries have done to reform their healthcare systems. Unlike many academician authors who have covered the problems only in part with skewed information, this book will finally help the healthcare consumer understand the problems facing us and form their own assessments of what should be done to restore the American healthcare system.

Examining the emerging figure of the woman doctor and her relationship to empire in Victorian culture, Narin Hassan traces both amateur and professional 'doctoring' by British women travelers in colonial India and the Middle East. Hassan sets the scene by offering examples from Victorian novels that reveal the rise of the woman doctor as a fictional trope. Similarly, medical advice manuals by Victorian doctors aimed at families traveling overseas emphasized how women should maintain and manage healthy bodies in colonial locales. For Lucie Duff Gordon, Isabel Burton, Anna Leonowens, among others, doctoring natives secured them access to their private lives and cultural traditions. Medical texts and travel guides produced by practicing women doctors like Mary Scharlieb illustrate the relationship between medical progress and colonialism. They also helped support women's medical education in Britain and the colonies of India and the Middle East. Colonial subjects themselves produced texts in response to colonial and medical reform, and Hassan shows that a number of "New" Indian women, including Krupabai Satthianadhan, participated actively in the public sphere through their involvement in health reform. In her epilogue, Hassan considers the continuing tradition of women's autobiographical narrative inspired by travel and medical knowledge, showing that in the twentieth- and twenty-first century memoirs of South Asian and Middle Eastern women doctors, the problem of the "Woman Question" as shaped by medical discourses endures.

Finalist, PEN Center USA Literary Awards, Research NonfictionRich in oil and strategically located between Russia and China, Kazakhstan is one of the most economically and geopolitically important of the so-called Newly Independent States that emerged after the USSR's collapse. Yet little is known in the West about the region's turbulent history under Soviet rule, particularly how the regime asserted colonial dominion over the Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities.Grappling directly with the issue of Soviet colonialism, Curative Powers offers an in-depth exploration of this dramatic, bloody, and transformative era in Kazakhstan's history. Paula Michaels reconstructs the Soviet government's use of medical and public health policies to change the society, politics, and culture of its outlying regions. At first glance the Soviets' drive to modernize medicine in Kazakhstan seems an altruistic effort to improve quality of life. Yet, as Michaels reveals, beneath the surface lies a story of power, legitimacy, and control. The Communist regime used biomedicine to reshape the function, self-perception, and practices of both doctors and patients, just as it did through education, the arts, the military, the family, and other institutions.Paying particular attention to the Kazakhs' ethnomedical customs, Soviet authorities designed public health initiatives to teach the local populace that their traditional medical practices were backward, even dangerous, and that they themselves were dirty and diseased. Through poster art, newsreels, public speeches, and other forms of propaganda, Communist authorities used the power of language to demonstrate Soviet might and undermine the power of local ethnomedical practitioners, while moving the region toward what the Soviet state defined as civilization and political enlightenment.As Michaels demonstrates, Kazakhs responded in unexpected ways to the institutionalization of this new pan-Soviet culture. Ethnomedical customs surreptitiously lived on, despite direct, sometimes violent, attacks by state authorities. While Communist officials hoped to exterminate all remnants of traditional healing practices, Michaels points to evidence that suggests the Kazakhs continued to rely on ethnomedicine even as they were utilizing the services of biomedical doctors, nurses, and midwives. The picture that ultimately emerges is much different from what the Soviets must have imagined. The disparate medical systems were not in open conflict, but instead both indigenous and alien practices worked side by side, becoming integrated into daily life.Combining colonial and postcolonial theory with intensive archival and ethnographic research, Curative Powers offers a detailed view of Soviet medical initiatives and their underlying political and social implications and impact on Kazakh society. Michaels also endeavors to link biomedical policies and practices to broader questions of pan-Soviet identity formation and colonial control in the non-Russian periphery.

Medicine in an age of Commerce and Empire explores the impact of commercial and imperial expansion on British medicine from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century.