Medicine in the Meantime
Title | Medicine in the Meantime PDF eBook |
Author | Ramah McKay |
Publisher | Duke University Press |
Pages | 219 |
Release | 2017-12-21 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 0822372193 |
In Mozambique, where more than half of the national health care budget comes from foreign donors, NGOs and global health research projects have facilitated a dramatic expansion of medical services. At once temporary and unfolding over decades, these projects also enact deeply divergent understandings of what care means and who does it. In Medicine in the Meantime, Ramah McKay follows two medical projects in Mozambique through the day-to-day lives of patients and health care providers, showing how transnational medical resources and infrastructures give rise to diverse possibilities for work and care amid constraint. Paying careful attention to the specific postcolonial and postsocialist context of Mozambique, McKay considers how the presence of NGOs and the governing logics of the global health economy have transformed the relations—between and within bodies, medical technologies, friends, kin, and organizations—that care requires and how such transformations pose new challenges for ethnographic analysis and critique.
Medicine, Rationality and Experience
Title | Medicine, Rationality and Experience PDF eBook |
Author | Byron J. Good |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 268 |
Release | 1994 |
Genre | Medical |
ISBN | 9780521425766 |
Biomedicine is often thought to provide a scientific account of the human body and of illness. In this view, non-Western and folk medical systems are regarded as systems of 'belief' and subtly discounted. This is an impoverished perspective for understanding illness and healing across cultures, one that neglects many facets of Western medical practice and obscures its kinship with healing in other traditions. Drawing on his research in several American and Middle Eastern medical settings, in this 1993 book Professor Good develops a critical, anthropological account of medical knowledge and practice. He shows how physicians and healers enter and inhabit distinctive worlds of meaning and experience. He explores how stories or illness narratives are joined with bodily experience in shaping and responding to human suffering and argues that moral and aesthetic considerations are present in routine medical practice as in other forms of healing.
Rough Medicine
Title | Rough Medicine PDF eBook |
Author | Joan Druett |
Publisher | Psychology Press |
Pages | 292 |
Release | 2001 |
Genre | Medicine, Naval |
ISBN | 9780415924528 |
First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine
Title | The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine PDF eBook |
Author | James Le Fanu |
Publisher | Carroll & Graf Pub |
Pages | 426 |
Release | 2000 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780786707324 |
Argues that the pace of medical discoveries has slowed in the last twenty-five years due to excessive emphasis on the social and political aspects of health care, and to controversies caused by ethical issues.
The Making of Modern Medicine
Title | The Making of Modern Medicine PDF eBook |
Author | Michael Bliss |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Pages | 114 |
Release | 2011-01-15 |
Genre | Medical |
ISBN | 0226059030 |
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, we have become accustomed to medical breakthroughs and conditioned to assume that, regardless of illnesses, doctors almost certainly will be able to help—not just by diagnosing us and alleviating our pain, but by actually treating or even curing diseases, and significantly improving our lives. For most of human history, however, that was far from the case, as veteran medical historian Michael Bliss explains in The Making of Modern Medicine. Focusing on a few key moments in the transformation of medical care, Bliss reveals the way that new discoveries and new approaches led doctors and patients alike to discard fatalism and their traditional religious acceptance of suffering in favor of a new faith in health care and in the capacity of doctors to treat disease. He takes readers in his account to three turning points—a devastating smallpox outbreak in Montreal in 1885, the founding of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Medical School, and the discovery of insulin—and recounts the lives of three crucial figures—researcher Frederick Banting, surgeon Harvey Cushing, and physician William Osler—turning medical history into a fascinating story of dedication and discovery. Compact and compelling, this searching history vividly depicts and explains the emergence of modern medicine—and, in a provocative epilogue, outlines the paradoxes and confusions underlying our contemporary understanding of disease, death, and life itself.
Where They Need Me
Title | Where They Need Me PDF eBook |
Author | Pierre Minn |
Publisher | Cornell University Press |
Pages | 238 |
Release | 2022-09-15 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1501763873 |
Where They Need Me examines the work of Haitian health professionals in humanitarian aid encounters. Haiti is the target of an overwhelming number of internationally funded health projects. While religious institutions sponsor a number of these initiatives, many are implemented within the secular framework of global health. Pierre Minn illustrates the divergent criteria that actors involved in global health use to evaluate interventions' efficacy. Haitian physicians, nurses, and administrative staff are hired to carry out these global health programs, distribute or withhold resources, and produce accounts of interventions' outcomes. In their roles as intermediaries, Haitian clinicians are expected not only to embody the humanitarian projects of foreign funders and care for their impoverished patients but also to act as sources of support for their own kin networks, while negotiating their future prospects in a climate of pronounced scarcity and insecurity. In Where They Need Me, Minn argues that a serious consideration of these local health care providers in the context of global health is essential to counter simplistic depictions of clinicians and patients as heroes, villains, or victims as well as to move beyond the donor-recipient dyad that has dominated theoretical work on humanitarianism and the gift.
Race in a Bottle
Title | Race in a Bottle PDF eBook |
Author | Jonathan Kahn |
Publisher | Columbia University Press |
Pages | 330 |
Release | 2013 |
Genre | Medical |
ISBN | 0231162987 |
Approved by the FDA in 2005 as the first drug with a race-specific indication on its label, BiDil was touted as a pathbreaking therapy to treat heart failure in black patients. Kahn reveals that, at the most basic level, BiDil became racial through legal maneuvering and commercial pressure as much as through medical understandings of how the drug worked. He examines the legal and calls for a more reasoned approach to using race in biomedical research and practice.