Asylum medicine, a field encompassing medical forensic evaluations of asylum seekers, is an emerging discipline in healthcare. In a time of record global displacement due to human rights violations, conflict and persecution, interest in the medical and psychological evaluation of individuals subjected to torture and other ill-treatment is high. Health professionals are uniquely qualified to use their skills to make contributions to a group of vulnerable individuals fleeing danger and death in their home countries. Health professionals involved in asylum medicine perform medical and psychological forensic evaluations of asylum seekers. Their educational background prepares them to examine and describe physical and emotional scars related to trauma, and further training allows them to assess these scars in the context of persecution, describe them in a medical-legal affidavit and support these findings with testimony. Providers of asylum medicine are often involved in advocacy, as many governments become increasingly hostile to asylum seekers. Books on human rights exist, but there is no authoritative text of asylum medicine. This book presents a comprehensive overview of asylum medicine, with emphasis on the historical and legal background of asylum law, best practices for performing asylum examinations, challenges of examining detained asylum seekers, education of trainees and advocacy. Written by experts in the field, Asylum Medicine: A Clinician's Guide is a first of its kind resource for health care providers who practice asylum medicine.

The late-17th and 18th centuries represent a golden age in terms of the design and construction of hospitals in Britain and its US colonies. This account of this period of planning and construction considers both the architecture and function of the hospitals and public response to them.

Refugee health is growing as an academic medical discipline. More and more health care providers are coming together to exchange research information, educational curricula and social policies related to refugee health. The number of practitioners attending the annual North American Refugee Healthcare Conference has doubled since 2014. Refugees arrive in the United States from different parts of the world. Refugees undergo a medical screening soon after arrival, as recommended by the U.S. Department of State, and it is usually primary care practitioners who usually evaluate these patients at this first visit. Psychiatrists and other specialists may also evaluate them soon after arrival.Though physicians receive a variable amount of training in cross-cultural medicine, virtually none is in the area of refugee evaluations. There are several major ways that the field has changed. U.S. refugee policies and refugee admission numbers have changed dramatically in the past four years as has the epidemiology of medical conditions because the demographics of refugees have changed. The CDC guidelines for domestic screening have also been modified significantly as some of the screening tests are no longer recommended. Protocols have also been updated for presumptive treatment received by refugees before departure to the United States of other countries. A new chapter on end of life care for refugees has been added to the book. Now fully revised and expanded, this second edition reflects the many changes that have occurred in the field of refugee health since 2014. Refugee Health Care remains the definitive resource for primary care physicians and mental health practitioners who see and evaluate refugees. It is also relevant for medical, nursing and public health students involved with refugee health as well as resettlement agency workers and public health officials overseeing refugee care

Claire Edington's fascinating look at psychiatric care in French colonial Vietnam challenges our notion of the colonial asylum as a closed setting, run by experts with unchallenged authority, from which patients rarely left. She shows instead a society in which Vietnamese communities and families actively participated in psychiatric decision-making in ways that strengthened the power of the colonial state, even as they also forced French experts to engage with local understandings of, and practices around, insanity. Beyond the Asylum reveals how psychiatrists, colonial authorities, and the Vietnamese public debated both what it meant to be abnormal, as well as normal enough to return to social life, throughout the early twentieth century. Straddling the fields of colonial history, Southeast Asian studies and the history of medicine, Beyond the Asylum shifts our perspective from the institution itself to its relationship with the world beyond its walls. This world included not only psychiatrists and their patients, but also prosecutors and parents, neighbors and spirit mediums, as well as the police and local press. How each group interacted with the mentally ill, with each other, and sometimes in opposition to each other, helped decide the fate of those both in and outside the colonial asylum.

This book addresses the psychosocial and medical issues of forced migration due to war, major disasters and political as well as climate changes. The topics are discussed in the context of public health and linked to organizational, legal and practical strategies that can offer guidance to professionals, as well as governmental and non-governmental organizations. Both internal and international displacement present substantial challenges that require new solutions and integrated approaches. Issues covered include an overview of current health challenges in the new refugee crises: medicine and mental health in disaster areas, long-term displacement and mental health, integration of legal, medical, social and health economic issues, children and unaccompanied minors, ethical challenges in service provision, short and long-term issues in host countries, models of crises intervention, critical issues, such as suicide prevention, new basic and “minimal” intervention models adapted to limited resources in psychosocial and mental health care, rebuilding of health care in post-disaster/conflict countries, training and burn-out prevention. The book was developed in collaboration with the World Psychiatric Association, and is endorsed by Fabio Grandi (UN High Commissioner for Refugees), Manfred Nowak (former UN Special Rapporteur for Torture), and Jorge Aroche (President of IRCT).

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book explores how the body was investigated in the late nineteenth-century asylum in Britain. As more and more Victorian asylum doctors looked to the bodily fabric to reveal the ‘truth’ of mental disease, a whole host of techniques and technologies were brought to bear upon the patient's body. These practices encompassed the clinical and the pathological, from testing the patient's reflexes to dissecting the brain. Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum takes a unique approach to the topic, conducting a chapter-by-chapter dissection of the body. It considers how asylum doctors viewed and investigated the skin, muscles, bones, brain, and bodily fluids. The book demonstrates the importance of the body in nineteenth-century psychiatry as well as how the asylum functioned as a site of research, and will be of value to historians of psychiatry, the body, and scientific practice.

This collection of essays explores the development of the lunatic asylum, and the concept of confinement for those considered insane, in different national contexts over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Leading scholars in the field of medical history have contributed extensive primary research through individual case studies in the context of the legal, social, economic, and political situations of thirteen different countries. The book represents the first truly international history of the mental hospital, and is, therefore, a landmark comparative study in the history of medicine.