Henry of Grosmont, first Duke of Lancaster, cousin and friend of Edward III, was a soldier, statesman, and diplomat. His Book of Holy Medicines of 1354, an astonishing composition by a secular nobleman, is a classic of penitential thinking and intense spirituality that has never been available in a full translation. Catherine Batt's sensitive and profoundly informed translation into modern English brings to life the work's allegorical account of the wounds of sin and its meditative processes of healing. Her annotations and substantial introduction place the text within the political, literary, and discursive networks of later fourteenth-century England and its multilingual culture, and they open up important new literary connections in England and on the continent, where Lancaster spent much of his career. His Book is now accessible to modern English-speaking readers as a classic of medieval spirituality and lay writing alongside the works of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich.

Devotional texts in late medieval England were notable for their flamboyant piety and their preoccupation with the tortured body of Christ and the grief of the Virgin Mary. Generations of readers internalized and shaped the "cultures of piety" represented by these works. Anne Clark Bartlett and Thomas H. Bestul here gather seven examples of this literature, all written in the period 1350–1450, one in Anglo-Norman, the remainder in Middle English. (The volume includes an appendix containing the original texts of the latter six pieces.) The collection illustrates the polyglottal, conflicting, and often polemical nature of devotional culture in the Middle Ages. It provides a valuable context for and interesting counterpoint to the Canterbury Tales and other classic works of late medieval England. The introduction and the translators' headnotes discuss crucial aspects of the texts' histories and thematics, including the importance of the body in spiritual practices, the development of female patronage and of a wide audience for this literature, and the indivisibility of the political and the religious in medieval times.

If you believe that the latest blockbuster medication is worth a premium price over your generic brand, or that doctors have access to all the information they need about a drug’s safety and effectiveness each time they write a prescription, Dr. Jerry Avorn has some sobering news. Drawing on more than twenty-five years of patient care, teaching, and research at Harvard Medical School, he shares his firsthand experience of the wide gap in our knowledge of the effectiveness of one medication as compared to another. In Powerful Medicines, he reminds us that every pill we take represents a delicate compromise between the promise of healing, the risk of side effects, and an increasingly daunting price. The stakes on each front grow higher every year as new drugs with impressive power, worrisome side effects, and troubling costs are introduced. This is a comprehensive behind-the-scenes look at issues that affect everyone: our shortage of data comparing the worth of similar drugs for the same condition; alarming lapses in the detection of lethal side effects; the underuse of life-saving medications; lavish marketing campaigns that influence what doctors prescribe; and the resulting upward spiral of costs that places vital drugs beyond the reach of many Americans. In this engagingly written book, Dr. Avorn asks questions that will interest every consumer: How can a product judged safe by the Food and Drug Administration turn out to have unexpectedly lethal side effects? Why has the nation’s drug bill been growing at nearly 20 percent per year? How can physicians and patients pick the best medication in its class? How do doctors actually make their prescribing decisions, and why do those decisions sometimes go wrong? Why do so many Americans suffer preventable illnesses and deaths that proper drug use could have averted? How can the nation gain control over its escalating drug budget without resorting to rationing or draconian governmental controls? Using clinical case histories taken from his own work as a practitioner, researcher, and advocate, Dr. Avorn demonstrates the impressive power of the well-conceived prescription as well as the debacles that can result when medications are misused. He describes an innovative program that employs the pharmaceutical industry’s own marketing techniques to reduce use of some of the most overprescribed and overpriced products. Powerful Medicines offers timely and practical advice on how the nation can improve its drug-approval process, and how patients can work with doctors to make sure their prescriptions are safe, effective, and as affordable as possible. This is a passionate and provocative call for action as well as a compelling work of clear-headed science.

A complete study course in classical and cross-cultural shamanism, teaching the reader all s/he ever needs to know about shamanism, shamanic healing, soul retrieval, spirit extraction, house cleansing, cleaning the energy body, working with the souls of the dead – and much more.

In Our Right to Drugs, Szasz shows how the present drug war started at the beginning of this century, when the US government first assumed the task of protecting people from patent medicines. By the end of World War I the free market in drugs was but a dim memory. Instead of dwelling on the familiar impracticality and unfairness of drug laws, Szasz demonstrates the deleterious effects of prescription laws, which place people under lifelong medical supervision. The result is that most Americans today prefer a coercive and corrupt command drug economy to a free market in drugs.

Medicine of the Prophet is a combination of religious and medical information, providing advice and guidance on the two aims of medicine - the preservation and restoration of health - in careful conformity with the teachings of Islam as enshrined in the Qur'an and the hadith, or sayings of the Prophet. Written in the fourteenth century by the renowned theologian Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 751AH/1350AD) as part of his work Zad al-Ma'ad, this book is a mine of information on the customs and sayings of the Prophet, as well as on herbal and medical practices current at the time of the author. In bringing together these two aspects, Ibn Qayyim has produced a concise summary of how the Prophet's guidance and teaching can be followed, as well as how health, sickness and cures were viewed by Muslims in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The original Arabic text offers an authoritative compendium of Islamic medicine and still enjoys much popularity in the Muslim world. This English translation is a more complete presentation than has previously been available and includes verification of all hadith references. Medicine of the Prophet will appeal not only to those interested in alternative systems of health and medicine, but also to people wishing to acquaint themselves with, or increase their knowledge of, hadith and the religion and culture of Islam.