Showing 1-50 of 86 items.
Persisting Pandemics
Syphilis, AIDS, and COVID
Rutgers University Press
Syphilis, AIDS, and COVID disprove any belief that scientific discoveries have ended the period of acute epidemic diseases that once defined 19th century life and replaced them with chronic cardiovascular diseases and cancers. Today, we cope with a greater array of epidemics than those who lived during the 19th century, even though we have the biomedical means to control them. Our cumulative experience with epidemic diseases, together with our attempts to eliminate them, remains a continued component of our existence.
The Sounds of Furious Living
Everyday Unorthodoxies in an Era of AIDS
Rutgers University Press
The Sounds of Furious Living seeks to understand the AIDS activist tradition, identifying the historical currents out of which it arose. Embracing a patient-centered, social historical lens, it traces historic shifts in popular understanding of health and perceptions of biomedicine through the 19th and 20th centuries to explain the lasting appeal of unorthodox health activism into the modern era. In asking how unorthodox health activism flourished during the 20th century’s last major pandemic, Kelly also seeks to inform our understanding of resistance to biomedical authority in the setting of the 21st century’s first major pandemic: COVID-19. As a deeply researched portrait of distrust and disenchantment, The Sounds of Furious Living helps explain the persistence of movements that challenge biomedicine’s authority well into a century marked by biomedical innovation, while simultaneously posing important questions regarding the meaning and metrics of patient empowerment in clinical practice.
Bishops and Bodies
Reproductive Care in American Catholic Hospitals
By Lori Freedman; Foreword by Debra Stulberg
Rutgers University Press
Four out of the ten largest U.S. health care systems follow the policies of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that forbid abortion, sterilization, and related treatments in their hospitals. Drawing on rich interviews with patients and providers, Bishops and Bodies shows how these opaque restrictions conflict with medical standards, producing unjust and unequal reproductive care.
Mammography Wars
Analyzing Attention in Cultural and Medical Disputes
Rutgers University Press
Mammography is a routine health screening performed 40 million times each year in the United States, yet it remains one of the most deeply contested topics in medicine. In Mammography Wars, sociologist Asia Friedman uses the sociology of attention to map the cognitive structure of the “mammography wars.”
Dying Green
A Journey through End-of-Life Medicine in Search of Sustainable Health Care
Rutgers University Press
Dying Green considers the environmental costs of common healthcare practices, raising an urgent question: in striving to improve the health outcomes of individual patients, are we damaging human health on a global scale? Offering a comparative analysis of the care provided to terminally ill patients in different settings, it envisions a more sustainable approach to healthcare.
Abortion Care as Moral Work
Ethical Considerations of Maternal and Fetal Bodies
Edited by Johanna Schoen
Rutgers University Press
This anthology brings together the voices of abortion providers, counselors, clinic owners, neonatologists, bioethicists, and historians. Authors address the motivations that lead them to offer abortion care, discuss how anti-abortion regulations have made it increasingly difficult to offer feminist-inspired services, and ponder the ethical frameworks supporting abortion care and fetal research.
Importing Care, Faithful Service
Filipino and Indian American Nurses at a Veterans Hospital
Rutgers University Press
Drawing on rich ethnographic and survey data collected over a four-year period, Cherry’s study explores the role Catholicism plays in shaping the professional and community lives of foreign-born Filipino and Indian American nurses. Their stories provide unique insights into the often-unseen roles race, religion, and gender play in the daily lives of new immigrants employed in American healthcare. Seeing nursing as a religious calling, they care for their patients with a sense of divine purpose but must also confront the cultural tensions and disconnects between how they were raised and trained in another country and the legal separation of church and state. How they cope with and engage these tensions plays an important role in not only shaping how they see themselves as Catholic nurses, but their place in the new American story.
Embodied Politics
Indigenous Migrant Activism, Cultural Competency, and Health Promotion in California
Rutgers University Press
Arguing for a structurally competent approach to migrant health, Embodied Politics shows how efforts to promote indigenous health may actually reinforce the same social and political economic forces, namely structural racism and neoliberalism, that are undermining the health of indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico and the United States.
Carrying On
Another School of Thought on Pregnancy and Health
Rutgers University Press
Unlike traditional pregnancy guidebooks that offer recommendations, Carrying On investigates prenatal health norms by exploring the origin stories for issues at the center of pregnancy, ranging from morning sickness and weight gain to ultrasounds and induction. In a world of information overload, Carrying On helps expecting parents make sense of the overwhelming amount of counsel by shedding light on where it all came from: how and why did such confusing and contradictory guidance on pregnancy come to exist?
Pink and Blue
Gender, Culture, and the Health of Children
Rutgers University Press
In modern pediatric practice, gender matters. This volume seeks to understand the dialectical relationship between gender and the medical care of children by combining a historical perspective on gender and pediatrics with analyses of current debates and controversies in pediatric practice such as pediatric transgender medicine, HPV, neonatal intensive care, and more.
From Residency to Retirement
Physicians' Careers over a Professional Lifetime
Rutgers University Press
From Residency to Retirement tells the stories of twenty American doctors over the last half century, which saw a period of continuous, turbulent, and transformative changes to the U.S. health care system. The cohort’s experiences are reflective of the generation of physicians who came of age as Presidents Carter and Reagan began to focus on costs and benefits of health services.
Bodies Unbound
Gender-Specific Cancer and Biolegitimacy
By Piper Sledge
Rutgers University Press
Bodies Unbound is a story about the relationship between bodies and gender. Drawing on the experiences of individuals whose bodies and gender identities don't match medical and social expectations, Piper Sledge explores how ideologies of gendered bodies shape medical care when medical professionals use their position of authority to dictate which combinations of bodies and genders are legitimate or not.
Nursing the Nation
Building the Nurse Labor Force
Rutgers University Press
Nursing the Nation explores how nurses became employees of hospital and care agencies rather than independent, individual contractors. It also demonstrates how nurses missed opportunities to control their own destinies in practice, but gained the ability to establish themselves as the most critical part of health care today.
An Organ of Murder
Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America
Rutgers University Press
An Organ of Murder explores the origins of both popular and elite theories of criminality in the nineteenth-century United States. This work traces the long-lasting influence of phrenological visual culture and language in America, as well as the practical uses of phrenology in courts, prisons, and daily life.
False Dawn
The Rise and Decline of Public Health Nursing
Rutgers University Press
Since its initial publication in 1989 by Garland Publishing, Karen Buhler Wilkerson’s False Dawn: The Rise and Decline of Public Health Nursing remains the definitive work on the creation, work, successes, and failures of public health nursing in the United States.
Exhibiting Health
Public Health Displays in the Progressive Era
Rutgers University Press
This book is an analysis of the logic of production--and where possible the consumption--of visual displays for popular public health education between 1900 and 1930. It examines the power and limits of using visual displays to support public health initiatives.
The Love Surgeon
A Story of Trust, Harm, and the Limits of Medical Regulation
Rutgers University Press
From the 1950s to 1980s, Ohio obstetrician gynecologist James Burt performed a bizarre procedure that he termed “love surgery” on hundreds of new mothers, not bothering to get their informed consent. The Love Surgeon asks tough questions about Burt’s heinous acts and what they reveal about the failures of the medical establishment.
Talking Therapy
Knowledge and Power in American Psychiatric Nursing
By Kylie Smith
Rutgers University Press
Talking Therapy traces the rise of modern psychiatric nursing in the United States from the 1930s to the 1970s. Through an analysis of the relationship between nurses and other mental health professions, with an emphasis on nursing scholarship, this book highlights the role of nurses in challenging, and complying with, modern approaches to psychiatry.
Pyrrhic Progress
The History of Antibiotics in Anglo-American Food Production
Rutgers University Press
Mass-introduced after 1945, antibiotics helped revolutionize post-war agriculture, but food producers soon became dependent on routine antibiotic use to sustain and increase production. Pyrrhic Progress analyses over half a century of antibiotic use, regulation, and resistance in US and British food production.
Healthcare and Human Dignity
Law Matters
Rutgers University Press
The biases that permeate the American healthcare system are nearly invisible; invisible to all but those they handicap. In Healthcare and Human Dignity, law professor Frank McClellan recounts the experiences of some such individuals and highlights the importance of establishing a healthcare system that prioritizes human dignity.
Medicine over Mind
Mental Health Practice in the Biomedical Era
Rutgers University Press
In an era in which the medicalization of mental health troubles and treatment has been settled for several decades, little is known about how this biomedical framework affects practitioners’ experiences. This book explores how practitioners make sense of a field that has shifted rapidly in just a few decades.
Toxic Exposures
Mustard Gas and the Health Consequences of World War II in the United States
Rutgers University Press
Toxic Exposures tells the shocking story of how the United States and its allies intentionally subjected thousands of their own servicemen to mustard gas as part of their preparation for chemical warfare. Drawing from once-classified government records, military reports, scientists’ papers, and veterans’ testimony, Susan L. Smith assesses the poisonous legacies of these experiments, including scientific racism and environmental degradation. In addition, she reveals their surprising impact on the origins of chemotherapy as cancer treatment and the development of veterans’ rights movements.
When the Air Became Important
A Social History of the New England and Lancashire Textile Industries
Rutgers University Press
Janet Greenlees examines the working environments of the heartlands of the British and American cotton textile industries from the nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. She contends that the air quality within these pioneering workplaces was a key contributor to the health of the wider communities of which they were a part.
Lost
Miscarriage in Nineteenth-Century America
Rutgers University Press
In Lost, medical historian Shannon Withycombe weaves together women’s personal writings and doctors’ publications from the 1820s through the 1910s to investigate the transformative changes in how Americans conceptualized pregnancy, understood miscarriage, and interpreted fetal tissue over the course of the nineteenth century. What emerges from Withycombe’s work is unlike most medicalization narratives.
Prelude to Hospice
Florence Wald, Dying People, and their Families
Rutgers University Press
Award-winning medical historian Emily K. Abel provides insight into several important issues surrounding the growth of hospice care, including the relationships between doctors and patients at a time when a growing number of patients began to feel emboldened to challenge medical authority, demanding information about diagnosis and treatment and participation in decision-making.
Children and Drug Safety
Balancing Risk and Protection in Twentieth-Century America
Rutgers University Press
This book traces the development, use, and marketing of drugs for children in the twentieth century. It illuminates the historical dimension of a clinical and policy issue with great contemporary significance—many of the drugs administered to children today have never been tested for safety and efficacy in the pediatric population.
Rest Uneasy
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in Twentieth-Century America
Rutgers University Press
Rest Uneasy investigates the processes by which SIDS became both a discrete medical enigma and a source of social anxiety construed differently over time and according to varying perspectives. Brittany Cowgill chronicles and assesses Americans’ fraught but consequential efforts to explain and conquer SIDS.
Lady Lushes
Gender, Alcoholism, and Medicine in Modern America
Rutgers University Press
In Lady Lushes, medical historian Michelle L. McClellan traces the story of the female alcoholic from the late-nineteenth through the twentieth century. She draws on a range of sources—including medical literature, archival materials, popular media, and autobiographical writings of alcoholic women—to demonstrate the persistence of the belief that alcohol use is antithetical to an idealized feminine role.
Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat
The Origins of School Lunch in the United States
Rutgers University Press
Historian A. R. Ruis explores the origins of American school meal initiatives to explain why it has been so difficult to establish meal programs that satisfy the often competing interests of children, parents, schools, health authorities, politicians, and the food industry.
Frederick Novy and the Development of Bacteriology in Medicine
Rutgers University Press
Medical historian, medical researcher, and clinician Powel H. Kazanjian uses Novy’s archived letters, laboratory notebooks, lecture notes, and published works to examine medical research and educational activities at the University of Michigan and other key medical schools during a formative period in modern U.S. medical science.
Nursing with a Message
Public Health Demonstration Projects in New York City
Rutgers University Press
Nursing with a Message transports readers to New York City in the 1920s and 1930s, charting the rise and fall of two community health centers. Patricia D’Antonio examines the day-to-day operations of these clinics, as well as the community outreach work done by nurses who visited schools, churches, and homes. Assessing both the successes and failures of these public health projects, she also traces their legacy in shaping both the best and worst elements of today’s primary care system.
Communities of Health Care Justice
Rutgers University Press
U.S. health care has often been conceived as a social good, and more specifically as a national good. Communities of Health Care Justice presents an alternate model, making a powerful ethical argument for why smaller communities—bound together by culture, religion, gender, race, and place—should be regarded as critical moral actors that play key roles in defining and upholding just health policy. Furthermore, it outlines the systemic, conceptual, and structural changes required to move toward this health care justice.
Selling Science
Polio and the Promise of Gamma Globulin
Rutgers University Press
In Selling Science, medical historian Stephen E. Mawdsley recounts the untold story of the first large clinical trial to control polio, using 55,000 healthy children. The value of the proposed experiment was questioned by many prominent health professionals, but as Mawdsley points out, compromise and coercion moved it forward. He shows that at a time when most Americans trusted scientists, their mutual encounter under the auspices of conquering disease was shaped by politics, marketing, and at times, deception.
Transplanting Care
Shifting Commitments in Health and Care in the United States
Rutgers University Press
Transplanting Care examines the daily lives of midwestern organ transplant patients and their caregivers, from pretransplant preparations through to the long posttransplant recovery. Drawing on scores of interviews with patients, relatives, and healthcare professionals, Laura L. Heinemann follows a variety of patients and loved ones as they undertake this difficult “transplant journey” while coping with a paucity of resources for caregiving.
Privacy and the Past
Research, Law, Archives, Ethics
Rutgers University Press
In Privacy and the Past, medical historian Susan C. Lawrence explores the impact of research ethics and increasing privacy concerns on the study of history, offering insight into what historians should do when they research, write about, and name real people in their work. Engagingly written and powerfully argued, this book is an important first step in preventing privacy regulations from affecting the historical record and the ways that historians help us understand ourselves.
American Catholic Hospitals
A Century of Changing Markets and Missions
Rutgers University Press
In American Catholic Hospitals, Barbra Mann Wall chronicles changes in Catholic hospitals during the twentieth century. Wall explores the Church's struggle to safeguard its religious values. As hospital leaders reacted to increased political, economic, and societal secularization, they extended their religious principles in the areas of universal health care and adherence to the Ethical and Religious Values in Catholic Hospitals, leading to tensions between the Church, government, and society. Wall undertakes unprecedented analyses of the gendered politics of post-Second Vatican Council Catholic hospitals, as well as the effect of social movements on the practice of medicine.
Smoking Privileges
Psychiatry, the Mentally Ill, and the Tobacco Industry in America
Rutgers University Press
The mentally ill may represent as much as half of the smokers in America. In a groundbreaking look at this little-known public health problem, Smoking Privileges offers an insightful historical account of the intersection of smoking and mental illness, placing this issue in the context of changes in psychiatry, in the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries, and in the experience of mental illness over the last century.
Managing Madness in the Community
The Challenge of Contemporary Mental Health Care
Rutgers University Press
The mentally ill might not go to Shutter Island or the Cuckoo’s Nest, but that doesn’t mean they’re getting the best care they can. With extensive, unique ethnographic research at two community-based organizations that provide the bulk of such care, Managing Madness in the Community lays bare the true nature, effects, and costs of our fragmented mental health system and provides a useful broad framework that will help researchers and policymakers understand the key forces influencing the system today.
American Melancholy
Constructions of Depression in the Twentieth Century
Rutgers University Press
In American Melancholy, Laura D. Hirshbein traces the growth of depression as an object of medical study and as a consumer commodity and illustrates how and why depression came to be such a huge medical, social, and cultural phenomenon. This is the first book to address gender issues in the construction of depression, explores key questions of how its diagnosis was developed, how it has been used, and how we should question its application in American society.
War and Disease
Biomedical Research on Malaria in the Twentieth Century
By Leo Slater
Rutgers University Press
Malaria is one of the leading killers in the world today. Though drugs against malaria have a long history, attempts to develop novel therapeutics spanned the twentieth century and continue today. In this historical study, Leo B. Slater shows the roots and branches of an enormous drug development project during World War II
A massive undertaking, the antimalarial program was to biomedical research what the Manhattan Project was to the physical sciences.
A volume in the Critical Issues in Health and Medicine series, edited by Rima D. Apple and Janet Golden.
Saving Sickly Children
The Tuberculosis Preventorium in American Life, 1909-1970
Rutgers University Press
Known as "The Great Killer" and "The White Plague," few diseases influenced American life as much as tuberculosis. Sufferers migrated to mountain or desert climates believed to ameliorate symptoms. Architects designed homes with sleeping porches and verandas so sufferers could spend time in the open air. The disease even developed its own consumer culture complete with invalid beds, spittoons, sputum collection devices, and disinfectants. The "preventorium," an institution designed to protect children from the ravages of the disease, emerged in this era of Progressive ideals in public health. In this book, Cynthia A. Connolly provides a provocative analysis of public health and family welfare through the lens of the tuberculosis preventorium.
Tainted Earth
Smelters, Public Health, and the Environment
Rutgers University Press
Thoroughly grounded in extensive archival research, Tainted Earth traces the rise of public health concerns about nonferrous smelting in the western United States, focusing on three major facilities: Tacoma, Washington; El Paso, Texas; and Bunker Hill, Idaho. It documents the response from community residents, public health scientists, the industry, and the government to pollution from smelters and the long road to protecting public health and the environment.
Tainted Earth
Smelters, Public Health, and the Environment
Rutgers University Press
Thoroughly grounded in extensive archival research, Tainted Earth traces the rise of public health concerns about nonferrous smelting in the western United States, focusing on three major facilities: Tacoma, Washington; El Paso, Texas; and Bunker Hill, Idaho. It documents the response from community residents, public health scientists, the industry, and the government to pollution from smelters and the long road to protecting public health and the environment.
The Business of Private Medical Practice
Doctors, Specialization, and Urban Change in Philadelphia, 1900-1940
Rutgers University Press
Health care is more expensive in the United States than in other wealthy nations, and access varies significantly across space and social classes. In this case study, James A. Schafer Jr. uses the city of Philadelphia in the early twentieth-century to show that these problems reflect the informal organization of health care in a free market system in which profit and demand, rather than social welfare and public health needs, direct the distribution and cost of crucial resources.
Classrooms and Clinics
Urban Schools and the Protection and Promotion of Child Health, 1870-1930
Rutgers University Press
Classrooms and Clinics is the first book-length assessment of the development of public school health policies from the late nineteenth century through the early years of the Great Depression. Richard A. Meckel examines the efforts of early twentieth-century child health care advocates and reformers to utilize urban schools to deliver health care services to socioeconomically disadvantaged and medically underserved children in the primary grades to improve children’s health and thereby improve their academic performance.
Broadcasting Birth Control
Mass Media and Family Planning
By Manon Parry
Rutgers University Press
Traditionally, the history of the birth control movement has been told through the accounts of the leaders, organizations, and legislation that shaped the campaign. Historians have recently begun examining the cultural work of printed media, including newspapers, magazines, and novels in fostering support for the cause. This book builds upon this new scholarship on the women’s reproductive health movement to explore the films and radio and television broadcasts developed by twentieth-century birth control advocates to promote family planning in the U.S. and internationally.
![Mapping "Race"](/assets/a8a5680/9780813561363-343215-315x440.jpg "Mapping "Race"")
Mapping "Race"
Critical Approaches to Health Disparities Research
Rutgers University Press
The essays in this unique book argue for the inclusion of race as a social construction in the design of large-scale data collection efforts and how scientists must utilize race in the context of specific research questions. This landmark collection concludes on a prescriptive note, providing an arsenal of multidisciplinary, conceptual, and methodological tools for studying race specifically within the context of health inequalities.
![Mapping "Race"](/assets/a8a5680/9780813561370-343230-315x440.jpg "Mapping "Race"")
Mapping "Race"
Critical Approaches to Health Disparities Research
Rutgers University Press
The essays in this unique book argue for the inclusion of race as a social construction in the design of large-scale data collection efforts and how scientists must utilize race in the context of specific research questions. This landmark collection concludes on a prescriptive note, providing an arsenal of multidisciplinary, conceptual, and methodological tools for studying race specifically within the context of health inequalities.
Comrades in Health
U.S. Health Internationalists, Abroad and at Home
Rutgers University Press
This collection brings together a group of professionals and activists whose lives have been dedicated to health internationalism. By presenting a combination of historical accounts and first-hand reflections, these essays aim to draw attention to the longstanding international activities of the health left and the lessons they brought home. The involvement of these progressive U.S. health professionals is presented against the background of foreign and domestic policy, social movements, and global politics.
Structural Intimacies
Sexual Stories in the Black AIDS Epidemic
Rutgers University Press
Structural Intimacies brings together scholarship on the structural dimensions of the AIDS epidemic and the social construction of sexuality to address the continuing HIV epidemic in the Black population, It asserts that shifting forms of sexual stories, structural intimacies, are emerging and presents a compelling argument: in an era of deepening medicalization of HIV/AIDS, public health must move beyond individual-level interventions to community-level health equity frames and policy changes.
Stay Informed
Subscribe nowRecent News