Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2015 - Science & Technology — Biology — African and African American Studies

Medical sociologist Michael Rowe (Yale School of Medicine) uses multicolored threadsvalues and ethics, concepts and theories, stories and lessons, citizenship and mental healthto weave an intriguing tapestry.  He presents the citizenship model as an adaptable framework for those working within the mental health system.  The author begins the narrative with homeless outreach and concludes with genuine citizenship, as distinguished from community placement and abandonment.  Rowe challenges readers to look at the realities of the community integration process through the lens of those who have lived it.  The book is based on sound theory and empirical evidence.  Qualitative data provide background for the presentation of theory, and the author provides ample references throughout to link readers to related statistical methods and analytical procedures that support his conclusions.  A valuable resource for all mental health care providers, especially those practicing or preparing to practice in community settings.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

In this controversially titled work,psychiatrist/science historian Belkin (New York Univ. Langone Medical Center) offers a historical account of the committee from Harvard Medical School, chaired by Henry K. Beecher, that established the criteria for what is now known as whole brain death in the 1960s.  Whole brain death is widely used as a legal definition of death and replaced cardiac death as the standard.  This is the first historic account of the emergence of the criteria and is based on archival sources, including memos, committee notes, and drafts of the committee reports.  The author also uses interviews he conducted 20 years ago with committee members.  The book provides a critical examination of the work of this committee in the context of what was known about coma and consciousness at the time, as well as the assumptions about the nature of biological life that underpin the criteria for biological death.  Anyone interested in the intersection of values, technology, and science or the origin of bioethics will find great value in this book.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

Despite advances in medical technology, tuberculosis is again on the rise, largely due to the emergence of multi-drug resistant (MDR) TB and the neglected TB-HIV epidemic.  InDiscovering Tuberculosis, McMillen (history, Univ. of Virginia) gives a comprehensive history of tuberculosis from 1900 to the present, including misguided research efforts.  Measures in the mid-1900s targeted those who had high rates of TB, such as Native Americans and populations in East Africa and India rather than investigating the true underlying, predisposing factors, such as poverty.  The bacillus Calmette-Guérin vaccine offered some protection but was implemented without any long-term or efficacy studies.  When the vaccine had only limited success, health care professionals turned to antimicrobial agents, which led to drug resistance.  Once hailed as the answer to tuberculosis, directed observed therapy short course treatment regimens have proven they are not the universal panacea.  Great strides have been made in reducing MDR TB drug costs, which has led to increased access to treatment.  As the author concludes, the future of tuberculosis remains to be seen.  Highly recommended for microbiology and health care classes to generate discussions pertaining to antibiotic resistance, health care access and race, and drug costs.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.

InJonas Salk: A Life, Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs (emer., medicine, Stanford Univ.) draws together ten years of research to recount the odyssey of a flawed, enigmatic man dogged by a voracious press, public canonization, and a vexed personal life.  Salk was guided by the Hebrew injunctiontikkun olam (repair the world).  From relative obscurity, he bucked accepted vaccine wisdom to develop a killed virus vaccine that ended the 20th centurys brutal polio summers. Embroiled in vicious multilateral vaccine battles, negotiating fraught clinical trials, and locked out of the rarified community of academic virology, Salk was judged a second-rate scientist by his detractors.  In fact, he made significant forays into influenza and AIDS vaccines and multiple sclerosis immunology.  In the 1970s, he founded the Salk Institute to unite the two cultures of science and the humanities.  An inept administrator, Salk was banished by a cabal of institute scientists and supporters; a new regime saved his institute.  In later decades he fostered a near-mystical philosophy of metabiology, concerned with mankinds future and a "biology of the spirit."  Although Jacobs kaleidoscopic biography avoids hagiography, she concludes that Salk did repair at least a part of the world.Summing Up: Essential. All readership levels.

This comprehensive history of internship and residency, masterfully examined and analyzed by clinical professor/medical historian Ludmerer (Washington Univ., St. Louis), fills a long-standing gap in the history of American medicine.  With roots in the 19th-century apprenticeship system, postgraduate medical education evolved unevenly, with increasing regulation and oversight.  The author pays close attention to social and cultural contexts.  An important subtext is the fundamental tension between hospital service and physician education.  From the outset, brutal work schedules, inadequate supervision, and exploitation by hospitals defied satisfactory solutions.  Later chapters deal with the impact of the recent transformation of hospitals from refuges for the sick to complex corporations under fire from insurers.  The administrative imperative of rapid patient throughput created a siege mentality among residents struggling with increased patient loads, shortened hospitalizations, and decreased time for observation and reflection.  Long years of training, massive educational debt, and the desire for quality lifestyle added to the perennial burdens of sleep deprivation and burnout.  Recent mandates limiting work hours led to fragmentation of care, increased moonlighting, and resident dissatisfaction.  The final chapter offers tentative blueprints for preserving excellence in preparing the next generation of physicians.Summing Up: Essential. All academic, general, and professional health sciences collections.

More Than Hot, by Hamlin (Univ. of Notre Dame;Cholera, CH, Aug'10, 47-6899), is a valuable addition to the Johns Hopkins "Biographies of Disease" series, edited by distinguished historian of medicine Charles Rosenberg (Harvard), who provides a foreword for each publication in the series.  Fever, in contemporary medicine, is simply identified as an increase in temperature, a mere symptom of many diseases.  Before the 19th century, fever was a diagnosis.  It was associated with heightened sensory perception, a feeling of internal burning, and delirium.  Fevers were classified by their durations and patterns (short, intense, long and drawn out, etc.).  Hamlin explains that during the 19th century, symptoms associated with fever were classified into a series of febrile diseases by the emerging fields of bacteriology and pathology (e.g., typhoid fever, childbed/puerperal fever).  By the 20th century, further developments in medical technology (e.g., the thermometer) narrowed the definition of fever to its current categorization as a symptom.  Hamlin examines this fascinating biological and cultural history of fever over nine chapters, organized chronologically.  Extensive endnotes support the text.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All academic health sciences library collections.

This volume by Kaufman (Univ. of California, San Francisco) is a must read for all practitioners and people experiencing the end of life (EOL).  The National Institute of Aging funded the book, and the author takes a unique approach to the subject by describing how anthropology contributes to medicine in understanding health, illness, and healing.  She gives excellent accounts of what causes the multiple problems people experience when theyor someone in their familieshave a catastrophic illness, explaining how ethical, cultural, and political forces drive health care delivery in the US.  Because predictions indicate 20 percent of the population will turn 65 years old by 2050, dealing with individuals at EOL is a significant issue.  Kaufman does a good job discussing the four outside issues that impact medicine today: the biomedical research industry, which pours out expensive new treatments; the determination of what treatments will be ordered according to what insurance or Medicare will reimburse for; evidence supporting a treatments use, causing it to become standard care for all; and the ethical imperative that if something is standard, everyone should receive it.  Kaufman also provides several scenarios and an extensive bibliography.  This book should be required reading for every health care provider.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals/practitioners.

Adolf Meyer was named chief of the department of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University in 1908.  During his time at Johns Hopkins, he transformed custodial asylum medicine into a clinical science through the development of the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic, the first-ever clinic devoted to psychiatry.  In this fascinating study, Lamb (history and classical studies, McGill Univ.) examines Meyers efforts to establish psychiatry as a clinical science and subdiscipline of biology between the years 1892 and 1917, and she explores the meaning of psychobiology by examining how Meyer put it into practice at the Phipps Clinic.  The first historian to gain access to the clinic's rich archival collection, Lamb offers not a history of the center but rather a historical interpretation of Meyers early ideas and scientific/therapeutic practices.  In the first two chapters, Lamb describes Meyers biological theories of mind and his crusade to establish psychiatry as a clinical science, beginning in 1892.  The remaining chapters explore how Meyer practiced these clinical methods at Johns Hopkins in the clinic and classroom between 1913 and 1918.  This book is a medical historian's dream.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

If there is one thing people can be assured of, it is that perspectives on health care vary.  Is it a right or a privilege?  Can it be bought or sold?  Beginning with this latter concept of commodification, Reich (sociologist, Columbia Univ.) focuses on hospital care as it is organized and delivered in three separate institutions within the same medium-sized California community: "PubliCare," "HolyCare," and "GroupCare."  The work is, accordingly, divided into three parts, each with a chapter on the origins of the hospital, the inconsistencies (contradictions) in the hospitals conception of care, the organization of physician work, and the organization of the delivery of care within the hospital.  Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, Reich shapes a thoughtful account of how hospital care is differentiated and marketed in each context.  Moreover, the comparative analysis serves to illustrate the inherent problems and risks that accompany the different representations of hospital care.  The author's writing does suffer a bit from jargon, but the text is easy to read.  Eight pages each of chapter notes and references support the text.  This book is an important resource for academic audiences and professionals in the health disciplines as well as those in the social sciences.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.

Physician and historian Podolsky (Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard), author ofPneumonia before Antibiotics (CH, Nov'06, 44-1564), provides a detailed, outstanding account of antibiotic reform, well-researched and documented, with 100-plus pages of notes and a user-friendly index.  Archival photographs, articles, advertisements, cartoons, and other resources make up a rich backdrop to the antibiotic development, marketing, and regulatory narratives.  Five chapters, "The Origins of Antibiotic Reform," "Antibiotics and the Invocation of the Controlled Clinical Trial," "From Sigmamycin to Panalba: Antibiotics and the FDA," "'Rational' Therapeutics and the Limits to Delimitation," and "Responding to Antibiotic Resistance," highlight the most significant changes and reforms set in motion over the past six decades.  Regulation of the drug industry, adoption of legislative amendments ensuring clinical trials, and removal of "irrational" drugs (fixed-dose combination antibiotics) from the marketplace are the major themes woven throughout the chapters.  Podolsky's historical accounts challenge readers to be mindful of what continue to be serious concerns within the global public health systemantibiotic resistance; overuse, irrational prescribing, and availability of antibiotics; and tensions between therapeutic discovery and commercial enterprises.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals/practitioners.

This book tells the moving personal and professional stories of four great leaders of the birth control movement: public health reformer Margaret Sanger; reproductive biologist Gregory Pincus; wealthy philanthropist and MIT graduate Katharine Dexter McCormick; and beloved devout Catholic obstetrician/gynecologist John Rock.  These staunch crusaders were largely responsible for the idea, development, testing (in Worcester, MA and Puerto Rico), funding, legalization, and widespread acceptance of oral contraceptives.  Eig (formerly,Wall Street Journal), author of Opening Day (CH, Jul'08, 45-6233) andLuckiest Man (CH, Oct'05, 43-1012), weaves together fascinating details about their families, friends, and colleagues along with important events, restrictive laws, organizations like Planned Parenthood and the World Health Organization, and the pharmaceuticals industry.  The book also covers the strong influence of the Catholic Church, eugenics, and global overpopulation concerns as well as popular magazine articles and interesting characters like Hugh Hefner and Alfred Kinsey.  Although occasionally disjointed and repetitious, this account is very readable.  It is valuable for all audience levels due to its international and balanced perspective.  Well referenced and thoroughly footnoted and indexed; illustrated with black-and-white photographs.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.

Conis (history, Emory Univ.) describes the scope of this work as a social history of vaccination in the United States over the last half-century.  She presents a detailed, step-by-step historical account, beginning in the 1960s, based on an extensive literature review of all the events.  This includes social, economic, political, and commercial aspects as well as issues such as poverty, sex, government, drug companies, the womens movement, societys perception of disease, and more.  These all contributed to the still-current controversy over the safety and medical value of vaccination, which started with the introduction of the polio vaccine.  The subject matter is well organized in three parts and nine chapters, each covering a particular aspect in an unbiased, well-written style.  Coniss expertise and comprehension of the subject are evident.  General readers may find the magnitude and detail in the presentation overwhelming, but the work is valuable to anyone with a singular interest in the topic.  A 64-page notes section and a 10-page bibliography support the text.Summing Up: Highly recommended. History of medicine and health sciences collections serving upper-division undergraduates through professional/practitioners and informed general audiences.