Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2019 - Science & Technology — Engineering

Despite a wealth of books and articles dedicated to philosophical examinations of medicine and medical practice, there was, up to this point, no comprehensive introductory text for the philosophy of medicine. Care and Cure fills this gap by providing the first detailed overview of the field. In 14 chapters, Stegenga (Univ. of Cambridge) explores a series of epistemological, metaphysical, and political questions and topics covering issues as diverse as health, disease, objectivity, psychiatry, and public health, among others. Stegenga discusses the key aspects of each debate (incorporating historical and contemporary perspectives) while introducing the reader to a range of useful examples illustrating the central points. Additionally, the end of each section includes a brief but helpful set of recommended further readings as well as three to four discussion questions. Stegenga has written an incredibly clear and accessible text with a very intuitive structure. It will prove useful to anyone who teaches or studies philosophy of medicine, medical humanities, or bioethics.Summing Up: Essential. Undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

In science, as in life, many roads intersect, bringing together investigators and research resulting in unanticipated outcomes. Chasing Men on Fire initially focuses on medical researchers' quest to understand a rare disease that causes patients to feel pain in the absence of noxious stimuli, but soon their study transcends that original inquiry, connecting the dots with other areas of investigation taking place around the world. After an exhaustive search, Waxman (neuroscience, Yale Univ.) and his team found a mutated gene responsible for causing "Man on Fire Syndrome." But this is just the beginning of their story. Waxman's enticing narrative includes copies of the original published articles, presented in chronological order. Although the casual science enthusiast may find the book daunting at times, anyone with a background in scientific research will appreciate the Herculean effort that is required for groundbreaking scientific discoveries. This unflinching description of what it takes to pursue cutting-edge research is one of the book's greatest strengths. Importantly, Waxman reveals that the journey has not ended, and that scientists are that much closer to achieving the quest to find treatment for patients with retractable neurological disorders.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

Dopesick delves deeply into the opioid overdose death crisis currently menacing the US. Presently, opioid deaths exceed the numbers of AIDS/HIV casualties, and the epidemic shows no signs of abatement. Macy, a journalist, began studying the opioid crisis over two decades ago--before it spun out of control. Her analysis is wide-ranging: she interviews public health officials, nurses, doctors, law enforcement personnel, addiction medical specialists, addicts, those in recovery, and their families. Providing a macro level understanding, she systematically explores how Purdue Pharma aggressively marketed OxyContin painkilling capsules without any firm scientific foundation, resulting in sharply rising numbers of addicted users while economic obsolescence began to affect rural America. Dopesick also offers a powerful micro-level analysis as Macy established enduring associations with those impacted by the crisis, following subjects through their repeated recovery efforts, interviewing some even in prison, and seeing some succeed in renouncing their addictions while others relapsed or experienced fatal overdoses. This heart-wrenching narrative calls attention to the US government's failure to adequately address this burgeoning crisis. An important read for anyone seeking to better understand the opioid death epidemic.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

Medical Materialities is a collection of medial anthropology studies that examine materiality in medicine and healing. Medical materiality deals with the quality, safety, efficiency, or characteristics of such materials as inserted or attached medical devices, health care infrastructures, practices and methods, food and herbs, and similar objects or milieu that are used in supporting people's health. The chapters in the book cover ethnographic studies in various cultures or clinical settings. They explore situated human experiences of medical materials as well as the dialectic between materiality in medicine and healing and human physical and psychological adaptation. Additionally, the investigations of medical anthropology in the book address cultural understandings of medical materiality; these investigations provide nuanced understandings of relationships and links between people and objects in different cultural backgrounds and health care situations. This book serves to fill the gap between medical anthropology and material studies in medicine and makes the two subdisciplines mutually supportive fields. It is a must-have book in anthropology, medicine, and material studies.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

This important interdisciplinary work crosses national, cultural, linguistic, and disciplinary borders to make a positive contribution to the fields of history of medicine and biology, medical humanities, science studies, philosophy of science, and philology. Mirko Grmek (1924-2000), who was trained as a physician and knew more languages than he had fingers, is able to draw on a wide range of primary sources, including laboratory notebooks and unpublished papers of 19th-century physiologist Claude Bernard, among others. Belonging to a generation of scholars whose medical training was essential to the rightful practice of history of medicine, Grmek follows in the footsteps of other great medical historians such as Sigerist, Canguilhem, Ackerknecht, and Edelstein. Grmek casts a wide net from antiquity to the present, and his writing is timely and relevant in areas such as Slavic medicine, medical deontology, social medicine, surgery, physiology, disease concepts, gerontology, pathography, cell theory, Chinese sphygmology, medical geography, disease ecology, epistemology, and quantitative methods of biological sciences. Be it the medieval plagues, AIDS, or political issues such as war, genocide, and global pandemics of emerging infections, Grmek excels at showing the interconnection of diseases and societies.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates and above.

One hundred years after the influenza pandemic of 1918, scholars continue to assess the medical history, public health response, and social impact of the disease. Milne (Maynooth Univ., Belfast), however, is the first to publish a full-length treatise of the 1918 influenza in Ireland, examining the ways the illness politically affected Ireland's move toward independence; influenced public health decisions and delivery; and radically altered the lives of individual Irish people, still reeling under the trauma of the First World War. Based on Milne's 2009 doctoral dissertation, this text demonstrates an admirable and comprehensive understanding of previous work on the epidemic, including Alfred Crosby's benchmark study America's Forgotten Pandemic (2nd. ed., 2003); Niall Johnson's Britain and the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic (2006); and Jeffery Taubenberger's genetic research of the virus (included in the anthology The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918-19, edited by Howard Phillips and David Killingray, 2003). Milne also adeptly handles novel primary research, including a close study of contemporary Irish newspapers and oral history interviews with survivors and family members of victims.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

The Pandemic Century is a fascinating study of how various societies, international organizations, and scientists have responded to global disease threats. His study covers a broad swath of history including the Spanish flu, AIDS, and Zika. Honigsbaum (University College London) argues that human actions disturb ecological equilibriums and thus lead to the spreading of disease. Medical researchers and scientists, he contends, are so beholden to their assumptions that they often fail to successfully identify and devise strategies for dealing with newly discovered pathogens. The range of topics and the approach make this work ideal for students. The book's emphasis on the environmental and social causes of disease should engender lively classroom discussion. Honigsbaum argues that while great strides have been made in the ability to fight and contain disease, "we should recognize that this knowledge is constantly giving birth to new fears and anxieties." Honigsbaum concludes that "as the pandemic century draws to a close, we know better than to trust the pronouncements of experts." The book contains notes, but no bibliography. On the whole, it offers lively coverage of epidemic disease in the 20th century that should appeal to students and specialists alike.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All academic levels.

Of all of the books written in the last decade about special education policy reform, this represents the best of the best. Siegel, with a long, distinguished career working with children on the autism spectrum and their families, has authored the definitive book about where autism has been, where it is now, and where it should go in the future. Unlike many other texts of late that tend merely to lament over educational policies that do not work or throw rocks at the entire special education system in general, Siegel dissects those flawed policies and practices and offers numerous practical, commonsense remedies for those ills. She speaks to the illusions of special education "inclusion" as others have but goes further and writes "heretical" truisms about why the politics of inclusion and other politically correct educational practices do not work with children with autism and may be detrimental to the adult independence of these learners. The "Autism as a Growth Industry" section is particularly intriguing. Siegel focuses on truth; in her own words, "the truth in special education is a vulnerable commodity."Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.

This edited collection of essays examines the forms, meanings, and processes of contagion across modes and sites of transmission, historical periods, and methods of scholarly analysis. The 14 chapters are organized into four sections that illustrate interdisciplinary approaches to examining contagion. The "Quarantine/Exposure" chapters trace the history of inoculation and immunology, consider viral contagion as an evolutionary force, weigh individual civil liberties and public health concerns, and describe social contagion at the intersection of public fears and nuclear disasters. The "Flesh/Spirit" chapters explore the ways contagion has been coupled and decoupled from disease in literature, in drama and performances, and in the economic practices that gave structure to modern capitalism. In the "Madness/Reason" chapters, the authors propose that contagion underpins cultural beliefs and meanings pertaining to violence, deviance, criminality, individual psychopathy, and phallocentrism. Finally, the "Revolutionary/Bureaucracy" chapters transcend historical and geographic lines and examine the duality of contagion as a tool for resistance and as a means of suppression. This broadly referenced text is an excellent example of scholarship in the critical humanities and social science disciplines.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates and above.

The title of this book indicates the two related aspects that form its subject matter: autism and vaccinations, both of personal concern to the author, a pediatrician whose research centers on tropical pediatrics and vaccine development and the parent of a daughter, Rachel, now some 25 years old, autistic since birth. Descriptions of his daughter's autistic behavior reveal their overwhelming effect on him and his family, primarily reflecting the love of their daughter despite the consequent drastic changes in their family's life. His descriptions will be most informative to readers less familiar with the effects of autistic behavior. This compelling background serves as the basis for Hotez's strong scientific interest in debunking the still-somewhat popular belief that vaccinations should be avoided because they can lead to autism. He cites scientific studies revealing that in areas where these beliefs are prevalent, there exists a significant increase in the number of deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases. One of the book's most interesting insights is that although the first report that vaccinations can lead to autism has been thoroughly debunked, a popular belief in the opposite persists.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

The Veterans Health Administration (VA) stands as America's sole foray into socialized healthcare. Gordon, a journalist, sets out to determine if the arguments of conservative politicians and for-profit health companies are correct that the healthcare of our nation's veterans would be better served in the private sector. Her thoroughly researched conclusion: despite its negative media image, the VA surprisingly outshines the private sector in critical ways, the foremost being that as a public entity it is better equipped to place veterans' healthcare first without incentive, unlike privatized health agencies whose primary purpose is to turn a profit. Combining statistics and other data with personal anecdotes of veterans and employees, Gordon describes how the VA seamlessly integrates healthcare with mental health and social services. This approach has substantially reduced the number of homeless veterans, and led to innovative medical research, such as nicotine patches. This book offers a unique approach to an important topic and is an essential addition for institutions with programs in medicine and other health-affiliated fields (health administration, social work, etc.), public policy and administration, political science, or for any public library serving veteran and/or military populations.Summing Up: Essential. All levels.