Showing results by publisher "Tantor Media" in History & Commentary

In telling the history of women in medicine, the pioneers are rightly remembered and celebrated in books, articles, memorials, awards, names of buildings, and organizations. In contrast, the generation who began the transition from minority status to the current numerical equity are seldom...

The Essence of Invention tells the story of medical inventors who have laid the foundation for modern patient care, from the development of anesthesia and safe surgery to the advent of vaccines against smallpox, polio, and COVID-19, and how, through creativity and persistence, they have changed the world.

Between 1927 and 1979, more than 8,000 people were involuntarily sterilized in five hospitals across the state of Virginia. From this plain and terrible fact springs Elizabeth Catte's Pure America, a sweeping, unsparing history of eugenics in Virginia, and by extension the United States.

Physicians for the People chronicles the remarkable stories of 241 Black doctors who practiced medicine in Alabama during the Jim Crow era. Historian Jack D. Ellis reveals the ingenuity and resilience of these trailblazing doctors who defied segregation by establishing hospitals and clinics and providing vital healthcare to underserved Black communities.

The 2014 Ebola epidemic demonstrated the power of pandemics and their ability not only to destroy lives locally but also to capture the imagination and terrify the world. In 2019 and the years that followed, the coronavirus pandemic infected every continent and took the lives of millions. In this updated edition, Christian W. McMillen provides a concise yet comprehensive account of pandemics throughout human history, illustrating how pandemic disease has shaped history and, at the same time, social behavior has influenced pandemic disease.

Bradwel reminds us that the centenary of this apparent "wonder drug" should be no cause for celebration. Insulin often remains inaccessible to those who need it most: elusive prescriptions, uneven availability and sky-high prices result in rationing and desperate do-it-yourself research and development. In the face of bootstraps rhetoric and "Pharma Bro" capitalists, patients across the world are left to fend for themselves. There is a long way to go in the twenty-first century until insulin truly fulfills the extraordinary promises made by its discovery.

At its core, American Disgust wrestles with how changing cultural notions of digestion-what goes into the body and what comes out of it-create and impose racial categories motivated by feelings of disgust rooted in American settler-colonial racism. It shows how disgust is a changing, yet fundamental, aspect of American subjectivity and that engaging with it-personally, politically, and theoretically-opens up possibilities for conceptualizing health at the individual, societal, and planetary levels.

In the 1970s, Dr. Alan Scott sought to selectively weaken eye muscles to treat strabismus (when one or both eyes are misaligned) without surgery. After failed attempts with other agents, Scott developed a method to stabilize the bacteria that causes botulism, culminating in a drug that eventually became known as Botox.

The Quaker City and its hospitals were pioneers in the field of mental health. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, its institutions were crowded and patients lived in shocking conditions. The mentally ill were quartered with the dangerously criminal. By 1906, the city had purchased a vast acreage of farmland incorporated into the city, and the Philadelphia Hospital dubbed its new venture Byberry City Farms. From the start, its history was riddled with corruption and committees, investigations and inquests, appropriations and abuse.

Most histories of wounded Civil War veterans construe them as feminized men whose manhood has suffered due to their inability to provide for and raise families or engage in business. Wounded for Life complicates this picture by examining how seven veterans—six soldiers and one physician—coped with their changed bodies in their postwar lives. Through these intimate stories, author Robert D. Hicks looks at the veteran's body as shaped by the trauma of the battlefield and hospital and the construction of a postwar identity in relation to that trauma.