During the twentieth century, lead poisoning killed thousands of workers and children in the United States. Thousands who survived lead poisoning were left physically crippled or were robbed of mental faculties and years of life. In Brush with Death, social historian Christian Warren offers the first comprehensive history of lead poisoning in the ......
The Cardiac Pacemaker, the Implantable Defibrillator, and American Health Care
Today hundreds of thousands of Americans carry pacemakers and implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) within their bodies. These battery-powered machines--small computers, in fact--deliver electricity to the heart to correct dangerous disorders of the heartbeat. But few doctors, patients, or scholars know the history of these devices or how ......
In this compact and illuminating history, Georges Minois examines how a culture's attitudes about suicide reflect its larger beliefs and values--attitudes toward life and death, duty and honor, pain and pleasure. Minois begins his survey with classical Greece and Rome, where suicide was acceptable--even heroic--under some circumstances. With the ......
Although the physicians and surgeons of eighteenth-century Germany have attracted previous scholarly inquiry, little is known about their day-to-day activities--and even less about the ways in which those activities fit into the economic, political, and social structures of the time. In this groundbreaking work, Mary Lindemann brings together the ......
In this first detailed history of the development of medical treatment and professionalization in the early U.S. Navy, Harold Langley traces the evolution of medical practice in the Navy from the time Congress authorized the building of the first frigates in 1794, to the establishment of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery in the Navy Department in ......
For over fifty years Dr Robert Spencer (1889-1969) practiced medicine in the small coal-mining town of Ashland, PA. He gained another kind of notoriety for performing safe and reliable abortions. This book presents his biography. It is suitable for those interested in the issue of abortion.
In Bioethics in America, Tina Stevens challenges the view that the origins of the bioethics movement can be found in the 1960s, a decade mounting challenges to all variety of authority. Instead, Stevens sees bioethics as one more product of a ''centuries-long cultural legacy of American ambivalence toward progress,'' and she finds its modern roots ......