Resources to Explore: Healthcare, Children’s
Madness & Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason by Michel Foucault A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Books Healthcare Kids
Category: Healthcare
Healthcare
American Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System
by E. Fuller Torrey, M.D.Copyright (c) 2014. This book tells the story of the American mental health system, starting with JFK’s “reforms” and ending with the Affordable Care Act. JFK, whose sister suffered from mental retardation and a failed partial lobotomy, assuaged his family’s “guilt” by reforming the system to close the state-run mental hospital system. This step federalized the system and took away state responsibility for these actions. In its place, no one –…
Healthcare
Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis
by Helen Bynum(c) Copyright 2012, 2015. This book, part of Oxford University Press’s series on “biographies” of diseases, highlights one disease the haunted humankind for millennia – tuberculosis/consumption. This battle, like its infectious disease brethren of malaria and yellow fever, is as old as recorded civilization. Like most infectious diseases, it has become a victim of its success in that its prevalence is now only among some of the “less desirables” of humanity: The developing…
Healthcare
A History of Public Health
by George Rosen(c) Copyright 1958, 1993, 2015. George Rosen wrote this book, originally published in 1958, about the progress that humanity has made in this field. He was optimistic about the progress made with antibiotics and vaccines. He saw opportunity for the eradication of smallpox and malaria. He saw the trajectory of human progress as going upwards. In 2018, this optimism has been somewhat muted by the realities of HIV/AIDS, by the lingering persistence of…
Healthcare Poverty
Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues
by Paul Farmer Copyright (c) 2001. Paul Farmer is a genius and is worthy of reading by anyone interested in his field of medical anthropology. An MD/PhD professor of Harvard and founder of Partners in Health, Farmer, perhaps better than anyone else alive, embodies the ethic that health care is a human right. In this book, he writes on his experiences in Haiti. He writes of fighting AIDS and Tuberculosis. He points out that poverty…
Healthcare
The Epidemic: A Global History of AIDS
by Joanathan EngelCopyright (c) 2006. Although this book is a little over a decade old, most of its history is still relevant to the equation when one speaks of HIV/AIDS. The history of the male-homosexual community combined with the history of IV-drug-user community combined with Asian/African transmissions is still locked in many of the same patterns that were present in 2006. Engel does a strong job of telling their stories and in so doing, telling…
Healthcare
A History of Global Health: Interventions into the Lives of Other People
bg Randall M. PackardCopyright (c) 2016. I chose this book to read because I wanted a tutorial to the field of global health, and I find that histories are interesting tutorials to subjects. The author, unknown to me, is a Johns Hopkins professor of medical history and is known for writing a work on the history of malaria. The book meets my already-high expectations. Written well, it chronicles early attempts to control disease in “foreign”…
Healthcare
The Fever: How Malaria has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years
by Sonia Shah(c) 2010.Especially during the later Bush years, I heard a lot about mosquito nets to prevent malaria. It was a simple intervention that provided real action. Now, I’m told many (actually, most) of those mosquito nets aren’t used to protect those that are sleeping. They are used as fish nets or on only adults, not on more vulnerable children. This little-known fact and more comprises the main storyline in Fever. Written by an…