Category: Healthcare

by E. Fuller Torrey and Judy Miller(c) Copyright 2002. This book, written in part by a psychiatrist with expert knowledge of schizophrenia, addresses the question of why mental illness has become increasingly pervasive since 1750. Starting with this date and proceeding towards the present, Torrey and Miller make a commanding case that the prevalence of mental illness has increased steadily since the age of Enlightenment, at least in English-speaking countries. The argument is forceful. They…

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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 –…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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”…

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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…

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