Medical

This book is unlike anything you've encountered before. It presents an adjusted reality made of engaging elements shaping a unique and immersive adventure, boldly venturing to places where society hesitates. In its pages, you'll reach breathtaking heights that ignite your potential, supercharging your optimal living and longevity.

In an era where health solutions often come in pill bottles and quick fixes, Adjusted Reality presents a revolutionary perspective on personal transformation and whole-being health. Drawing from over twenty-five years of clinical experience, Dr. Sherry McAllister challenges the status quo of fragmented healthcare and inherited thinking patterns with a profound question: “How can we open ourselves up to do better?"

This groundbreaking work transcends traditional self-help approaches by addressing the root forces that shape our lives and health decisions. Dr. McAllister introduces a comprehensive navigational concept that integrates mind, body, and spirit, elevating readers from mere well-being to the term “whole-being"—a supercharged state of authentic health and purposeful living.

Through the metaphor of climbing (and descending) life’s mountains and valleys, readers explore the ascent toward personal growth and the equally crucial challenge of maintaining progress beyond the peak. The book provides innovative frameworks for:

• Breaking free from groupthink and conventional healthcare paradigms
• Developing a sustainable approach to quality of life and longevity
• Understanding the interconnectedness of physical health, emotional responses, and life choices
• Building resilient communities through shared moral compasses and collective vitality

Adjusted Reality isn't just about personal transformation—it's about evolving our entire approach to health and healing. Dr. McAllister's vibrant enthusiasm and quarter-century of practical experience illuminate a path from fragmented care to comprehensive vitality, from last hope to first choice.

Perfect for readers seeking authentic change in their health journey and those ready to embrace a more comprehensive approach to personal transformation, this book offers more than solutions—it provides a new lens through which to view your entire relationship with health and whole-being.

This Atlas is principally based on the Brush Foundation Study of Human Growth and Development, conceived in 1929 by Professor T. Wingate Todd of Western Reserve University School of Medicine. This intensive study collected data on the maturation of human anatomy through the meticulous X-raying of a series of research subjects enrolled in the study as juveniles—some as young as three months—and thereafter routinely weighed and measured at three-month to one-year intervals, depending on their age.

This Atlas utilizes not only the X-ray films to which Todd had access but, also, those which were obtained in the six years subsequent to Todd's publication of his Atlas of Skeletal Maturation of the Hand. The X-ray standards in the present volume are, therefore, the first to be based exclusively on the research of the Brush Foundation Study.

Biographical sketches of the nineteen chairmen who have guided the evolution of the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school and surgery department, America’s first, from 1765 to the present day

In Surgeons and Something More, Clyde F. and Elizabeth D. Barker chronicle the evolution of the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school and surgery department, America’s first, begun in 1765. In the turbulent times before and after the Revolution, with medicine and surgery then in a primitive state, the new school’s leaders included some of America’s most conspicuous political and military figures.Over the next 250 years, the new nation experienced a dozen wars, four presidential assassinations, several devastating epidemics, and the expansion of US territory nine times over. This book reveals how Penn surgeons played prominent roles in these events as well as in the concomitant medical advances, such as anesthesia, antisepsis, heart surgery, x-rays, transplantation, cancer chemotherapy, intravenous nutrition, and gene therapy.

Biographical sketches of the nineteen chairmen who have guided Penn Surgery over its development detail the department’s progress and depict some of its setbacks. These trailblazers wrote the first text- books, taught the first classes, started the field’s journals, and led its academic organizations. By inventing new procedures, they saved countless lives. But by ignoring antisepsis, they lost many others. They operated on paupers, prisoners, Supreme Court justices, and gravely wounded presidents. Three of them became US Surgeon Generals. Others fought duels, explored the frozen Arctic seas, and conducted clandestine love affairs. In war, they parachuted behind enemy lines and invented SCUBA to disrupt enemy shipping. They built World War II’s largest hospital in the Burmese jungle to care for wounded commandos, and in Korea’s MASH tents they were the real-life Hawkeyes struggling to save the lives of stricken GIs. This is the story of how surgery evolved to its present, still imperfect, form, and of the role played by the doctors of the University of Pennsylvania in advancing the surgeon’s science and art.

Compassion as Remedy is a quietly revolutionary book about healthcare, ethics, and spiritual practice delivered as a commentary on a 2,500-year-old Tibetan text—the rGyud-bZhi (The Four Tantras), which is the guiding treatise for Traditional Tibetan Medicine. This book, which is a translation of “The Physician Chapter” of rGyud-bZhi, helps readers grasp the essence of healing and teaches healthcare practitioners how to develop limitless compassion, a quality that is essential—as our current healthcare situation makes starkly clear.

Moral development and the practice of compassion should be of great importance to all medical practitioners and “The Physician Chapter” provides detailed instructions, drawn from a millennia-old culture and tradition that is attracting increased attention. Although many books have been written about Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and more, there are very few approachable books regarding the unique features of Tibetan medicine and spiritual and meditation practice.

By integrating healthcare with spiritual practice, Compassion as Remedy provides guidelines for ethics, along with suggestions for developing wisdom and compassion. Throughout the world today, both medical practitioners and their patients are increasingly curious about holistic healing traditions, seeking to find natural, organic, and noninvasive remedies with few side effects. This book shows that compassion itself is a source for the alleviation of suffering.

Dr. Yonten includes examples from his clinical practice, drawn from cross-cultural perspectives and neuroscience, giving readers a rare view of compassion as remedy. In the words of His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, one of Dr. Yonten’s teachers, “The ideal physician is one who combines sound medical understanding with compassion and wisdom.”

Firsthand accounts of COVID-19’s devastating effects on working-class communities of color

The first months of the COVID-19 pandemic were filled with talk of heroes, the frontline workers who kept the country functioning. “And when they write those history books, the heroes of the battle will be the hardworking families of New York,” Governor Andrew Cuomo trumpeted on Labor Day 2020. But what if those heroes, those essential workers and their families, wrote the book themselves?

In Until We’re Seen, the heroes write their own stories. Through firsthand accounts by college students at Brooklyn College and California State University Los Angeles, Until We’re Seen chronicles COVID-19’s devastating, disproportionate effects on working-class communities of color, even as the United States has declared the pandemic over and looks away from its impacts.

Very few of these students and their families had the luxury of laboring from home; if they were able to keep their jobs, they took subways and buses, and they worked. They drove delivery trucks, worked in private homes, cooked food in restaurants for people to pick up, worked as EMTs, and did construction. They couldn’t escape to second homes; if anything, more people moved in, as families were forced to consolidate to save money. Together, the accounts in this book show that the COVID-19 pandemic did discriminate, following the race and class fissures endemic to US society. But if these are tales of hardship, they are also love stories—of students’ families, biological and chosen—and of the deep resolve, mundane carework, and herculean efforts such love entails.

Recounting 2020–2022 through the experiences of predominantly young, working-class immigrants and people of color living in the first two major US COVID-19 epicenters, Until We’re Seen spotlights previously untold stories of the pandemic in New York, Los Angeles, and the nation as a whole.

An important analysis of the difference class makes in reproductive health choices

Can you run a marathon, drink coffee, eat fish, or fly on a plane while pregnant? Such questions are just the tip of the iceberg for how most pregnant women’s bodies are managed, surveilled, and scrutinized during pregnancy. The Reproduction of Inequality examines the intense social pressure that expectant and new mothers face when it comes to their health and body-care choices.

Drawing on interviews with dozens of pregnant women and new mothers from poor, middle-class, and mixed-class backgrounds, Katherine Mason paints a vivid picture of the immense weight of expectation that comes with the early stages of motherhood. The women in Mason’s study universally sought to give their children a healthy start in life; however, their chosen approaches varied based on their socio-economic class. Whereas middle-class mothers attempted a complete lifestyle change and absolute devotion to the achievement and maintenance of “the healthy pregnant body,” poorer women made strategic choices about which health goals to prioritize on a limited budget, lacking the economic and cultural capital required to speak and perfectly adhere to the language of “good health.” The unfortunate result is that middle-class mothers are more likely to be seen by others and by themselves as “good” parents, whereas the efforts of working-class mothers are often misread as displaying inadequate concern about their health and that of their child. This in turn contributes to longstanding stereotypes about poor families and communities, and limits their children's chances for upward mobility. The Reproduction of Inequality is a compelling analysis of the impact of class on new mothers’ approaches to health and wellness, and a sobering examination of how inequality shapes mothers’ efforts to maximize their own health and that of their children.

A bold exposé of how the very foundation of toxicology has been contaminated by sexist and racist ideologies

The first critical understanding of the field of toxicology from a feminist and antiracist perspective, Toxic Sexual Politics asserts that the science of toxicants must be held accountable for the uneven distribution of toxic pollution along racial and sexual lines. Drawing upon in-depth interviews and extensive ethnographic and archival research, including participant observations in toxicology classrooms, conferences, and laboratories, Melina Packer urges environmental health advocates to place toxicant science within its masculinist, militarist, and eugenicist history.

Toxic Sexual Politics shows how the founding fathers of U.S. toxicology were ideologically aligned with the chemical industry, inventing a science that could “make chemicals safe,” as opposed to one that could adequately protect planetary health from toxicants’ hazards. While many toxicologists today are critical of the chemical industry, they continue to rely on the highly limited tools of toxicology as accurate measures of toxicity, as do government regulators, the courts, and environmental advocates.

Unlike most critiques of the chemical industry and narratives of environmental health movements, Toxic Sexual Politics refuses to take the science at face value. By focusing on the sexist, racist, and ableist biases reinforced by toxicology, Packer powerfully argues that this scientific discipline reproduces the very same white supremacist and heterosexist logics that generated environmental injustices in the first place. The field of toxicology can explicitly confront chemical corporate power by building from queer, feminist, anti-ableist, and antiracist movements for environmental and reproductive justice.

An eye-opening and compelling ethnography about how doctors make decisions

The oath that doctors take to "do no harm" suggests that patient welfare is at the center of what it means to be a successful medical professional. It is also understood, however, that hospitals are not only vessels for medical care—they are businesses, educational institutions, and complex bureaucracies with intricate codes of etiquette that dictate how each staff member should approach situations with patients. In Conflicted Care, Hyeyoung Oh Nelson provides an in-depth look at the decision-making processes of physicians at a large, prestigious academic medical center—that she calls Pacific Medical Center—and finds that more often than not patient wellbeing is only one of several factors governing day-to-day decisions.

The steps physicians take reveal a kind of hidden curriculum of the medical world, one that is guided by status and hierarchy, bureaucracy, norms for consulting with third-parties, regulations for interactions with patients, and medical uncertainty. While at an institutional and individual level patient care continues to be integral to everything the physicians do, they are forced to reconcile that vow with these other, often-conflicting internal logics. Harm, Nelson argues, is thus built into the practice of medicine in the United States. This harm can take the form of unnecessary treatments and consultations or inadequate treatment for pain to motivate specialist intervention that would otherwise be resisted. These and other practices have the overall consequence of significantly driving up inpatient care costs, which then results in patients forgoing needed, ongoing treatment once they receive their medical bills.

Drawing on a deep ethnography of physicians in the Internal Medicine Service unit, Nelson offers a sharp assessment of current policies aimed at alleviating medical costs and explains why they are ineffective. She concludes by offering novel policy and practice recommendations for health care practitioners, policy makers, and healthcare institutions.

Winner, 2025 Thomas & Znaniecki Best Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association International Migration Section

Reveals the presence of an informal system of valuable support and care for marginalized migrants

The United States’ health care system not only consists of a formal safety net, but also an informal and disjointed network of organizations that offer basic care to millions of migrants. This “Third Net” provides free or low-cost health care for the undocumented, low-income, and uninsured migrants who are excluded from the formal system. This groundbreaking study sheds light on the existence of the Third Net and its implications for the overall inequalities in the US health care system.

The Third Net is made up of diverse providers with varying levels of service, organizational culture, and mission. These providers operate in unconventional settings, such as mobile clinics on wheels; pop-up clinics in repurposed spaces; and unlicensed, makeshift clinics run by health activists. Despite their unassuming appearances, these clinics are vital resources for marginalized populations that often go unnoticed by the general public, revealing the shortcomings of our formal health care system.

By examining these alternative health care spaces, the authors expose the inequities entrenched in the broader health care system and urge a reevaluation of it entirely in order to address these injustices.

2025 Global Book Awards Gold Medalist in Organizational Change

Discover the innovations transforming medicine—and the fight to make care more equitable, accessible, and effective.

In The Great Healthcare Disruption, Dr. Marschall Runge—cardiologist, researcher, and CEO of Michigan Medicine—offers a gripping, insider’s look at the forces rapidly reshaping American healthcare. From artificial intelligence and retail medicine to revolutionary gene therapies and next-generation obesity drugs, this is your essential guide to the most significant transformation in medical care since the discovery of antibiotics.

Inside you’ll explore:

• The rise of Big Tech in medicine—how Amazon, Google, and other disruptors are redefining the patient experience
• Breakthrough treatments and AI-driven diagnostics reshaping chronic disease management, behavioral health, and drug development
• The hidden trade-offs of innovation—how cutting-edge care delivery models are improving outcomes while straining the systems meant to support them
• Why traditional institutions must evolve—and how academic medical centers can remain vital in a tech-driven world
• Hard truths about access, equity, and affordability—and what must change to make healthcare work for everyone

With rich storytelling, sharp insights, and practical solutions, Dr. Runge cuts through the complexity of modern medicine to offer a bold, balanced path forward.

Whether you're a healthcare professional, policy leader, or curious reader, The Great Healthcare Disruption is your guide to understanding—and shaping—the revolution already underway.

Explores informal global health action and the importance of intentions of those who volunteer

In the past two decades, medical missions have gained popularity among medical professionals, who view these excursions as important ethical interventions. Indeed, the notion of giving back by volunteering in rural or impoverished communities is celebrated as an ideal act of selflessness, one whose effects are unquestionably beneficial to those being served.

Good Intentions in Global Health is a groundbreaking exploration of the growing realm of informal global health engagement, shedding light on the intricate interplay between intentions, emotions, and ethical considerations. Drawing on fieldwork in Guatemala, Nicole S. Berry investigates those who volunteer for short-term medical missions, revealing how the intent to do good shapes their everyday understandings of their own actions taken in the global health domain.

Berry uncovers how the glorification of medical missions can obscure problems that stem from North American clinicians doctoring in places where they typically do not understand the context. The short-term nature of missions also means that volunteers are not privy to the long-term effects of their actions—the potential harms that may arise from a lack of sustained follow-up care or the utter absence of documentation that they were even there. By relying on gut instincts to reassure themselves that they are doing good, volunteers often bypass a comprehensive assessment of the ethical dimensions underlying their global health work.

Good Intentions in Global Health shows why desires and emotions are increasingly important to contemporary global health. She makes the case that we must pay attention to volunteers’ perceptions of their work, however wrongheaded or naïve, in order to truly influence global health on the ground.

Healthcare providers in the American medical system may find that patients from different cultures bring unfamiliar expectations, anxieties, and needs into the examination room. To provide optimal care for all patients, it is important to see differences from the patient's perspective and to work with patients from a range of demographics. Caring for Patients from Different Cultures has been a vital resource for nurses and physicians for more than twenty years, offering hundreds of case studies that illustrate crosscultural conflicts or misunderstandings as well as examples of culturally competent health care.

Now in its fifth edition, Caring for Patients from Different Cultures covers a wide range of topics, including birth, end of life, communication, traditional medicine, mental health, pain, religion, and multicultural staff challenges. This edition includes more than sixty new cases with an expanded appendix, introduces a new chapter on improving adherence, and updates the concluding chapter with examples of changes various hospitals have made to accommodate cultural differences. Grounded in concepts from the fields of cultural diversity and medical anthropology, Caring for Patients from Different Cultures provides healthcare workers with a frame of reference for understanding cultural differences and sound alternatives for providing the best possible care to multicultural communities.

Now that the health community is in a state of reflection, how do we put the lessons learned into practice?

As we step back to examine the worldwide response to the COVID-19 pandemic, now is the time to think about how to raise the bar for our response to the next public health emergency. Now is the time to revisit health preparedness strategies and plans. And now is the time to review what the health community did that worked—and how we can do that again.

Learning from COVID-19: GIS for Pandemics tells real-life stories about how spatial thinking became invaluable in both local and full-scale outbreaks during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Needing to answer the question of “where” sat at the forefront of everyone’s mind, and using a geographic information system (GIS) for real-time surveillance transformed possibly overwhelming data into location intelligence that provided agencies and civic leaders with valuable insights. 

Co-edited by Esri chief medical officer Dr. Este Geraghty, this book highlights best practices, key GIS capabilities, and lessons learned during the COVID-19 response that can help communities prepare for the next crisis. GIS has empowered:

• Organizations to use human mobility data to estimate the adherence to social distancing guidelines
• Communities to monitor their health care systems’ capacity through spatially enabled surge tools
• Governments to use location-allocation methods to site new resources (i.e., testing sites and augmented care sites) in ways that account for at-risk and vulnerable populations
• Communities to use maps and spatial analysis to review case trends at local levels to support reopening of economies
• Organizations to think spatially as they consider “back-to-the-workplace” plans that account for physical distancing and employee safety needs

Learning from COVID-19 also includes a “next steps” section that provides ideas, strategies, tools, and actions to help jump-start your own use of GIS, either as a citizen scientist or a health professional. A collection of online resources, including additional stories, videos, new ideas and concepts, and downloadable tools and content, complements this book.

Now is the time to use science and data to make informed decisions for our future, and this book shows us how we can do it.

This revolutionary, heartfelt guide is for pet lovers who want their furry friends to live happier, healthier lives, to support their pet’s health naturally and confidently.

Groundbreaking holistic veterinarian Jeff Feinman shares his innovative “whole-istic” love-based framework, cutting-edge scientific research, beautiful illustrations, endearing pet stories, and easy ways to strengthen your bond with your pet.

In this book, you’ll discover how to:

• Interpret your pet’s symptoms, especially ones that keep coming back, and respond to them meaningfully
• Support healing with the best of both conventional medicine and holistic traditions
• Apply a love-centered approach to your pet that unlocks their natural healing ability
• Make informed health decisions based on your pet’s physical and spiritual well-being

By the end of Path to Pet Wellness, you’ll become a true advocate for your pet’s wellness, learn from your pet how to live a more connected, joyful life, and engage more meaningfully with your pet every day.

Healthcare providers in the American medical system may find that patients from different cultures bring unfamiliar expectations, anxieties, and needs into the examination room. To provide optimal care for all patients, it is important to see differences from the patient's perspective and to work with patients from a range of demographics. Caring for Patients from Different Cultures has been a vital resource for nurses and physicians for more than twenty years, offering hundreds of case studies that illustrate crosscultural conflicts or misunderstandings as well as examples of culturally competent health care.

Now in its fifth edition, Caring for Patients from Different Cultures covers a wide range of topics, including birth, end of life, communication, traditional medicine, mental health, pain, religion, and multicultural staff challenges. This edition includes more than sixty new cases with an expanded appendix, introduces a new chapter on improving adherence, and updates the concluding chapter with examples of changes various hospitals have made to accommodate cultural differences. Grounded in concepts from the fields of cultural diversity and medical anthropology, Caring for Patients from Different Cultures provides healthcare workers with a frame of reference for understanding cultural differences and sound alternatives for providing the best possible care to multicultural communities.

This volume offers a new critical edition with facing English translation and a detailed study of the medieval manual of dietetics Occitan Health Advice dating from the 13^th century and probably compiled in the milieu of Montpellier’s university. This Advice on health and well-being is a unique example of medical writing: composed in Occitan (formerly called Old Provençal), the vernacular language of southern France; it provided a wealth of medical information and guidance for a literate nonspecialist reader interested in a healthful life. This Advice will interest medical historians, literary scholars, and linguists, as well as readers curious about the Middle Ages, for all of whom it provides invaluable information on medieval daily life, dietary regimen, and healthy habits.

An inside look at how patients living with terminal illness created one of the country’s first medical marijuana collectives

Marijuana as medicine has been a politically charged topic in this country for more than three decades. Despite overwhelming public support and growing scientific evidence of its therapeutic effects (relief of the nausea caused by chemotherapy for cancer and AIDS, control over seizures or spasticity caused by epilepsy or MS, and relief from chronic and acute pain, to name a few), the drug remains illegal under federal law.

In Dying to Get High, noted sociologist Wendy Chapkis and Richard J. Webb investigate one community of seriously-ill patients fighting the federal government for the right to use physician-recommended marijuana. Based in Santa Cruz, California, the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana (WAMM) is a unique patient-caregiver cooperative providing marijuana free of charge to mostly terminally ill members. For a brief period in 2004, it even operated the only legal non-governmental medical marijuana garden in the country, protected by the federal courts against the DEA.

Using as their stage this fascinating profile of one remarkable organization, Chapkis and Webb tackle the broader, complex history of medical marijuana in America. Through compelling interviews with patients, public officials, law enforcement officers and physicians, Chapkis and Webb ask what distinguishes a legitimate patient from an illegitimate pothead, good drugs from bad, medicinal effects from just getting high. Dying to Get High combines abstract argument and the messier terrain of how people actually live, suffer and die, and offers a moving account of what is at stake in ongoing debates over the legalization of medical marijuana.

An engaging history of the role that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin played in the origins of public health in America

Before the advent of modern antibiotics, one’s life could be abruptly shattered by contagion and death, and debility from infectious diseases and epidemics was commonplace for early Americans, regardless of social status. Concerns over health affected the founding fathers and their families as it did slaves, merchants, immigrants, and everyone else in North America. As both victims of illness and national leaders, the Founders occupied a unique position regarding the development of public health in America. Revolutionary Medicine refocuses the study of the lives of George and Martha Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams, and James and Dolley Madison away from the usual lens of politics to the unique perspective of sickness, health, and medicine in their era. For the founders, republican ideals fostered a reciprocal connection between individual health and the “health” of the nation. Studying the encounters of these American founders with illness and disease, as well as their viewpoints about good health, not only provides us with a richer and more
nuanced insight into their lives, but also opens a window into the practice of medicine in the eighteenth century, which is at once intimate, personal, and first hand. Perhaps most importantly, today’s American public health initiatives have their roots in the work of America’s founders, for they recognized early on that government had compelling reasons to shoulder some new responsibilities with respect to ensuring the health and well-being of its citizenry.

The state of medicine and public healthcare today is still a work in progress, but these founders played a significant role in beginning the conversation that shaped the contours of its development.

Hand in hand with such health crises as HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, and the resurgence of tuberculosis has come an explosion of scientific and medical technologies. As technology documents illness with ever greater precision and clarity, the knowledge and vocabulary of patients is being similarly expanded by activists, consumer advocates, and artists working with new electronic technologies.
Into this breach steps The Visible Woman, collecting professional, academic, and lay viewpoints on gender and the role of visual and textual representation in contemporary health and science. From fetal photography and mammography to mental retardation and chronic fatigue syndrome, The Visible Woman reveals how identities are constructed in medical research and public health initiatives, as well as in popular press accounts of health. New ways of seeing the body, through medical imaging, plastic and sexual surgery, and services for people with disabilities, are all informed, the book argues, by a broader cultural fascination with visuality and media.
Emphasizing the authors' first-hand experiences as medical practitioners, activists, scholars, and patients, The Visible Woman breaks with more established approaches that cast patients as passive objects of medical inquiry, and medical professionals as perpetrators of institutional exploitation in the name of the public good. Asking what it means to be on both ends of the microscope, The Visible Woman highlights the complex perspectives of medical and scientific practitioners who themselves exist both inside and outside their workplaces and professional identities.
The contributors are Michael Bérubé, Lisa Cartwright, Stacie A. Colwell, Richard Cone, Anne Eckman, Valerie Hartouni, Janet Lyon, Emily Martin, Gaye Naismith, Mark Rose, Ella Shohat, Vivian Sobchack, Carol Stabile, Sandy Stone, and Paula A. Treichler.

Do doctors fix patients? Or do they heal them? For all of modern medicine’s many successes, discontent with the quality of patient care has combined with a host of new developments, from aging populations to the resurgence of infectious diseases, which challenge medicine’s overreliance on narrowly mechanistic and technical methods of explanation and intervention, or “fixing’ patients. The need for a better balance, for more humane “healing” rationales and practices that attend to the social and environmental aspects of health and illness and the experiencing person, is more urgent than ever. Yet, in public health and bioethics, the fields best positioned to offer countervailing values and orientations, the dominant approaches largely extend and reinforce the reductionism and individualism of biomedicine.

The collected essays in To Fix or To Heal do more than document the persistence of reductionist approaches and the attendant extension of medicalization to more and more aspects of our lives. The contributors also shed valuable light on why reductionism has persisted and why more holistic models, incorporating social and environmental factors, have gained so little traction. The contributors examine the moral appeal of reductionism, the larger rationalist dream of technological mastery, the growing valuation of health, and the enshrining of individual responsibility as the seemingly non-coercive means of intervention and control. This paradigm-challenging volume advances new lines of criticism of our dominant medical regime, even while proposing ways of bringing medical practice, bioethics, and public health more closely into line with their original goals. Precisely because of the centrality of the biomedical approach to our society, the contributors argue, challenging the reductionist model and its ever-widening effects is perhaps the best way to press for a much-needed renewal of our ethical and political discourse.

Almost everything you know about heroin addiction is wrong. Not only is it wrong, but it is obviously wrong. Heroin is not highly addictive; withdrawal from it is not medically serious; addicts do not become criminals to feed their habit; addicts do not need any medical assistance to stop taking heroin; and contrary to received wisdom, heroin addiction most certainly IS a moral or spiritual problem.

Based on his ample experience as a prison doctor and psychiatrist in a large general hospital in a British slum, Dr. Dalrymple argues that addiction to opiates is not an illness at all, and that doctors only make it worse. They deceive both the addicts and themselves by pretending that they have something to offer.

In this brilliant, entertaining, and provocative book, Theodore Dalrymple explains how and why a literary tradition dating back to De Quincey and Coleridge, and continuing up to the deeply sociopathic William Burroughs and beyond, has misled all Western societies for generations about the nature of addiction to opiates. These writers’ selfdramatizing and dishonest accounts of their own addiction have been

accepted uncritically, and have been more influential by far than the whole of pharmacological science in forming public attitudes. As a result, a self-serving, self-perpetuating, and completely useless medical bureaucracy has been set up to deal with the problem.

With scathing wit, implacable logic, and savage denunciation, Dr. Dalrymple exposes the mythology surrounding addiction to opiates. Moving seamlessly among literature, pharmacology, history, and philosophy, he demonstrates what happens when the nature of a social problem is thoroughly misunderstood, and when human beings are regarded as inanimate objects rather than as agents of their own destiny. His scintillating, iconoclastic little book has an importance far beyond its immediate subject matter.

A bold exposé of how the very foundation of toxicology has been contaminated by sexist and racist ideologies

The first critical understanding of the field of toxicology from a feminist and antiracist perspective, Toxic Sexual Politics asserts that the science of toxicants must be held accountable for the uneven distribution of toxic pollution along racial and sexual lines. Drawing upon in-depth interviews and extensive ethnographic and archival research, including participant observations in toxicology classrooms, conferences, and laboratories, Melina Packer urges environmental health advocates to place toxicant science within its masculinist, militarist, and eugenicist history.

Toxic Sexual Politics shows how the founding fathers of U.S. toxicology were ideologically aligned with the chemical industry, inventing a science that could “make chemicals safe,” as opposed to one that could adequately protect planetary health from toxicants’ hazards. While many toxicologists today are critical of the chemical industry, they continue to rely on the highly limited tools of toxicology as accurate measures of toxicity, as do government regulators, the courts, and environmental advocates.

Unlike most critiques of the chemical industry and narratives of environmental health movements, Toxic Sexual Politics refuses to take the science at face value. By focusing on the sexist, racist, and ableist biases reinforced by toxicology, Packer powerfully argues that this scientific discipline reproduces the very same white supremacist and heterosexist logics that generated environmental injustices in the first place. The field of toxicology can explicitly confront chemical corporate power by building from queer, feminist, anti-ableist, and antiracist movements for environmental and reproductive justice.

What does it mean to oppose AIDS, to be at odds with AIDS? What kind of rupture with history does AIDS represent? How does AIDS and what is said about AIDS relate to gay identity? How does AIDS relate to thinking and acting, particularly deconstructive thinking? The author confronts these questions from a broad philosophical background that ranges from Kant, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger to contemporary thought concerning gay activism and AIDS research, all brought together in an effort to find a philosophical language capable of doing justice to the singularity of lived experience in the shadow of AIDS.

In examining what AIDS reveals about the conditions of existence, García Düttmann develops the idea of the “dis-unity” or “at-odds-ness” of existence, of the “non-belonging” that characterizes the marginalized, outcast, or abandoned, and exposes human existence itself. He analyzes what AIDS reveals about the character of history through two intertwined issues. First, he examines arguments bearing on the epochal significance of AIDS, the idea that AIDS reveals something uniquely characteristic of our time, hence that the epidemic marks a historical caesura. Second, he develops a theory of historical witnessing suggesting that the phenomena of historical event and bearing witness are not at all separate, but instead are co-originary, inhering in the same complex.

Volume II in the Ben cao gang mu series offers a complete translation of chapters 5 through 11, devoted to waters, fires, soils, metals, jades, stones, minerals, and salts.

The Ben cao gang mu is a sixteenth-century Chinese encyclopedia of medical matter and natural history by Li Shizhen (1518–1593). The culmination of a sixteen-hundred-year history of Chinese medical and pharmaceutical literature, it is considered the most important and comprehensive book ever written in the history of Chinese medicine and remains an invaluable resource for researchers and practitioners. This nine-volume series reveals an almost two-millennia-long panorama of wide-ranging observations and sophisticated interpretations, ingenious manipulations, and practical applications of natural substances for the benefit of human health. Paul Unschuld's annotated translation of the Ben cao gang mu, presented here with the original Chinese text, opens a rare window into viewing the people and culture of China's past.

Explores informal global health action and the importance of intentions of those who volunteer

In the past two decades, medical missions have gained popularity among medical professionals, who view these excursions as important ethical interventions. Indeed, the notion of giving back by volunteering in rural or impoverished communities is celebrated as an ideal act of selflessness, one whose effects are unquestionably beneficial to those being served.

Good Intentions in Global Health is a groundbreaking exploration of the growing realm of informal global health engagement, shedding light on the intricate interplay between intentions, emotions, and ethical considerations. Drawing on fieldwork in Guatemala, Nicole S. Berry investigates those who volunteer for short-term medical missions, revealing how the intent to do good shapes their everyday understandings of their own actions taken in the global health domain.

Berry uncovers how the glorification of medical missions can obscure problems that stem from North American clinicians doctoring in places where they typically do not understand the context. The short-term nature of missions also means that volunteers are not privy to the long-term effects of their actions—the potential harms that may arise from a lack of sustained follow-up care or the utter absence of documentation that they were even there. By relying on gut instincts to reassure themselves that they are doing good, volunteers often bypass a comprehensive assessment of the ethical dimensions underlying their global health work.

Good Intentions in Global Health shows why desires and emotions are increasingly important to contemporary global health. She makes the case that we must pay attention to volunteers’ perceptions of their work, however wrongheaded or naïve, in order to truly influence global health on the ground.

Florence Nightingale is best known as the founder of modern nursing, a reformer in the field of public health, and a pioneer in the use of statistics. It is not generally known, however, that Nightingale was at the forefront of the religious, philosophical, and scientific though of her time. In a three-volume work that was never published, Nightingale presented her radical spiritual views, motivated by the desire to give those who had turned away from conventional religion an alternative to atheism. In this volume Michael D. Calabria and Janet A. Macrae provide the essence of Nightingale's spiritual philosophy by selecting and reorganizing her best-written treatments. The editors have also provided an introduction and commentary to set the work into a biographical, historical, and philosophical context.

This volume illuminates a little-known dimension of Nightingale's personality, bringing forth the ideas that served as the guiding principles of her work. It is also an historical document, presenting the religious issues that were fiercely debated in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Suggestions for Thought, one has the opportunity to experience a great practical mind as it grapples with the most profound questions of human existence.

In Discovery and Healing: Reflections on Five Decades of Hematology/Oncology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, David Vaughn describes the history of the Perelman School of Medicine's Division of Hematology/Oncology. Vaughn knows the subject well: he trained in the Division's Hematology/Oncology fellowship program from 1990 -1993 and has been on the faculty of the Division since 1993.

Since its founding in 1972, the Division of Hematology/Oncology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has made important contributions to the fields of blood disorders and cancer medicine. Based largely on his personal experience and extensive interviews with former and present faculty, Vaughn describes the evolution of the Division from a small group of research hematologists to a comprehensive program of fundamental and translational researchers and clinical specialists in benign and malignant hematology and solid tumor oncology. He highlights the importance of leadership as he examines the successes of each of the four Division chiefs: Richard "Buz" Cooper, Sanford Shattil, Stephen Emerson, and Lynn Schuchter. He describes the lasting impact that the Division's first oncologist, John Glick, has had on the Division, the Abramson Cancer Center, and the author himself. He emphasizes the important role that philanthropy has played in the Division's achievements. He concludes the account by reflecting on the Division's experience and call to action as it confronted the COVID-19 pandemic.

Both a memoir and a historical account, Vaughn's book demonstrates the good that can be accomplished when an innovative and dedicated medical faculty are committed to discovery and healing.

Written for speech therapists and doctors, this book gives a precise, practical summary of anthroposophical therapeutic speech.

Speech formation, or creative speech, is based on the ancient art of recitation and drama, and was revived and fundamentally redeveloped by Rudolf and Marie Steiner in the early 1920s.

The therapeutic work is based on speech exercises and indications on how to use them, which were given by Rudolf Steiner.

Cartographies of Disease: Maps, Mapping, and Medicine, new expanded edition, is a comprehensive survey of the technology of mapping and its relationship to the battle against disease. This look at medical mapping advances the argument that maps are not merely representations of spatial realities but a way of thinking about relationships between viral and bacterial communities, human hosts, and the environments in which diseases flourish. 

Cartographies of Disease traces the history of medical mapping from its growth in the 19th century during an era of trade and immigration to its renaissance in the 1990s during a new era of globalization. Referencing maps older than John Snow's famous cholera maps of London in the mid-19th century, this survey pulls from the plague maps of the 1600s, while addressing current issues concerning the ability of GIS technology to track diseases worldwide. The original chapters have some minor updating, and two new chapters have been added. Chapter 13 attempts to understand how the hundreds of maps of Ebola revealed not simply disease incidence but the way in which the epidemic itself was perceived. Chapter 14 is about the spatiality of the disease and the means by which different cartographic approaches may affect how infectious outbreaks like ebola can be confronted and contained.

Now, more than ever, professionals can benefit from the power of location data, maps, and analytics in healthcare.  

Health professionals see the importance of the who, what, when, and where of data analytics. The “where” adds a crucial element because good healthcare begins locally and understanding the impacts of place leads to better health. Health professionals recognize the insights gained from visualizing and analyzing location data. Maps, dashboards, apps, and charts can serve as location analytic tools to quantify problems, make predictions, improve operations, assess infrastructure, and make better decisions overall.

GIS Jump Start for Health Professionals is a concise workbook that introduces location analytics available in geographic information systems (GIS) to health professionals, medical students, residents, fellows, nursing students, medical researchers, and others interested in health IT and informatics, health-care administration, and health policy. GIS Jump Start for Health Professionals provides hands-on tutorials that introduce the ArcGIS tools and shows how to use web-based data, storytelling apps, and much more. The book includes concepts and short video lectures to improve learning outcomes. Focused lessons get health professionals up and running quickly and experiencing first hand the value of location data, maps, and analytics.

Written by Kristen S. Kurland, an award-winning professor at Carnegie Mellon University and co-creator of the GIS Tutorial series, this book can be used as a short course or incorporated into another course. It is also valuable to self-learners who want location technology experience. 

In the spring of 1996, when numerous reports of bovine spongioform encephalopathy, popularly known as "mad cow disease," coincided with an outbreak of a similar neuropathological disease in humans, a panic spread across Britain, Europe, and subsequently to the United States. Described as "the biggest crisis the European Union ever had," the mad cow controversy raised important issues about the ways in which risks to the public heath are assessed, disseminated, and controlled. Was the "epidemic" merely a failure of management, the lessons of which could be incorporated into a new strategy for dealing with public anxiety? Was it an isolated case of poor decision-making in a highly volatile economic sector, or was it the kind of nightmare that could face any government responsible for public safety? And what role did the media play in exacerbating an already spiraling crisis?
Divided into four major sections–"Scientific/Historical Perspectives"; "Politics as Health"; "Understanding the Crisis"; and "Lessons and Possibilities" – Mad Cow Crisis assembles the perspectives of a range of experts on this strange and frightening phenomenon, with a view to helping us comprehend how and why such crises occur. Both a careful consideration of how we interpret risk and uncertainty and a step-by-step guide to managing public fear, this important book will interest anyone concerned with public health, communication, science, economics, and medicine.

An extensively researched account of the ups and downs in the history of uppers

Uppers. Crank. Bennies. Dexies. Greenies. Black Beauties. Purple Hearts. Crystal. Ice. And, of course, Speed. Whatever their street names at the moment, amphetamines have been an insistent force in American life since they were marketed as the original antidepressants in the 1930s. On Speed tells the remarkable story of their rise, their fall, and their surprising resurgence. Along the way, it discusses the influence of pharmaceutical marketing on medicine, the evolving scientific understanding of how the human brain works, the role of drugs in maintaining the social order, and the centrality of pills in American life. Above all, however, this is a highly readable biography of a very popular drug. And it is a riveting story.

Incorporating extensive new research, On Speed describes the ups and downs (fittingly, there are mostly ups) in the history of amphetamines, and their remarkable pervasiveness. For example, at the same time that amphetamines were becoming part of the diet of many GIs in World War II, an amphetamine-abusing counterculture began to flourish among civilians. In the 1950s, psychiatrists and family doctors alike prescribed amphetamines for a wide variety of ailments, from mental disorders to obesity to emotional distress. By the late 1960s, speed had become a fixture in everyday life: up to ten percent of Americans were thought to be using amphetamines at least occasionally.

Although their use was regulated in the 1970s, it didn't take long for amphetamines to make a major comeback, with the discovery of Attention Deficit Disorder and the role that one drug in the amphetamine family—Ritalin—could play in treating it. Today’s most popular diet-assistance drugs differ little from the diet pills of years gone by, still speed at their core. And some of our most popular recreational drugs—including the "mellow" drug, Ecstasy—are also amphetamines. Whether we want to admit it or not, writes Rasmussen, we’re still a nation on speed.

Inside today's data-driven personalized medicine, and the time, effort, and information required from patients to make it a reality

Medicine has been personal long before the concept of “personalized medicine” became popular. Health professionals have always taken into consideration the individual characteristics of their patients when diagnosing, and treating them. Patients have cared for themselves and for each other, contributed to medical research, and advocated for new treatments. Given this history, why has the notion of personalized medicine gained so much traction at the beginning of the new millennium?

Personalized Medicine investigates the recent movement for patients’ involvement in how they are treated, diagnosed, and medicated; a movement that accompanies the increasingly popular idea that people should be proactive, well-informed participants in their own healthcare.

While it is often the case that participatory practices in medicine are celebrated as instances of patient empowerment or, alternatively, are dismissed as cases of patient exploitation, Barbara Prainsack challenges these views to illustrate how personalized medicine can give rise to a technology-focused individualism, yet also present new opportunities to strengthen solidarity. Facing the future, this book reveals how medicine informed by digital, quantified, and computable information is already changing the personalization movement, providing a contemporary twist on how medical symptoms or ailments are shared and discussed in society.

Bringing together empirical work and critical scholarship from medicine, public health, data governance, bioethics, and digital sociology, Personalized Medicine analyzes the challenges of personalization driven by patient work and data. This compelling volume proposes an understanding that uses novel technological practices to foreground the needs and interests of patients, instead of being ruled by them.

How the Cuban health care system became the blueprint for accessible medical care around the world

Quiet as it’s kept inside the United States, the Cuban revolution has achieved some phenomenal goals, reclaiming Cuba’s agriculture, advancing its literacy rate to nearly 100 percent – and remaking its medical system. Cuba has transformed its health care to the extent that this “third-world” country has been able to maintain a first-world medical system, whose health indicators surpass those of the United States at a fraction of the cost. Don Fitz combines his deep knowledge of Cuban history with his decades of on-the-ground experience in Cuba to bring us the story of how Cuba’s health care system evolved and how Cuba is tackling the daunting challenges to its revolution in this century.

Fitz weaves together complex themes in Cuban history, moving the reader from one fascinating story to another. He describes how Cuba was able to create a unified system of clinics, and evolved the family doctor-nurse teams that became a model for poor countries throughout the world. How, in the 1980s and ‘90s, Cuba survived the encroachment of AIDS and increasing suffering that came with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and then went on to establish the Latin American School of Medicine, which still brings thousands of international students to the island. Deeply researched, recounted with compassion, Cuban Health Care tells a story you won’t find anywhere else, of how, in terms of caring for everyday people, Cuba’s revolution continues.

Proposes the pragmatic changes we must make to survive COVID and the worst of the new diseases on the horizon

The Trump administration’s neglect and incompetence helped put half-a-million Americans in the ground, dead from COVID-19. Joe Biden was elected president in part on the promise of setting us on a science-driven course correction, but, a little more than a year later, another half-a-million Americans were killed by the virus. What happened? In The Fault in Our SARS, evolutionary epidemiologist Rob Wallace catalogs the Biden administration's failures in controlling the outbreak. He also shows that, beyond matters of specific political persona or party, it was a decades-long structural decline associated with putting profits ahead of people that gutted U.S. public health.

COVID-19 isn’t just an American tragedy. Each in its own way, countries around the world following the "profit-first" model failed their people. Global vaccination campaigns were bottled up by efforts to protect pharmaceutical companies' intellectual property rights. Economies were treated as somehow more real than the people and ecologies upon which they depend. Frustrated populations pushed back against lockdowns, abuses of governmental trust, and, fair or not, the very concept of public health. A social rot meanwhile wended its way into the heart of the sciences that, tasked with controlling disease, serve the systems that helped bring about COVID-19 in the first place.

In The Fault in Our SARS, Wallace and an array of invited contributors aim to strip down the capitalist social psychology that in effect protected the SARS virus. The team proposes instead new approaches in health and ecology that appeal both to humanity's highest ideals and the pragmatic changes we must make to survive COVID and the worst of the new diseases on the horizon.

Businesses that produce bioscience products—gene tests and therapies, pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and medical devices—are regularly confronted with ethical issues concerning these technologies. Conflicts exist between those who support advancements in bioscience and those who fear the consequences of unfettered scientific license. As the debate surrounding bioscience grows, it will be increasingly important for business managers to consider the larger consequences of their work.

This groundbreaking book follows industry research, development, and marketing of medical and bioscience products across a variety of fields, including biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and bio-agriculture. Compelling and current case studies highlight the ethical decisions business managers frequently face. With the increasing visibility and public expectation placed on businesses in this sector, managers need to understand the ethical and social issues. This book addresses that need and provides a framework for incorporating ethical analysis in business decision making.

Over the past three decades, guidance on the selection of art in hospitals has suggested realistic art that depicts soothing and comforting images such as tranquil waters, green vegetation, flowers, and open spaces. Based on these findings, curators have been cautioned to avoid art with uncertain meaning that risks upsetting viewers in stressful states. However, some hospitals exhibit ambiguous or abstract art and cite anecdotal evidence of its appropriateness for healthcare settings. More recent research is going beyond anecdotal evidence, and indicates that the ambiguity of meaning in abstract compositions can have positive effects.

'Purpose-built' Art in Hospitals is built on an international study of artwork in hospitals around the globe. Exploring 'purpose-built' (specially commissioned) artwork in hospitals through the dual lens of an artist and healthcare professional, Rollins identifies 15 specific 'purposes' of visual artwork in hospitals and presents a compelling case for their use that is grounded in research. The book builds the reader's understanding of the many functions of artwork in hospitals, with the goal of encouraging greater variety in art offerings to better serve the many diverse needs of patients, families, visitors and staff within the hospital environment.

While the physical and emotional trials of waiting on transplant lists are featured in popular media, the struggles recipients face years after surgery are not. Voices of Teenage Transplant Survivors introduces illness narratives from an unrecognized patient population: recipients of heart, liver, and kidney transplants. Offering unique narratives by adolescents who use poetry to explore issues surrounding the changing body, independence, identity, and mortality, the book showcases a message of healing and voices of hope amid uncertainty.

Illuminating the physical, psychological, and existential challenges confronted by adolescents for which organ rejection and side effects loom in their future, Sample details the poetry workshops where these adolescents articulated experiences silenced by family, friends, and the culture of medicine. She includes close readings and analyses of their writings, along with writing prompts and references to narrative medicine theory. This powerful book offers something new for medical and health professionals, medical humanities researchers, students, and the public.

Blood transfusion is considered a life-saving therapy since ancient times, but, at the same time, a high-risk procedure. Nowadays the common perception is that infection is the greatest risk, even if the blood has never been safer from this point of view. Currently, the residual risk of transfusion must be related mainly to immunological mechanisms underlying to AB0 and minor blood systems, to compatibility of blood transfused and to development of irregular antibodies in transfused patients.

"Transfusion Medicine and Patient Safety" aims to provide the basic of immunohematology to readers and to analyze the transfusional process highlighting the most critical points, thus more exposed to errors.

Screening on blood and blood components for infectious diseases along with the surveillance action on emerging viruses results in the drastic reduction of post-transfusion infection, together with the potential to further increase the level of security from infection through the inactivation of blood components.
The text also describes the major diagnostic systems and organizational models that modern technology provides us with a correct immunohematological diagnosis and an appropriate trasfusional therapy.

‘Because at the heart of the apparent conflict between public health concerns and capitalistic interests, market access for pharmaceuticals is largely driven by political considerations, the difference with usual consumer goods being that pharmaceuticals are saving lives or years of life in good health’. Pharmaceuticals are mainly sourced by companies investing in costly R&D and production at their own risks to make them globally available. However, access for patients in need can be restricted due to insufficient medical resources and/or unaffordability. The dilemma between rewarding innovation with prices in line with value and risks for companies and ensuring affordability for patients or health insurances has become critical for all stakeholders, with political and economic implications. The development of universal health coverage puts pressure on governments to control directly or indirectly reimbursement and prices of pharmaceuticals, whereas the flow of innovations addressing infectious, chronic, and life-threatening diseases, thanks to accelerated scientific progress, is growing constantly.

Management of pharmaceutical health care expenditure approach varies according to the historical, cultural, and economic backgrounds that contribute to building each health care system, and companies are confronted with a very complex environment to launch their new drugs and manage their lifecycle until loss of patent. This book explores the different models of health care systems (e.g., Europe, United States, Japan, China) and the criteria and processes for decision making in coverage and pricing of pharmaceuticals. It also provides the analytic tools that are used to inform the decisions, and how market access strategy can be integrated in the product life cycle. Short case studies related to specific disease areas or methods are supporting exposed concepts and methods.

This book targets primarily students, but may prove useful to industry or insurance executives and eventually public decision makers with interest in the field: all will find relevant insights and sources to dig deeper into the topic. The content has been developed partially through a well received teaching program at CEIBS MBA since 2020.

Biogenic toxins are fascinating natural products characterized by an enormous diversity of chemical structures and pharmacological activities. They not only pose hazards to humans and animals, but they are important components in the interplay of substances and living beings in nature and, moreover, important sources for new drugs.

Numerous images of plants and chemical structural formulas complete the book, as well as extensive references for further reading.

The multivolume reference is an essential resource for physicians, veterinarians, pharmacists, chemists, biochemists, food chemists and biologists, for students in the relevant fields, and maybe for interested laymen.

All aspects of natural toxins based on the latest scientific knowledge are included:

• All aspects of the toxicology of all living organisms and natural foods, chemistry, action mechanisms, symptoms of intoxications.
• The only book arranged on a strictly scientific base according to the biogenetic origin and chemical structure.

Natural Poisons and Venoms in 5 Volumes:

Volume 1: Plant Toxins: Terpenes and Steroids 2023, ISBN 978-3-11-072472-1

Volume 2: Plant Toxins: Polyketides, Phenylpropanoids and Further Compounds 2024, ISBN 978-3-11-072851-4

Volume 4: Animal Toxins 2023, ISBN 978-3-11-072854-5

Volume 5: Fungal and Microbial Toxins 2025, ISBN 978-3-11-072856-9

Now, more than ever, professionals can benefit from the power of location data, maps, and analytics in healthcare.  

Health professionals see the importance of the who, what, when, and where of data analytics. The “where” adds a crucial element because good healthcare begins locally and understanding the impacts of place leads to better health. Health professionals recognize the insights gained from visualizing and analyzing location data. Maps, dashboards, apps, and charts can serve as location analytic tools to quantify problems, make predictions, improve operations, assess infrastructure, and make better decisions overall.

GIS Jump Start for Health Professionals is a concise workbook that introduces location analytics available in geographic information systems (GIS) to health professionals, medical students, residents, fellows, nursing students, medical researchers, and others interested in health IT and informatics, health-care administration, and health policy. GIS Jump Start for Health Professionals provides hands-on tutorials that introduce the ArcGIS tools and shows how to use web-based data, storytelling apps, and much more. The book includes concepts and short video lectures to improve learning outcomes. Focused lessons get health professionals up and running quickly and experiencing first hand the value of location data, maps, and analytics.

Written by Kristen S. Kurland, an award-winning professor at Carnegie Mellon University and co-creator of the GIS Tutorial series, this book can be used as a short course or incorporated into another course. It is also valuable to self-learners who want location technology experience. 

Cartographies of Disease: Maps, Mapping, and Medicine, new expanded edition, is a comprehensive survey of the technology of mapping and its relationship to the battle against disease. This look at medical mapping advances the argument that maps are not merely representations of spatial realities but a way of thinking about relationships between viral and bacterial communities, human hosts, and the environments in which diseases flourish. Cartographies of Disease traces the history of medical mapping from its growth in the 19th century during an era of trade and immigration to its renaissance in the 1990s during a new era of globalization. Referencing maps older than John Snow's famous cholera maps of London in the mid-19th century, this survey pulls from the plague maps of the 1600s, while addressing current issues concerning the ability of GIS technology to track diseases worldwide. The original chapters have some minor updating, and two new chapters have been added. Chapter 13 attempts to understand how the hundreds of maps of Ebola revealed not simply disease incidence but the way in which the epidemic itself was perceived. Chapter 14 is about the spatiality of the disease and the means by which different cartographic approaches may affect how infectious outbreaks like ebola can be confronted and contained.

Find out what really goes on behind the scenes of long-term care facilities in Be Aware of That Nursing Home.

Drawing from Richard Danford’s unparalleled, hands-on experience and insight into the long-term care system and its impact on consumers and families, this resource serves as an essential guide for those navigating the complexities of choosing nursing home care, emphasizing the importance of dignity, rights, and quality of life. Not only a testament to Richard’s lifelong commitment to advocacy, it’s also a call to action for systemic change.

At a time when nursing home conditions are once again in the media, Be Aware of That Nursing Home offers a valuable perspective not commonly available to potential nursing home consumers and family members. What is available is slick, often misleading marketing created by an industry reaping massive profits off taxpayer dollars. Information attempting to influence policymakers is mostly provided by well-meaning academics, data experts, or attorneys who are one step removed from personally witnessing the everyday realities of nursing home environments. Those efforts are repeatedly squelched by the well-financed, powerful lobbyists of the long-term care industry. Otherwise, the tragic, unacceptable conditions in far too many nursing homes would never have happened.

Be Aware That Nursing Home informs consumers and families as to how today’s nursing homes came about, what tragedies occur daily, and what consumers need to know to protect themselves when choosing a facility. Not only is this information crucial for consumers and families, but it’s also important for the underappreciated, underpaid professionals attempting to serve in dysfunctional and often life-threatening environments. 

Volume VIII in the Ben cao gang mu series offers a complete translation of chapters 38 through 46, devoted to clothes, utensils, worms, insects, amphibians, animals with scales, and animals with shells.

The Ben cao gang mu is a sixteenth-century Chinese encyclopedia of medical matter and natural history by Li Shizhen (1518–1593). The culmination of a sixteen-hundred-year history of Chinese medical and pharmaceutical literature, it is considered the most important and comprehensive book ever written in the history of Chinese medicine and remains an invaluable resource for researchers and practitioners. This nine-volume series reveals an almost two-millennia-long panorama of wide-ranging observations and sophisticated interpretations, ingenious manipulations, and practical applications of natural substances for the benefit of human health. Paul Unschuld's annotated translation of the Ben cao gang mu, presented here with the original Chinese text, opens a rare window into viewing the people and culture of China's past.