Medical

A tiny mutation on the X chromosome can shape a family’s history. Passed down from a “carrier” parent to a child, fragile X syndrome is the most common inherited cause of intellectual disability and autism. Beyond that—and a rarity among genetic disorders—some fragile X carriers not only transmit the mutation but also experience related conditions themselves. In such cases, carriers can have tremors, infertility, and psychiatric disorders that complicate raising children with fragile X syndrome—and all too often, they suffer in silence.

The Carriers investigates this common but still little-known genetic condition and its life-altering consequences. Anne Skomorowsky reveals how this disorder afflicts families across generations, telling the stories of the mothers and grandparents of fragile X patients and considering how genes interact with family dynamics. She interweaves the personal narratives and family histories of the people affected by fragile X disorders with clear and accessible explanations of the science behind them. Skomorowsky unpacks the latest research on the fragile X mutation and explores the history of its discovery. She highlights the roles of women as carriers, caregivers, and researchers who have made astonishing scientific breakthroughs over the last three decades.

The Carriers is an essential book for fragile X families, including those just learning they are carriers, and for all readers interested in the complexities of heredity, the ethical dilemmas of genetic medicine, and the relationship between genes and personality.

A staggering 3 million people in the United States alone have been diagnosed with epilepsy. When you consider that migraines share very similar characteristics to seizures, you can add another 35 million to the pool. Then consider the fact that neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's may be the long-term result of uncontrolled damage to the brain from epilepsy and migraines. This means a very large number of people alive today are affected by this process that produces a progressive degeneration of the brain.

Migraines and Epilepsy: How to find relief, live well and protect your brain , unlike others books on this topic, brings together many of the concepts that help to heal your brain, improve brain function, and eliminate debilitating conditions that negatively affect your brain. It is designed as a guide to protect the most important thing you own-your brain. While nothing in the physiology of the brain is guaranteed, the majority of those who follow the recommendations in this book will find relief.

But, that is not the way it has to be. Today, it is possible for some stroke victims to make a full recovery. Gerry Purdy knows this because his wife, Alicia – a healthy, beautiful and smart person – suffered a stroke on August 23, 2011 and was able to return to her vivacious self.

Our Stroke of Luck portrays the life they had together. Gerry and Alicia had dated in high school and got back together for their 45th high school reunion. Life was good. And then – Bam! – without warning Alicia suffered a stroke.

Find out how Alicia’s neurosurgeon was able to remove the clot from her brain that caused the stroke. Experience the tense ups and downs of that night—one moment seeming as though she might be paralyzed on her left side for the rest of her life and then the next seeing a flash of hope.

Gerry and Alicia were lucky that the radiologist was able to identify the clot in her brain and lucky to get her transferred to the Marcus Stroke Center at Grady Hospital in Atlanta. They were lucky that Dr. Nogueira was able to extract the clot from Alicia’s brain. And, finally, they were lucky that she was able to make a full recovery. Truly, this was their stroke of luck.

What if a natural solution had been there all along, just overlooked by the pharmaceutical industry?

When a new, natural, and non-toxic way to address cancer is being discovered, it is a game changer that does not go unnoticed in the scientific community. But instead of being hailed and embraced, it is fiercely opposed by prominent scientists with strong ties with the pharmaceutical industry and the might of the government is called to the rescue. As a result, we are losing the war on cancer.

Mirko Beljanski, PhD, one of the first green molecular biologists, was called upon by President Mitterrand of France to treat his prostate cancer, allowing him to reach his second term in office, but upon his death, Beljanski became the subject of relentless persecution aimed at wiping out this information. In Winning the War on Cancer, his daughter Sylvie Beljanski outlines her journey of learning about her father’s discoveries, and ensuring his legacy is available to all those struggling with the disease today.

In today’s complex healthcare environment, implementing evidence-based care into real-world practices is difficult and time consuming. Even methods that are known to be effective allow for limited flexibility and therefore fail as often as they succeed. Through much study and experimentation, Malaz Boustani, MD, MPH, Jose Azar, MD, and Craig A. Solid, PhD have come to understand how individuals’ interactions within the complex social systems of hospitals, clinics, and other care delivery organizations shape the decisions and behaviors of those involved. Upon this foundation and through leveraging theories of behavioral economics, we have developed the Agile Implementation Model, a process for selecting, adapting, implementing, evaluating, sustaining, and scaling evidence-based healthcare interventions.

This model acknowledges the uniqueness of each individual facility and considers individuals within the system to be semiautonomous but interconnected. In tandem with illustrative examples, Agile Implementation describes the underlying theories and frameworks that explain health delivery systems and lays out the 8 steps of the Agile Implementation Model. Upon completing Agile Implementation, readers have a better understanding of why certain quality initiatives succeed while others fail and have tangible, actionable tools for implementing effective and sustainable change in the healthcare setting.

The Medicine Cabinet is a beautifully curated and expertly written compendium of over 100 astonishing objects related to the story of medicine.

Each object is cared for by London's Science Museum, which houses one of the largest and most significant collections of medical artefacts in the world - including a Bronze Age trepanned skull, healing water from an Ancient Greek well, a seventeenth-century barber's pole, a pharmacist's ceramic leech jar, a gold memento mori ring, First World War blood transfusion apparatus and a prototype MRI scanner.

Each object is a profound reminder of the fragility of human existence, but also of the extraordinary lengths gone to by scientists, medical professionals and ordinary people in the attempt to conquer mortality. Published in association with the Science Museum, The Medicine Cabinet is a rich visual exploration of life, death and everything in between.

This book seeks to integrate the history of mental health nursing with the wider history of institutional and community care. It develops new research questions by drawing together a concern with exploring the class, gender, skills and working conditions of practitioners with an assessment of the care regimes staff helped create and patients’ experiences of them. Contributors from a range of disciplines use a variety of source material to examine both continuity and change in the history of care over two centuries. The book benefits from a foreword by Mick Carpenter and will appeal to researchers and students interested in all aspects of the history of nursing and the history of care. The book is also designed to be accessible to practitioners and the general reader.
This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3, Good health and well-being.

This book examines the work that nurses of many differing nations undertook during the Crimean War, the Boer War, the Spanish Civil War, both World Wars and the Korean War.

It makes an excellent and timely contribution to the growing discipline of nursing wartime work. In its exploration of multiple nursing roles during the wars, it considers the responsiveness of nursing work, as crisis scenarios gave rise to improvisation and the – sometimes quite dramatic – breaking of practice boundaries. The originality of the text lies not only in the breadth of wartime practices considered, but also the international scope of both the contributors and the nurses they consider. It will therefore appeal to academics and students in the history of nursing and war, nursing work and the history of medicine and war from across the globe.

Negotiating Nursing explores how the Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service (Q.A.s) salvaged their soldier-patients within the sensitive gender negotiations of what should and could constitute nursing work and where that work could occur. The book argues that the Q.A.s, an entirely female force during the Second World War, were essential to recovering men from the battlefield and for the war, despite concerns about women’s presence on the frontline. Using personal testimony the book maps the developments in nurses’ work as they created a legitimate space for themselves in war zones and established their position as the expert at the bedside. Yet, despite the acknowledgement of nurses’ vital role in the medical service, their position was gendered. As the women of Britain were returned to the home post-war, it was the military nurses’ womanhood that stymied their considerable skills from being transferred to the new welfare state.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

Medicine was transformed in the eighteenth century. Aligning the trajectories of intellectual and material wealth, this book uncovers how medicine acquired a new materialism as well as new materials in the context of global commerce and warfare. Bringing together a wide range of sources, this book argues that the intellectual developments in European medicine were inextricably linked to histories of conquest, colonization and the establishment of colonial institutions.

This is the first book to trace the links between colonialism and medicine on such a geographical and conceptual scale. Chakrabarti examines the texts, plants, minerals, colonial hospitals, dispensatories and the works of surgeons, missionaries and travellers to demonstrate that these were shaped by the material constitution of eighteenth century European colonialism.

This book will appeal to experts and students in histories of medicine, science, and imperialism as well as south Asian and Caribbean history.

This book explores local medical, lay and legal negotiations with the asylum system in nineteenth-century Ireland. It deepens our understanding of attitudes towards the mentally ill and institutional provision for the care and containment of people diagnosed as insane. Uniquely, it expands the analytical focus beyond asylums incorporating the impact that the Irish poor law, petty session courts and medical dispensaries had on the provision of services. It provides insights into life in asylums for patients and staff. The study uses Carlow asylum district – comprised of counties Wexford, Kildare, Kilkenny and Carlow in the southeast of Ireland – to explore the ‘place of the asylum’ in the period.

This book will be useful for scholars of nineteenth-century Ireland, the history of psychiatry and medicine in Britain and Ireland, Irish studies and gender studies.

What is autism and where has it come from? Increased diagnostic rates, the rise of the 'neurodiversity' movement, and growing autism journalism, have recently fuelled autism's fame and controversy. The metamorphosis of autism is the first book to explain our current fascination with autism by linking it to a longer history of childhood development. Drawing from a staggering array of primary sources, Bonnie Evans traces autism back to its origins in the early twentieth century and explains why the idea of autism has always been controversial and why it experienced a 'metamorphosis' in the 1960s and 1970s.

Evans takes the reader on a journey of discovery from the ill-managed wards of 'mental deficiency' hospitals, to high-powered debates in the houses of parliament, and beyond. The book will appeal to a wide market of scholars and others interested in autism.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

How did skilled nursing practice develop to become an essential part of the modern health system? This book provides some important answers to this question. It traces the history and development of nursing practice in Europe and North America, exploring two broad categories of nursing work: the ‘hands-on’ clinical work of nurses in hospitals and the work of nurses in public health, which involved health screening, health education and public health crisis management. The book contains rich case studies of nursing practice across diverse settings in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As well as examining ‘what nurses did’, it explores the significance and meaning of nursing work, for nurses themselves, their patients and their communities, and examines developments in practice against a backdrop of social, cultural, political and economic drivers and constraints.

This book will be of interest to academics and clinical nurses alike. It is also an ideal textbook for undergraduate nursing programmes, providing students with rich accounts of the history of their own disciplinary practice.

The First World War was the first ‘total war’. Its industrial weaponry damaged millions of men and drove whole armies underground into dangerously unhealthy trenches. Many were killed. Many more suffered terrible, life-threatening injuries: wound infections such as gas gangrene and tetanus, exposure to extremes of temperature, emotional trauma and systemic disease. In an effort to alleviate this suffering, tens of thousands of women volunteered to serve as nurses. Of these, some were experienced professionals, while others had undergone only minimal training. But regardless of their preparation, they would all gain a unique understanding of the conditions of industrial warfare. Until recently their contributions, both to the saving of lives and to our understanding of warfare, have remained largely hidden from view. By combining biographical research with textual analysis, Nurse writers of the great war opens a window onto their insights into the nature of nursing and the impact of warfare.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

Mass vaccination campaigns are political projects that presume to protect individuals, communities, and societies. Like other pervasive expressions of state power - taxing, policing, conscripting - mass vaccination arouses anxiety in some people but sentiments of civic duty and shared solidarity in others. This collection of essays gives a comparative overview of vaccination at different times, in widely different places and under different types of political regime.

Core themes in the chapters include immunisation as an element of state formation; citizens' articulation of seeing (or not seeing) their needs incorporated into public health practice; allegations that donors of development aid have too much influence on third-world health policies; and an ideological shift that regards vaccines more as profitable commodities than as essential tools of public health.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

Therapeutic landscapes uniquely brings together historical and contemporary debates on the use of the garden as a therapeutic space. Hickman narrates the story of the landscapes associated with psychiatric, general and specialist medical institutions and asks what did they look like, how were they used and how did this relate to medical concepts? It traces the history of these gardens from the grottos, Chinese galleries and summer houses of elite nineteenth-century lunatic asylums, through Florence Nightingale’s championing of the Victorian pavilion hospital design with its courtyard gardens, and the open-air institutions of the Edwardian period with their revolving chalets. It concludes with a discussion of new hospital gardens being created by designers such as Dan Pearson in the twenty-first century.

This book will be essential reading for those interested in the histories of place, space and material culture, and in particular medical historians, garden historians and historical geographers.

Communicating the History of Medicine critically assesses the idea of audience and communication in medical history. This collection offers a range of case studies on academic outreach from historical and current perspectives. It questions the kind of linear thinking often found in policy or research assessment, instead offering a more nuanced picture of both the promises and pitfalls of engaging audiences for research in the humanities.

For whom do academic researchers in the humanities write? For academics and, indirectly, at least for students, but there are hopes that work reaches broader audiences and that it will have an impact on policy or among professional experts outside of the humanities. Today impact is more and more discussed in the context of research assessment. Seen from a media theoretical perspective, impact may however be described as a case of ‘audiencing’ and the creation of audiences by means of media technologies.

At the core of this book are three central contentions: That medical welfare became the totemic function of the Old Poor Law in its last few decades; that the poor themselves were able to negotiate this medical welfare rather than simply being subject to it; and that being doctored and institutionalised became part of the norm for the sick poor by the 1820s, in a way that had not been the case in the 1750s.

Exploring the lives and medical experiences of the poor largely in their own words, Sickness, medical welfare and the English poor offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of the so-called crisis of the Old Poor Law from the later eighteenth century. The sick poor became an insistent presence in the lives of officials and parishes and the (largely positive) way that communities responded to their dire needs must cause us to rethink the role and character of the poor law.
This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 1, No poverty.

This book explores the development of modern transatlantic prosthetic industries in nineteenth and twentieth centuries and reveals how the co-alignment of medicine, industrial capitalism, and social norms shaped diverse lived experiences of prosthetic technologies and in turn, disability identities.

Through case studies that focus on hearing aids, artificial tympanums, amplified telephones, artificial limbs, wigs and dentures, this book provides a new account of the historic relationship between prostheses, disability and industry. Essays draw on neglected source material, including patent records, trade literature and artefacts, to uncover the historic processes of commodification surrounding different prostheses and the involvement of neglected companies, philanthropists, medical practitioners, veterans, businessmen, wives, mothers and others in these processes.

Through its study of diabetes care in twentieth-century Britain, Managing diabetes, managing medicine offers the first historical monograph to explore how the decision-making and labour of medical professionals became subject to bureaucratic regulation and managerial oversight. Where much existing literature has cast health care management as either a political imposition or an assertion of medical control, this work positions managerial medicine as a co-constructed venture. Although driven by different motives, doctors, nurses, professional bodies, government agencies and international organisations were all integral to the creation of managerial systems, working within a context of considerable professional, political, technological, economic and cultural change.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

Reforming food in post-famine Ireland: Medicine, science and improvement, 1845–1922 is the first dedicated study of how and why Irish eating habits dramatically transformed between the famine and independence. It also investigates the simultaneous reshaping of Irish food production after the famine. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the book draws from the diverse methodological disciplines of medical history, history of science, cultural studies, Irish studies, gender studies and food studies. Making use of an impressive range of sources, it maps the pivotal role of food in the shaping of Irish society onto a political and social backdrop of famine, Land Wars, political turbulence, the First World War and the struggle for independence. It will be of interest to historians of medicine and science as well as historians of modern Irish social, economic, political and cultural history.
This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 2, Zero hunger.

Many people are shocked upon discovering that tens of thousands of innocent persons in the United States were involuntarily sterilized, forced into institutions, and otherwise maltreated within the course of the eugenic movement (1900–30). Such social control efforts are easier to understand when we consider the variety of dehumanizing and fear-inducing rhetoric propagandists invoke to frame their potential victims. This book details the major rhetorical themes employed within the context of eugenic propaganda, drawing largely on original sources of the period. Early in the twentieth century the term “moron” was developed to describe the primary targets of eugenic control. This book demonstrates how the image of moronity in the United States was shaped by eugenicists.

This book will be of interest not only to disability and eugenic scholars and historians, but to anyone who wants to explore the means by which pejorative metaphors are used to support social control efforts against vulnerable community groups.

Recycling the disabled: Army, medicine, and modernity in WWI Germany examines the 'medical organisation' of Imperial Germany for total war. Faced with mounting casualties and a growing labour shortage, German military, industrial, and governmental officials turned to medical experts for assistance in the total mobilisation of society. Through an investigation of developments in orthopaedic medicine, prosthetic technology, military medical organisation and the cultural history of disability, Heather Perry reveals how the pressures of modern industrial warfare not only transformed medical ideas and treatments for injured soldiers, but also transformed social and cultural expectations of the disabled body – expectations that long outlasted the war.

This book is ideal for scholars and students interested in war, medicine, disability, science and technology, and modern Germany.

Migrant architects of the NHS draws on forty-five oral history interviews and extensive archival research to offer a radical reappraisal of how the National Health Service was made. It tells the story of migrant South Asian doctors who became general practitioners in the NHS. Imperial legacies, professional discrimination and an exodus of UK-trained doctors combined to direct these doctors towards work as GPs in some of the most deprived parts of the UK. In some areas, they made up over half of the general practitioner workforce. The NHS was structurally dependent on them and they shaped British society and medicine through their agency.

Aimed at students and academics with interests in the history of immigration, immigration studies, the history of medicine, South Asian studies and oral history. It will also be of interest to anyone who wants to know more about how Empire and migration have contributed to making Britain what it is today.

Physick and the family offers new insights into the early modern sickness experience, through a study of the medical history of Wales.

This first ever monograph of early modern Welsh medicine utilises a large body of newly discovered source material, numerous approaches and methodologies and makes a significant contribution to debates in medical history; including economies of knowledge, domestic medicine and care, material culture and the rural medical marketplace. Drawing on sources from probates to parish records, diaries to domestic remedy collections, Withey offers new directions for recovering the often obscure medical worldview of the ‘ordinary’ person.
This innovative study will appeal to anyone interested in the social history of the early modern period. Its multi-disciplinary approach will appeal to a broad spectrum of academics and scholars, and will enhance a range of courses and modules both in medical history and in social history more widely.

The making of British bioethics provides the first in-depth study of how philosophers, lawyers and other 'outsiders' came to play a major role in discussing and helping to regulate issues that used to be left to doctors and scientists. It details how British bioethics emerged thanks to a dynamic interplay between sociopolitical concerns and the aims of specific professional groups and individuals who helped create the demand for outside involvement and transformed themselves into influential 'ethics experts'. Highlighting this interplay helps us appreciate how issues such as embryo research and assisted dying became high-profile 'bioethical' concerns in the late twentieth century, and why different groups now play a critical role in developing regulatory standards and leading public debates. The book draws on a wide range of original sources and will be of interest to historians of medicine and science, general historians and bioethicists.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

Whether in the Swiss countryside or in a doctor's office in Boston, in German, English or French hospitals or within multinational organizations, with early vaccinations or with new pharmaceuticals from Big Pharma today, or in early modern Saxon mining towns or in Prussian military healthcare – for at least 500 years, accounting has been an essential part of medical practice with significant moral, social and epistemological implications. Covering the period between 1500–2000, the book examines in short case studies the importance of calculative practices for medicine in very different contexts. Thus, Accounting for Health offers a synopsis of the extent to which accounting not only influenced medical practices over centuries, but shaped modern medicine as a whole.
This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3, Good health and well-being.

Many health, environmental, and social challenges across the globe – from diabetes to climate change – are regularly discussed in terms of imbalances in biological, ecological, and social systems. Yet, as contributions to this collection demonstrate, while the pressures of modernity have long been held to be pathogenic, strategies for addressing modern excesses and deficiencies of bodies and minds have frequently focused on the agency of the individual, self-knowledge, and individual choices. This volume explores how concepts of ‘balance’ have been central to modern politics, medicine, and society, analysing the diverse ways in which balanced and unbalanced selfhoods have been subject to construction, intervention, and challenge across the long twentieth century.

Through original chapters on subjects as varied as obesity control, fatigue and the regulation of work, and the physiology of exploration in extreme conditions, Balancing the self explores how the mechanisms and meanings of balance have been framed historically. Together, contributions examine the positive narratives that have been attached to the ideals and practices of ‘self-help’, the diverse agencies historically involved in cultivating new ‘balanced’ selves, and the extent to which rhetorics of empowerment and responsibility have been used for a variety of purposes, from disciplining bodies to cutting social security. With contributions from leading and emerging scholars such as Dorothy Porter, Alex Mold, Vanessa Heggie, Chris Millard, and Natasha Feiner, Balancing the self generates new insights into emerging fields of health governance, subjectivity, and balance.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

Germs and governance brings together leading historians, practitioners and policy makers to consider the past, present and future of hospital infection control. Combining historical case-studies with practitioner experiences, this volume offers a new understanding of the emergence of theories of germ transmission and containment and how these theories played out in real-world environments, networks and professional organisations.

Exploring the historical context in which technologies like gloves were developed and popularised, as well as how relationships between communities and hospitals, doctors and nurses, and the emerging role of hospital bacteriologists have shaped infection control practices, the collection emphasises the diverse contexts in which ideas about germs, infection and safety circulated. The volume also addresses the historical neglect of the critical role of nurses in the development and success of infection control measures.

Measurements, and their manipulation, have been underestimated as crucial historical forces motivating and guiding the way we think about disability.

Using measurement technology as a lens, and examining in particular the measurement of hearing and breathing, this book draws together several existing discussions on disability, phenomenology, healthcare, medical practice, big data, embodiment, and emerging medical and scientific technologies around the turn of the twentieth century. These are popular topics of scholarly attention but have not, until now, been considered as interconnected topics within a single book. As such, this work connects several important, and usually separate academic subject areas and historical specialisms. The standards embedded in instrumentation created strict, but, ultimately arbitrary thresholds of what is categorised as normal and abnormal. Considering these standards from a long historical perspective reveals how these dividing lines shifted when pushed.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY) licence.

Britain is sick and it needs saving. Covid-19 has brought death, disruption and disorder. It has revealed fundamental failures in public policy and our approach to health. For years, the same failures have perpetuated a host of modern plagues - long-running deadly epidemics in diabetes, depression and heart disease. These plagues pose systemic risks to society itself.

In this timely book, Yuille and Ollier envisage a society that always puts the health of citizens first: the ‘Health Society’. The time for dithering and tinkering has passed. Prevention of disease is a task for all branches of government – not just the NHS but also for every workplace, employer, community and citizen. The ‘Health Society’ means working in radically new ways to extend our healthy lives and sustainably increase national prosperity.

Saving sick Britain follows the science and lays down a challenge to us all: are we ready to make the change required to end these modern plagues? In answering the question the book helps steer the reader towards rethinking what both 'prevention' and ‘health’ mean in modern Britain.
This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3, Good health and well-being.

The early 2020s marked the fortieth anniversary of the first confirmed cases of AIDS and a new wave of historical interest in the ongoing epidemic. This edited collection showcases some of this exciting new work, with a particular focus on less well-known histories from western Europe. Featuring research from social, cultural and public historians, sociologists and area studies scholars, its eight chapters address experiences, events and memories across regions and nations including Scotland, Wales, Italy, Norway and the Netherlands, paying careful attention to often-overlooked groups including drug users, sex workers, nurses, mothers and people in prison. Offering new perspectives on the development and implementation of policy, the nature of activism and expertise and which (or whose) histories are remembered, it is essential reading not only for historians of health but also for all those working in HIV/AIDS studies.

Electronic versions of chapters 3, 4, 6, 7 and 8 are available under a creative commons licence: www.manchesterhive.com/view/9781526151223/9781526151223.xml

Brilliant, volatile and invariably male, the surgeon stereotype is a widespread and instantly recognisable part of western culture. Setting out to anatomise this stereotype, Cold, hard steel offers an exciting new history of modern and contemporary British surgery.

The book draws on archival materials and original interviews with surgeons, analysing them alongside a range of fictional depictions, from the Doctor in the House novels to Mills & Boon romances and the pioneering soap opera Emergency Ward 10. Presenting a unique social, cultural and emotional history, it sheds light on the development and maintenance of the surgical stereotype and explains why it has proved so enduring.

At the same time, the book explores the more candid and compassionate image of the surgeon that has begun to emerge in recent years, revealing how a series of high-profile memoirs both challenge the surgical stereotype and simultaneously confirm it.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

The past 30 years have seen risk become a major field of study, most recently with the COVID-19 pandemic positioning it at the centre of public awareness, yet there is limited understanding of how risk can and should be used in policy making.

This book provides an accessible guide to the key elements of risk in policy making, including its role in rhetoric to legitimise decisions and choices.

Using risk as a framework, it examines how policy makers in a range of countries responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and explains why some were more successful than others.

What is the likelihood that common chemicals such as bisphenol-A, which is found in plastic water bottles, are harming us? Should shoppers be concerned about pesticide residues on fruits and vegetables in the supermarket produce aisle? Are we risking adverse health effects when we use insect repellent that contains DEET or slather on sunscreen? Modern life requires us to navigate an endless sea of chemicals. How do we know whether we need to worry about them?

This book is a layperson’s guide to understanding chemical risk. The toxicologist Gerald A. LeBlanc offers a nontechnical overview of the key factors in evaluating whether exposure to chemicals in our daily lives could be harmful. He leads readers through the basic concepts of risk assessment using real-world examples. LeBlanc emphasizes that chemical hazard depends on the level of exposure and provides practical strategies for sensible decision making. The book features a series of accessible case studies describing how we all can reach rational conclusions about the danger of typical chemical exposures we experience every day.

Giving nonexpert readers the tools to understand chemical risks, this book shows how critical thinking and science literacy can help us live with less fear and anxiety and make reasonable choices when confronted with potential hazards.

This volume draws together current research on dyslexia and literacy in multilingual settings across disciplines and methodologies. The contributors, all internationally recognised in the field, address developmental and acquired literacy difficulties and dyslexia in a range of language contexts including EAL/EFL. The book uses theories and analytical frameworks of a critical nature to reveal prejudicial social practices, and suggests future research directions towards a critical re-consideration of current understandings of dyslexia in multilingual settings, with a view to foregrounding the potential for interdisciplinarity. The book also suggests ways forward for evidence-informed practice, and it will be a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners and students alike.

Motor speech disorders are a common accompaniment of a whole range of neurological conditions, from stroke, brain injury and Parkinson’s disease through to many rarer conditions. This book aims to aid understanding of the nature of motor speech disorders from a cross-language perspective, in contrast to the largely English-centric nature of research and practice recommendations to date. The book looks not just at how these motor speech disorders are assessed and treated in other countries, but also examines how underlying speech impairments differ according to the language someone speaks. The book studies the underlying neurological, neurophysiological and neurophonetic characteristics of motor speech disorders in different language contexts, and discusses the implications these have for clinical rehabilitation. This significantly adds to debates around the theoretical understanding and clinical management of motor speech disorders.

This book brings together twelve previously unpublished language profiles based on the original Language Assessment, Remediation and Screening Procedure (LARSP). The languages featured are: Afrikaans, Bulgarian, Cantonese, Finnish, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Malay and Swedish. Each chapter includes a grammatical sketch of the language, details of typical language development in speakers of the language, as well as a description of and justification for the profile itself. The book will be an invaluable resource for speech-language pathologists and others wishing to analyse the grammatical abilities of individuals speaking one of these languages. This new collection complements a previous book in this series on the same theme: Assessing Grammar: The Languages of LARSP (Ball et al., 2012,).

Global migration continues to increase, and with it comes increasing linguistic diversity. This presents obvious challenges for both healthcare provider and patient, and the chapters in this volume represent a range of international perspectives on language barriers in health care. A variety of factors influence the best ways of approaching and overcoming these language barriers, including cultural, geographical, political and practical considerations, and as a result a range of approaches and solutions are suggested and discussed. The authors in this volume discuss a wide range of countries and languages, and cover issues that will be familiar to all healthcare practitioners, including the role of informal interpreters, interpreting in a clinical setting, bilingual healthcare practitioners and working with languages with comparatively small numbers of speakers.