New Books In Medicine

For many of the 40 million Americans who undergo anesthesia each year, it is the source of great fear and fascination. From the famous first demonstration of anesthesia in the Ether Dome at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1846 to today’s routine procedures that controls anxiety, memory formation, pain relief, and more, anesthesia has come a long way. But it remains one of the most extraordinary, unexplored corners of the medical world. In Counting Backwards: A Doctor’s Notes on Anesthesia (W. W. Norton and Company, 2017), Dr. Henry Jay Przybylo—a pediatric anesthesiologist with more than thirty years of experience—delivers an unforgettable account of the procedures, daily dramas, and fundamental mysteries. Przybylo has administered anesthesia more than 30,000 times in his career—erasing consciousness, denying memory, and immobilizing the body, and then reversing all of these effects—on newborn babies, screaming toddlers, sullen teenagers, even a gorilla. With compassion a

What role has the World Bank played in influencing health sector reform in Latin America? In her new book, Banking on Health: The World Bank and Health Sector Reform in Latin America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Shiri Noy explores this question and more using mixed methods, including interviews, quantitative analysis, and review of policy documents and archives. The book starts off by providing readers a history of the World Bank and its role in health reform. Even though it may seem as if the World Bank would have a similar solution across countries, Noy finds that involvement and plans are more variable due to the systems already in place within these countries. Noy then moves on to an analysis of health expenditures, finding surprising results that further drove her research project and curiosity. The book then explores three countries in turn: Argentina, Peru, and Costa Rica. This book provides rich analysis of a complex social issue and set of systems, sending the reader away with both empirical and theor

Anita Johnston, author of Eating in the Light of the Moon: How Women Can Transform Their Relationships with Food Through Myth, Metaphor, and Storytelling (Gurze Books, 2000), is an expert in the field of eating disorders treatment, who looks beyond eating itself in her approach. In this interview, Dr. Johnston describes why myth and metaphors are effective strategies for uncovering and understanding the function and meaning of disordered eating. Dr. Johnston shares examples of metaphors she uses in her book to illustrate the complexities of eating disorder recovery. Dr. Johnston explores food as metaphor, the difference between emotional and physical hunger, and why recovery looks more like a labyrinth than a maze. Anita Johnston is the Director of the Anorexia & Bulimia Center of Hawaii, which she co-founded in 1982 and is the Clinical Director and the Founder of the Ai Pono Intensive Out-Patient Eating Disorders Programs in Honolulu and ‘Ai Pono Maui, a residential treatment facility in Maui. Dr.

In the early twentieth century, Robert Hertz, a French anthropologist, and Cesare Lombroso, the Italian criminologist, debated the causes and consequences of left-handedness. According to Lombroso, left-handed individuals were more likely to be criminals. Hertz disagreed. For him, to restrict left-handedness was to suppress individual expression. In his book, On the Other Hand: Left Hand, Right Brain, Mental Disorder, and History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), Howard I. Kushner explores the fascinating and circuitous history of left-handedness. By looking at a wide variety of scientific research, as well as the cultural meanings attached to left-handedness, Kushner breaks down the binary between nature and nurture that has characterized most explanations of what some researchers have called non-right-handedness. Ultimately Kushner argues that discrimination against left-handers can be read as a barometer for a given society’s toleration of diversity.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megap

AIDS is one of the primary causes of death in Africa. Of the more than 24 million Africans infected with HIV, only about 54% have access to the treatment that they need. Despite the progress made in mitigating this disease in the global north, unfortunately, Africa is left behind. In her new book Doomed Interventions: The Failure of Global Responses to AIDs in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Kim Yi Dionne examines the obstacles to AIDs interventions in Africa. She challenges the narrative that the failure of these responses is because of insufficient funding or the lack of political will. She argues that designers of these intervention programs are often far removed from the agents who have to implement them and that the priorities between the international organizations who finance these interventions and the local people who have to navigate AIDs in Africa are often misaligned. She makes a case for local actors, priorities, and participation in the design and implementation of these intervention

Embracing a multi-perspectival authorial voice, Managing Madness: Weyburn Mental Hospital and the Transformation of Psychiatric Care in Canada (University of Manitoba Press, 2017), tells the story of the “last and largest” asylum in the British Commonwealth. From its founding in the 1920s until the age of deinstitutionalization, Weyburn Mental Hospital was central to the changing landscape of psychiatric care in Canada and beyond. Using a wide variety of documentary sources, Erika Dyck and Alex Deighton explore Weyburn’s rise and fall, from its role in Canada’s nation-building project to new experiments with LSD and the move towards community care. They also give voice to the often forgotten experience of patients, psychiatric nurses, and mental health activists.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Zoe Wool‘s ethnography of rehabilitation After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed (Duke University Press, 2015) describes how soldiers injured in the war on terror are pulled towards a normal and idealized American life (Duke University Press, 2015). She describes how the iconic military hospital orients its patients (mostly men) towards normative masculine domestic ideals in an attempt to assimilate them to ordinary life. By closely following their lives in and out of rehabilitation (clinical and domestic), Wool shows us how impossible and fraught this “ordinary” is as the men subvert and are caught between multiple desires and realities: to be home, whole, ordinary fathers and husbands, heroes and symbols of exceptionalism. The weight of life is carried by these soldiers and veterans who are asked to do so much cultural work in the service of their nation on and off the battlefield. Zoe Wool is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rice University, where her teaching and research incl

This podcast is usually devoted to book written about the past. The authors may be historians, or political scientists, or anthropologists, or even a member of the human rights community. But we’re almost always talking about a mass atrocity that took place ‘before.’ Sam Totten‘s new book Sudan’s Nuba Mountains People Under Siege: Accounts by Humanitarians in the Battle Zone (McFarland, 2017) is different. The book is a compilation of first hand accounts of people currently working in a crisis area. Some of are doctors, some journalists, some aid workers. Their contributions to the book are intensely personal, recounting experiences caring for the sick, communicating the truth, or simply trying to deliver food amidst the scorching heat and poor roads of the Nuba Mountains. Many are harrowing to read. All inspire a profound respect. But collectively they raise interesting questions. What does it mean to study genocide while being an activist? How can activists raise the visibility

Polio was a scourge that terrified generations of people throughout the United States and the rest of the world until Jonas Salk’s vaccine provided the first effective defense against it. In Jonas Salk: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2015), Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs chronicles the medical researcher whose success in developing a successful polio vaccine in the 1950s made him an international celebrity. Born to immigrant parents, Salk studied hard to graduate for college and earn his medical degree. His interest in helping all of humanity led Salk to pass on a career as a clinician in favor of one as a researcher in the burgeoning field of virology. After work during World War II on the first successful influenza vaccine Salk moved to Pittsburgh, where he soon found himself involved in a coordinated effort to defeat the disease. Salk’s vaccine became the first to achieve this. Yet as Jacobs demonstrates, the fame Salk won for his achievement came at a price. Though lionized the world over he found

In Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2010), Sarah D. Phillips offers a compelling investigation of disability policies and movements in Ukraine after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Scrupulously studied and researched, the data that the author presents reflect social and political changes that have been taking place in the country. Most importantly, this study is centered around people, around the lives of people who change our perception of life, love, and care and our understanding of self and other. In this regard, Sarah Phillips explores how official policies and informal movements, connected with the framing of the concept of disability, shape the ways people with physical impairments are integrated into social consciousness. As Sarah Phillips’s study shows, the concept of disability in Ukraine has undergone considerable transformations which were conditioned and triggered by historical circumstances. A particular attention is given to the

In 1976, the landmark supreme court case Estelle v. Gamble, established that under the Eighth Amendment “deliberate indifference” to the health needs of incarcerated individuals was tantamount to cruel and unusual punishment. Now, jails and prisons are one of the rare places in the contemporary U.S. where healthcare is deemed a right and not a privilege. In her new ethnography Jailcare: Finding the Safety Net for Women behind Bars (University of California Press, 2017), physician and Anthropologist, Carolyn Sufrin, examines what this means for incarcerated women when health care, coercion and violence coalesce. In addition to describing in detail how women experience healthcare and motherhood in custody, she offers us devastating diagnoses of how broken our current health and social safety nets are that women come to desire the cruel relative safety of jail. My conversation with Dr. Sufrin just begins to tackle the rich, beautiful and devastatingly complex lives of the women she encountered and ca

Between 1902 and 1934, hundreds of Native American men, women, and children were institutionalized at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians; only nine of them, however, were officially committed by court order. In Vanished in Hiawatha: The Story of the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), independent scholar Carla Joinson examines the history of the only insane asylum in United States history dedicated solely to the institutionalization of Native Americans. Vanished in Hiawatha further connects the establishment of the Canton Asylum with efforts to assimilate Indigenous populations during the first three decades of the twentieth century, and considers how and why the institution remained open for three decades, given the ongoing mismanagement and mistreatment of Native patients at the facility. Samantha M. Williams is a PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is currently writing her dissertation, which examines the history of the Stewart Ind

Katherine Paugh‘s new book The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition (Oxford University Press, 2017) examines the crucial role that reproduction took in the evolution of slavery in the British Caribbean. Using plantation records, Paugh reconstructs the life and work routine of Doll, an enslaved midwife tasked with delivering children on a Barbadian estate. Doll’s experience and approach butted up against the desires of slave reformers at the turn of the nineteenth century, who wanted to see a more routinized approach to enslaved women’s reproduction. As Paugh makes clear in her book, childbirth in the Caribbean became a critical goal for imperial observers who hoped to end the slave trade through a flourishing of natural reproduction in the colonies. This objective transformed the lives of enslaved people, and revolutionized the politics of slavery in the Anglophone world.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her new book, After the War: Returned Soldiers and the Mental and Physical Scars of World War I (UWA Publishing, 2017), Leigh Straw, a Senior Lecturer in Aboriginal Studies and History at the University of Notre Dame, explores the history of repatriation and return of WWI soldiers to Western Australia. The soldiers’ physical and mental scars, including tuberculosis and what we today call PTSD, did not end with the armistice, as soldiers and their families struggled with the consequences of wartime trauma well into the 1920s.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Drawing on an ethnography of Down’s syndrome screening in two UK clinics, Gareth M. Thomas‘ Down’s Syndrome and Reproductive Politics: Care, Choice, and Disability in the Prenatal Clinic (Routledge, 2017) explores how and why we are so invested in this practice and what effects this has on those involved. Informed by theoretical approaches that privilege the mundane and micro practices, discourses, materials, and rituals of everyday life, Downs Syndrome Screening and Reproductive Politics describes the banal world of the clinic and, in particular, the professionals contained within it who are responsible for delivering this programme. In so doing, it illustrates how Downs syndrome screening is downgraded and subsequently stabilised as a routine part of a pregnancy. Further, the book captures how this routinisation is deepened by a systematic, but subtle, framing of Downs syndrome as a negative pregnancy outcome. By unpacking the complex relationships between professionals, parents, technolog

Before the 1960s, doctors were generally in control of the treatment of drug addicts. And that made a certain sense, because drug addicts had something that looked a lot like a disease or mental illness. The trouble was that doctors had no effective way to treat drug addiction. Their best idea–Federal “narcotics farms,” one in Kentucky and one in Texas–kept junkies clean, but only by keeping them away from the drugs those junkies craved. In that sense, they were no more effective than prisons, though in fairness drug farms offered various treatment regimens that enabled some addicts to get and stay clean. Other than locking them up, the medical establishment had no good answer to the question “How do you cure someone of narcotics addiction?” Essentially, then, junkies (who could not spontaneously “kick,” and a lot do) usually ended up in one of three places: on the street, behind bars, or dead. Enter Charles Dederich. In 1958, Dederich, a veteran of AA and ex-dr

If you steered yourself away from books about brain science because you were interested in something completely different–psychoanalysis–then this is the book for you! This book will renew your appreciation for the revolutionary discovery and urgent need for psychoanalysis, as argued by one of the world’s leading neuroscientists. Mark Solms invented the word “neuropsychoanalyis” twenty years ago because he believed that brain science at that time was still in a primitive state of learning about “wetware,” when in fact the brain gives rise to a mind which has critical things to teach us about the brain. Psychoanalysis is the science of the mental that challenges the arrogant self-sufficiency of a purely biological approach that excludes the subjective phenomena that characterizes the healthy brain. The brain is not just an object, it is also a subject. The Feeling Brain (Karnac, 2015) is a collection of previously published papers that were selected to provide an intro

Anxiety has become a social epidemic. People feel anxious all the time about nearly everything: their work, families, and even survival. However, research shows that some of us are more prone to chronic anxiety than others, due in large part to experiences in utero and during the first year of life. My guest, psychologist Dr. Daniel Keating, explores these biological and genetic mechanisms in his new book, Born Anxious: The Lifelong Impact of Early Life Adversity–and How to Break the Cycle (St. Martin’s Press, 2017). His many years of research inform his ideas about the role of social inequality in elevated stress levels, and the impact of stress and adversity on gene expression and manifestations of anxiety. In our interview, we talk about the implications of these findings for understanding why some people perpetually feel tightly-wound and easily triggered. He also shares his suggestions for breaking this cycle and reducing our proneness to anxiety. Daniel P. Keating is a professor of psycholog

The book discussed here is entitled The Calculus of Happiness: How a Mathematical Approach to Life Adds Up to Health, Wealth, and Love (Princeton University Press, 2017) by Oscar Fernandez. If the thought of calculus makes you nervous, don’t worry, you won’t need calculus to enjoy and appreciate this book. Its actually an intriguing way to introduce some of the precalculus topics that will later be needed in a calculus class, through the examination of some of the basic mathematical ideas that can be used to analyze the problems of how to attain relationship bliss, live long, and prosper and all without being a Vulcan.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you’ve been hospitalized in Europe, North America, Australia or the Middle East in recent years, chances are that at some point a nurse from the Philippines has had some part in your treatment. As Megha Amrith writes in the introduction to Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia (NIAS Press, 2017), Filipinos today comprise one of the largest global diasporas of medical workers, with the Philippines having over 400 nursing colleges, many of them aimed primarily at preparing graduates for work abroad. But as the book’s subtitle indicates, it is a diaspora that stretches not only beyond but also across Asia. And whereas other studies have looked at the political economy of care in the West, Caring for Strangers is an ethnographic exploration of Filipino medical workers in Singapore. The story it tells is one of a community of women, and a few men, occupying an ambiguous space somewhere in-between their local counterparts on the one hand and tens of thousands of unskilled Filipino mi