Medicine in America PDF Download

Author: James H. Cassedy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
"Well written, with a very useful bibliographical essay and index, this book can be recommended for medical and general readers alike."--Guenter B. Risse, M.D., Ph.D., Journal of the American Medical Association. "The best brief history of health care in America since Richard H. Shryock's classic survey appeared over thirty years ago."--Ronald L. Numbers, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309047420
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Americans are accustomed to anecdotal evidence of the health care crisis. Yet, personal or local stories do not provide a comprehensive nationwide picture of our access to health care. Now, this book offers the long-awaited health equivalent of national economic indicators. This useful volume defines a set of national objectives and identifies indicatorsâ€"measures of utilization and outcomeâ€"that can "sense" when and where problems occur in accessing specific health care services. Using the indicators, the committee presents significant conclusions about the situation today, examining the relationships between access to care and factors such as income, race, ethnic origin, and location. The committee offers recommendations to federal, state, and local agencies for improving data collection and monitoring. This highly readable and well-organized volume will be essential for policymakers, public health officials, insurance companies, hospitals, physicians and nurses, and interested individuals.

Author: Paul Starr
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780465079353
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description
Winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize in American History, this is a landmark history of how the entire American health care system of doctors, hospitals, health plans, and government programs has evolved over the last two centuries. "The definitive social history of the medical profession in America....A monumental achievement."—H. Jack Geiger, M.D., New York Times Book Review

Author: Ira Rutkow
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439171734
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
A timely, authoritative, and entertaining history of medicine in America by an eminent physician Despite all that has been written and said about American medicine, narrative accounts of its history are uncommon. Until Ira Rutkow’s Seeking the Cure, there have been no modern works, either for the lay reader or the physician, that convey the extraordinary story of medicine in the United States. Yet for more than three centuries, the flowering of medicine—its triumphal progress from ignorance to science—has proven crucial to Americans’ under-standing of their country and themselves. Seeking the Cure tells the tale of American medicine with a series of little-known anecdotes that bring to life the grand and unceasing struggle by physicians to shed unsound, if venerated, beliefs and practices and adopt new medicines and treatments, often in the face of controversy and scorn. Rutkow expertly weaves the stories of individual doctors—what they believed and how they practiced—with the economic, political, and social issues facing the nation. Among the book’s many historical personages are Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington (whose timely adoption of a controversial medical practice probably saved the Continental Army), Benjamin Rush, James Garfield (who was killed by his doctors, not by an assassin’s bullet), and Joseph Lister. The book touches such diverse topics as smallpox and the Revolutionary War, the establishment of the first medical schools, medicine during the Civil War, railroad medicine and the beginnings of specialization, the rise of the medical-industrial complex, and the thrilling yet costly advent of modern disease-curing technologies utterly unimaginable a generation ago, such as gene therapies, body scanners, and robotic surgeries. In our time of spirited national debate over the future of American health care amid a seemingly infinite flow of new medical discoveries and pharmaceutical products, Rutkow’s account provides readers with an essential historic, social, and even philosophical context. Working in the grand American literary tradition established by such eminent writer-doctors as Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Carlos Williams, Sherwin Nuland, and Oliver Sacks, he combines the historian’s perspective with the physician’s seasoned expertise. Capacious, learned, and gracefully told, Seeking the Cure will satisfy armchair historians and doctors alike, for, as Rutkow shows, the history of American medicine is a portrait of America itself.

Author: John Abramson
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060568534
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Using the examples of Vioxx, Celebrex, cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, and anti-depressants, Overdo$ed America shows that at the heart of the current crisis in American medicine lies the commercialization of medical knowledge itself. Drawing on his background in statistics, epidemiology, and health policy, John Abramson, M.D., an award-winning family doctor on the clinical faculty at Harvard Medical School, reveals the ways in which the drug companies have misrepresented statistical evidence, misled doctors, and compromised our health. The good news is that the best scientific evidence shows that reclaiming responsibility for your own health is often far more effective than taking the latest blockbuster drug. You -- and your doctor -- will be stunned by this unflinching exposé of American medicine.

Author: Richard Harrison Shryock
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801490934
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
First published in 1960, Richard Harrison Shryock's Medicine and Society in America: 1660-1860 remains a sweeping and informative introduction to the practice of medicine, the education of physicians, the understanding of health and disease, and the professionalization of medicine in the Colonial Era and the period of the Early Republic. Shryock details such developments as the founding of the first medical school in America (at the College of Philadelphia in 1765); the introduction of inoculation against smallpox in Boston in 1721; the creation of the Marine Hospital Service in 1799, under which all merchant marines were required to take out health insurance; and the state of medical knowledge on the eve of the Civil War.

Author: Howard F. Stein
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429718624
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
This book situates biomedicine within American culture and argues that the very organization and practice of medicine are themselves cultural. It demonstrates the symbolic construction of clinical reality within American biomedicine and shows how biomedicine never leaves the realm of the personal.

Author: Norman Gevitz
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801878336
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Osopathic medicine currently serves the health needs of more than 30 million Americans. In this book the author chronicles the history of this once-controversial medical movement from its origins in the nineteenth century to the present, describing the philosophy and practice of osteopathy as well as its impact on medical care.

Author: Carla Bittel
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469606445
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
In the late nineteenth century, as Americans debated the "woman question," a battle over the meaning of biology arose in the medical profession. Some medical men claimed that women were naturally weak, that education would make them physically ill, and that women physicians endangered the profession. Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842-1906), a physician from New York, worked to prove them wrong and argued that social restrictions, not biology, threatened female health. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America is the first full-length biography of Mary Putnam Jacobi, the most significant woman physician of her era and an outspoken advocate for women's rights. Jacobi rose to national prominence in the 1870s and went on to practice medicine, teach, and conduct research for over three decades. She campaigned for co-education, professional opportunities, labor reform, and suffrage--the most important women's rights issues of her day. Downplaying gender differences, she used the laboratory to prove that women were biologically capable of working, learning, and voting. Science, she believed, held the key to promoting and producing gender equality. Carla Bittel's biography of Jacobi offers a piercing view of the role of science in nineteenth-century women's rights movements and provides historical perspective on continuing debates about gender and science today.

Author: Marcos Cueto
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110702367X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
This book provides a clear, broad, and provocative synthesis of the history of Latin American medicine.