New Books in Medicine

What if prisoners were to write the history of their own prison? What might that tell them--and all of us--about the roots of the system that incarcerates so many millions of Americans?  In Besides, Who Would Believe a Prisoner?: Indiana Women's Carceral Institutions, 1848-1920 (New Press, 2023), a group of incarcerated women at the Indiana Women's Prison have assembled a chronicle of what was ori...

Dr. Pierce Salguero sits down with two guests, Ounkham Souksavanh and Elizabeth Elliott, to talk about community engagement and community health in Laos. They discuss how Elizabeth as a medical anthropologist, and Ounkham as a physician, work together to build trust and improve healthcare access across an ethnically and religiously diverse landscape. Along the way, we learn about Elizabeth’s exper...

In this eye-opening chronicle of scientific research on the brain in the early Cold War era, the acclaimed historian Andreas Killen traces the complex circumstances surrounding the genesis of our present-day fascination with this organ. The 1950s were a transformative, even revolutionary decade in the history of brain science. Using new techniques for probing brain activity and function, researche...

Landscapes of Care: Immigration and Health in Rural America (UNC Press, 2023) examines the ways immigrants, mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean, navigate the healthcare system in the United States. Since 1990, immigration to the United States has risen sharply, and rural areas have seen the highest increases. Thurka Sangaramoorthy reveals that the corporatization of healthcare delivery and...

Of some twelve thousand Union Civil War surgeons, only fourteen were Black men. This book is the first-ever comprehensive exploration of their lives and service.  In Without Concealment, Without Compromise: The Courageous Lives of Black Civil War Surgeons (Southern Illinois UP, 2023), Jill L. Newmark's outstanding research uncovers stories hidden for more than 150 years, illuminating the unique ex...

A sweeping history of the American health care state that reveals the public has been intentionally misled about the true role of government. The US government has always invested federal, state and local dollars in public health protection and prevention. Despite this public funding, however, Americans typically believe the current system is predominantly comprised of private actors with little g...

Ruth Yun-Ju Chen is a historian of mid-imperial China (600–1400). Her research interests lie in the histories of medicine, publishing, and material cultures during this period. Her first book, Good Formulas: Empirical Evidence in Mid-Imperial Chinese Medical Texts, will come out from the University of Washington Press in 2023. This book charts how early print culture reshaped strategies for presen...

Taylor McCall's The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe (Reaktion, 2023) is the first history of medieval European anatomical images. Richly illustrated, The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe explores the many ways in which medieval surgeons, doctors, monks, and artists understood and depicted human anatomy. Taylor McCall refutes the common misconception that Renaissance artists and anatomists such...

Advance Directives in Asia: A Socio-Legal Analysis (Cambridge UP, 2023) , edited by Daisy Cheung and Michael Dunn is the first book to consider the concept of advance directives in Asia. It is unique in its depth and breadth as it brings together an extensive number of Asian jurisdictions to draw out the ways that advance directives are regulated in law and practice across the region. In their ana...

What’s safer than baby powder? Parents have been trusting Johnson & Johnson for over 100 years to powder their baby’s bottoms. Yet, numerous studies have revealed the presence of trace amounts of asbestos in this talc-based powder. Thousands of parents now claim that this asbestos is responsible for their cancers. A Reuters investigation catalogued this evidence and the fact that J&J knew about th...

Vincanne Adams's book Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move (Duke UP, 2023) is part of a broader trend in anthropology that is developing new methods and techniques to study our increasingly polluted and toxic world. Adams takes Glyphosate as a case study and follows this chemical as it moves from the past to the present, from the lab to the dinner table, from outside ou...

In Turkey, circumcision is viewed as both a religious obligation and a rite of passage for young boys, as communities celebrate the ritual through gatherings, gifts, and special outfits. Yet the procedure is a potentially painful and traumatic ordeal. With the expansion of modern medicine, the social position of sünnetçi (male circumcisers) became subject to the institutional arrangements of Turke...

Heide Hausse's book The Malleable Body: Surgeons, Artisans, and Amputees in Early Modern Germany (Manchester University Press, 2023) uses amputation and prostheses to tell a new story about medicine and embodied knowledge-making in early modern Europe. It draws on the writings of craft surgeons and learned physicians to follow the heated debates that arose from changing practices of removing limbs...

Yi-Tang Lin received her BA in sociology at National Taiwan University and MA in MA Interdisciplinary Practices of Humanities and Social Sciences, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and École Normale Supériorie (ENS), France. She completed her PhD at the University of Lausanne. After spending several years at the University of Geneva for her postdoc research on "Rockefeller Fello...

Jenna Grant is a cultural anthropologist from the University of Washington and author of Fixing the Image: Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom Penh, published by University of Washington Press in 2022.  Introduced in Phnom Penh around 1990, at the twilight of socialism and after two decades of conflict and upheaval, ultrasound took root in humanitarian and then privatized medicine. Servi...

We all know that as a nation our mental health is in crisis. But what most don't know is that a critical ingredient in this debate, and a crucial part of the solution - what we eat - is being ignored. Nutrition has more influence on what we feel, who we become and how we behave than we could ever have imagined. Listen to Kimberly Wilson speak with Owen Bennett-Jones discuss the connection between...

Helen Redmond is a Harlem-based documentary filmmaker, journalist, licensed clinical social worker, and professor at NYU. As senior editor and a multimedia journalist at Filter, a website that covers drug news, she’s been documenting America’s addiction crisis and treatment system for years. Her new documentary, Swallow THIS: A Documentary About Methadone & COVID-19, is currently on tour across th...

Why do American Black people generally have worse health than American White people? To answer this question, Keisha Ray's book Black Health: The Social, Political, and Cultural Determinants of Black People's Health (Oxford UP, 2023) dispels any notion that Black people have inferior bodies that are inherently susceptible to disease. This is simply false racial science used to justify White suprem...

Sleep was taking over Anna's life. Despite multiple alarm clocks and powerful stimulants, the young Atlanta lawyer could sleep for thirty or even fifty hours at a stretch. She stopped working and began losing weight because she couldn't stay awake long enough to eat. Anna's doctors didn't know how to help her until they tried an oddball drug, connected with a hunch that something produced by her b...

In this episode of High Theory, Eram Alam talks with us about shortage. A political tool, rather than a natural lack, the concept of a shortage changes the flows of goods and people across borders and space. The concept of a doctor shortage was used in the US immigration reform of the 1960s to recruit discount elite labor from newly postcolonial nations, creating the downstream effect of shortages...

Medical research saves lives-yet all too often, it is thwarted by a review system supposed to safeguard patients that instead creates needless delays and expense. Institutional Review Boards, which exist at every hospital and medical school that conducts medical research, have ended up imposing such complex, draconian conditions that research is frequently damaged, delayed, and distorted. This is...

Nothing excited early modern anatomists more than touching a beating heart. In his 1543 treatise, Andreas Vesalius boasts that he was able to feel life itself through the membranes of a heart belonging to a man who had just been executed, a comment that appears near the woodcut of a person being dissected while still hanging from the gallows. In this highly original book, Rose Marie San Juan confr...

Dr. Stephen L. Hauser and a patient named Andrea were both 27 years old when they met. He was an up-and-coming neurologist-in-training; she was a Harvard Law School graduate and White House aide whose brain was being ravaged by an explosive case of multiple sclerosis. It was the 1970s and Dr. Hauser had nothing to treat her with. She lost her ability to speak, swallow and breathe. At her bridal sh...

Eileen V. Wallis' book California and the Politics of Disability, 1850–1970 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) explores the political, legal, medical, and social battles that led to the widespread institutionalization of Californians with disabilities from the gold rush to the 1970s. By the early twentieth century, most American states had specialized facilities dedicated to both the care and the control...

Rebecca Whiteley's book Birth Figures: Early Modern Prints and the Pregnant Body (University of Chicago Press, 2023) is first full study of “birth figures” and their place in early modern knowledge-making. Birth figures are printed images of the pregnant womb, always shown in series, that depict the variety of ways in which a fetus can present for birth. Historian Rebecca Whiteley coined the term...