New Books in Medicine

In today’s program, Dr. Paul Steinberg, a psychiatrist and clinical professor at the University of British Columbia, discusses his recently released book Psychoanalysis in Medicine: Applying Psychoanalytic Thought to Contemporary Medical Care (Routledge, 2020).  In this new volume, Dr. Steinberg offers both theoretical inferences and practical guidance related to the application of psychoanalysis...

Daniel A. Rodriguez's history of a newly independent Cuba shaking off the U.S. occupation, The Right to Live in Health: Medical Politics in Postindependence Havana (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), focuses on the intersection of public health and politics in Havana.  While medical policies were often used to further American colonial power, in Cuba, Rodriguez argues, they evolved into im...

A scientist assesses the potential of stem cell therapies for treating such brain disorders as stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease. Stem cell therapies are the subject of enormous hype, endowed by the media with almost magical qualities and imagined by the public to bring about miracle cures. Stem cells have the potential to generate new cells of different types, and have been sho...

Vaccines make us wholly or partly immune to disease, such as Covid-19. But what is it to be immune? What is an immune system, and what does it do? In its beginnings, immunology was considered the science of the self/non-self distinction: the immune system comprised the self’s defenses against invading non-self pathogens, and was a sophisticated system possessed only by vertebrates. In Philosophy o...

We are just over a year from when global news first reported a new type of pneumonia emerging in the Chinese city of Wuhan. A lockdown of Wuhan on January 23rd, 2020, was the first indication that these stories were more serious than originally thought. All of us know what happened next: COVID-19 spread from China to other countries in Asia, then to Europe, then to North America, then worldwide. T...

In the early 1970s, a new wave of public service announcements urged parents to help end an American tradition of child abuse. The message, relayed repeatedly over television and radio, urged abusive parents to seek help.  Support groups for parents, including Parents Anonymous, proliferated across the country to deal with the seemingly burgeoning crisis. At the same time, an ever-increasing numbe...

Medicine and Memory in Tibet: Amchi Physicians in an Age of Reform (University of Washington Press, 2018) is the first full-length ethnography of Tibetan medical practitioners (amchi) in central Tibet working outside of major Tibetan medical institutions in Lhasa. Departing from extant ethnographies and scholarship on Tibetan medicine in the twentieth-century that often focus on institutions such...

A reporter uncovers the secrets behind the scientific scam of the century.  The news breaks first as a tale of fear and pity. Doctors at a London hospital claim a link between autism and a vaccine given to millions of children: MMR. Young parents are terrified. Immunization rates slump. And as a worldwide ‘anti-vax’ movement kicks off, old diseases return to sicken and kill. But a veteran reporter...

Americans today are often skeptical of scientific authority. Many conservatives dismiss climate change and Darwinism as liberal fictions, arguing that "tenured radicals" have coopted the sciences and other disciplines. Some progressives, especially in the universities, worry that science's celebration of objectivity and neutrality masks its attachment to Eurocentric and patriarchal values. As we g...

In Electric Brain: How the New Science of Brainwaves Reads Minds, Tells Us How We Learn, and Helps Us Change for the Better (BenBella, 2020), eminent neuroscientist R. Douglas Fields surveys the history and current state of scientific understanding about the brain as an electrical organ, and how the electrical activity of the brain relates to cognitive functioning and various clinical conditions....

Today I talked to Chris Hamby about his book Soul Full of Coal Dust: The True Story of an Epic Battle for Justice (Little Brown, 2020). Hamby looks into why there has been a surge in black-lung disease in West Virginia and elsewhere in recent years. Poor self-policing and rapacious business practices go a long way in explaining the upsurge. Add in a tradition of fatalism caused by King Coal, and i...

Today, more than 200,000 men and women over age fifty are languishing in prisons around the United States. It is projected that by 2030, one-third of all incarcerated individuals will be older adults. An already overcrowded and underserved prison system is straining to manage the needs of incarcerated older adults with growing frailty and health concerns. Separated from their families and communit...

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected every country around the world in a manner not seen since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, and is perhaps one of the most transformative events in decades. Most countries and governments have played catch-up to the pandemic, trying to get a handle on case numbers after an explosive increase. But a few places: Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, New Zeal...

We live in an age of moral revolutions in which the once morally outrageous has become morally acceptable, and the formerly acceptable is now regarded as reprehensible. Attitudes toward same-sex love, for example, and the proper role of women, have undergone paradigm shifts over the last several decades. In this book, Robert Baker argues that these inversions are the product of moral revolutions t...

When is sorrow sickness? That is the question that this book asks, exploring how our understandings of sadness, melancholy, depression, mania and anxiety have changed over time, and how societies have tried to treat something which lies on the border between the natural and the pathological. Jonathan Sadowsky's book The Empire of Depression: A New History (Polity, 2020) explores the various medica...

Between 1927 and 1979, more than 8,000 people were involuntarily sterilized in five hospitals across the state of Virginia. From this plain and terrible fact springs Elizabeth Catte's Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia (Belt, 2021), a sweeping, unsparing history of eugenics in Virginia, and by extension the United States. Virginia's twentieth-century eugenics program was not...

In Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century, (The Ohio State University Press, 2020), Alyson K. Spurgas, Ph. D. examines the “new science of female sexuality” from a critical, sociological perspective, considering how today’s feminist-identified sex researchers study and manage women with low desire. Diagnosing Desire investigates experimental sex research that m...

In The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans (St. Martin's Press, 2020), anthropologist Eben Kirksey visits the frontiers of genetics, medicine, and technology to ask: Whose values are guiding gene editing experiments? And what does this new era of scientific inquiry mean for the future of the human species? At a conference in Hong Kong in November 2018, Dr. He Jianku...

Though the current political climate might lead one to suspect that religion and medicine make for uncomfortable bedfellows, the two institutions have a long history of alliance. From religious healers and religious hospitals to religiously informed bioethics and research studies on the impact of religious and spiritual beliefs on physical and mental well-being, religion and medicine have encounte...

Séances, clairvoyance, and telepathy captivated public imagination in the United States from the 1850s well into the twentieth century. Though skeptics dismissed these experiences as delusions, a new kind of investigator emerged to seek the science behind such phenomena. With new technologies like the telegraph collapsing the boundaries of time and space, an explanation seemed within reach. As Ame...

Twentieth-century neuroscience fixed the brain as the basis of consciousness, the self, identity, individuality, even life itself, obscuring the fundamental relationships between bodies and the worlds that they inhabit. In Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on narratives of family and individual experiences with...

COVID-19 has had such far-reaching impacts that it can be, and has been, studied from the perspective of almost any academic discipline. For geographers, the ways in which COVID-19 affects place, space and movement is particularly consequential. It is at once a global phenomenon, yet it also ties us to localities in a way not experienced for a very long time in our increasingly mobile and intercon...

Alan Berkman (1945–2009) was no campus radical in the mid-1960s; he was a promising Ivy League student, football player, Eagle Scout, and fraternity president. But when he was a medical student and doctor, his politics began to change, and soon he was providing covert care to members of revolutionary groups like the Weather Underground and becoming increasingly radicalized by his experiences at th...

At first glance, the term “expressive individualism” seems benign enough. After all, people throughout the Western world value their personal freedom and the liberty to make crucial life decisions such as whether to have children and how and when they wish to die. What could possibly be wrong with the idea that everyone should be in control of his or her own body and fate to the greatest extent po...

While many doctors claim that Lyme disease--a tick-borne bacterial infection--is easily diagnosed and treated, other doctors and the patients they care for argue that it can persist beyond standard antibiotic treatment in the form of chronic Lyme disease. In Divided Bodies: Lyme Disease, Contested Illness, and Evidence-Based Medicine (Duke UP, 2020), Abigail A. Dumes offers an ethnographic explora...