New Books in Medicine

On the frontier of feminist technoscience research, Ericka Johnson’s collaborative project Gendering Drugs: Feminist Studies of Pharmaceuticals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) explores how the gendered body is produced in and by medical technologies. From an Alzheimers disease study that relied on the process of sexing flies, to the pharamceuticalized prostate, to the medical experiences of transgender...

Matthew James Crawford’s new book is a fascinating history of an object that was central to the history of science, technology, and medicine in the early modern Spanish Atlantic world. The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630-1800 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) looks closely at the struggles of the Spanish Empire in the second half of the eig...

The wish to understand mental suffering is universal and requires an appreciation for its history. Since Biblical times, humans have understood madness, or other deviations from normal mental functioning, in diverse and unique ways. These have included belief in divine origins, biological causation, and environmental influences. And treatments for mental illness have undergone a similar evolution....

Projit Bihari Mukharji’s new book explores the power of small, non-spectacular, and everyday technologies as motors or catalysts of change in the history of science and medicine. Focusing on practices of Ayurveda in British Bengal between about 1870-1930, Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Science (University of Chicago Press, 2016) is structured around five case studi...

Pragmatism, as a philosophical concept, is often misunderstood and misapplied. Fortunately, I had the chance to speak with Philip Rosenbaum, psychoanalyst and editor of the book Making our Ideas Clear: Pragmatism in Psychoanalysis (Information Age Publishing, 2015)about what pragmatism really is and how it informs clinical theory and praxis. We discuss how pragmatisms influence reaches far back to...

We are all familiar with the idea that some persons are disabled. But what is disability? What makes it such that a condition–physical, cognitive, psychological–is a disability, rather than, say, a disease or illness? Is disability always and intrinsically bad? Are disabilities things to be cured? Might disabilities be merely ways of being different? And what role should the testimony and experien...

In A Special Hell: Institutional Life in Alberta’s Eugenic Years (University of Toronto Press, 2015), Claudia Malacrida explores the practices of the Michener Center in Red Deer, Northern Alberta, to uncover a close relationship between the institutionalization of persons with disabilities and eugenics. Canadian province of Alberta was infamous for its eugenics program, which lasted until the 1970...

When trying to conceive doesn’t go as planned, many women and couples are faced with difficult decisions about which interventions to pursue. Treatment of infertility, whether natural or high-tech, comes with stress and feelings of isolation when your friends or relatives seem to fall pregnant without much effort. Mindfulness-based stress reduction techniques and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)...

Every night around the world, millions of people lie in bed at night, struggling to fall asleep. Experts suggest that about one in three people struggle with at least mild insomnia. Paradoxically, their efforts to control their sleep may actually result in digging them in even deeper into insomnia. Fortunately for people with insomnia, and the therapists and medical professionals who treat them, s...

In 2012, Canada stopped mining and exporting asbestos. Once considered a miracle mineral for its fireproof qualities, asbestos came to be better known as a carcinogenic, hazardous material banned in numerous countries around the world. Canada was once a leading producer of asbestos and home to the worlds largest chrysotile asbestos mine, located in the Town of Asbestos in the province of Quebec. T...

Statistics have been on the minds of more people than usual in the run-up and post-mortem of this past U.S. presidential election; some feel as though they were misled by numbers intended to lend a modicum of certainty to the complex calculus of modern life. But while election predictions come and go, the “empire of chance” lays siege to more and more aspects of daily life, alongside increasing po...

Since it was published in 2004, Ruth Rogaski’s Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (University of California Press, 2014 reprint) has won four major prizes in fields ranging from history of medicine to East Asian history. It is easy to see why. Set in the Chinese treaty port of Tianjin, the book follows Chinese elites over the tumultuous decades that spanned the...

In Healthcare Policy In Africa: Institutions and Politics from Colonialism to the Present (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), Jean-Germain Gros argues that healthcare policy should be the black box rather than the black hole of African Studies. By this he means that policy should be decoded so its secrets can be laid bare, rather than treated as an impenetrable mystery. To this end, in the book, as we...

Emerging in the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic was not just a public health crisis. It was a moral crisis too, argues Anthony M. Petro in his new book, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (Oxford University Press, 2015). Throughout the book, Petro describes the entanglements between the supposedly secular field of public health and the religious spheres of American Christianit...

“Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” Oscar Wilde famously observed. Wilde’s waning romanticism can be read in stark contrast with Nietzsche, who argued around the same time, “art is nothing but a kind of applied physiology.” Robert Brain’s The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (University of Washington Press, 2015) unveils a fascinating world of e...

When it comes to the history of psychoanalysis and psychiatry in the United States, to paraphrase Luce Irigaray, one never stirs without the other. While Freud sent Theodore Reik across the ocean to promote lay analysis, A.A. Brill, president of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, was preparing to divorce the International Psychoanalytic Association. Brill, driven by a fear that psychoanalysis...

Robert Peckham’s Epidemics in Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores the crucial yet under-explored role that epidemics have played in both colonial and postcolonial Asia. At once broad in sweep and nuanced in analysis, Peckham’s work explores a series of world-changing disease outbreaks across from the eighteenth century through the present. Organized around five themes (Mobility...

Roman Sieler’s

 Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets: Medicine and Martial Arts in South India (Oxford University Press, 2015) is a fine-grained ethnographic study of varmakkalai–the art of vital spots, a South Indian practice that encompasses both martial and medical activities. The interview explores how varmakkalai relates to the wider field of manual therapies and martial traditions in the subcontinen...

In his shining new book The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion, and Charity (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Ahmed Ragab, Assistant Professor of Religion and Science at Harvard Divinity School, charts the institutional and intellectual history of hospitals or bimaristans in medieval Egypt and the Levant. A central argument of this book is that hospitals in Islamdom were more than jus...

Many people carry around unresolved feelings and thoughts tied to difficult experiences, with no idea what to do with them. When left unattended for too long, these pent up feelings can lead to a variety of physical and mental health issues: sleep problems, depression, and even physical illness. Therapy can help, but its not always available for various reasons. Fortunately, long-time researchers...

When I first read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish as an undergrad, I remember wondering, “What does this look like, though? How might the disciplining of the body play out in different places?” Greg Eghigian, author of The Corrigible and the Incorrigible: Science, Medicine, and the Convict in Twentieth-Century Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2015) and Associate Professor of History at Penn...

What do the musical compositions of Bach, Gershwin, and the Beatles all have in common? Besides being great pieces of music, according to Andrew Schulman, they promote healing in intensive care (ICU) settings. Schulman is a classical guitar player and performer and author of Waking the Spirit: A Musician’s Journey Healing Body, Mind, and Soul (Picador, 2016). Schulman did not receive training as a...

In the early 2000s, the press–at least in Boston, where I was living at the time–was full of shrill stories about drug-crazed addicts breaking into area pharmacies in search of something called “Oxycontin.” I had no idea what Oxycontin was, but I was pretty sure there must be something remarkable about it if ordinary drug fiends were risking jail time and worse by robbing mom-and-pop drug stores t...

What exactly is ADHD, and is it time to update our ideas about it? In her new book, Your Innovator Brain: The Truth About ADHD (Balboa Press, 2016), Carol Gignoux turns our ideas about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder on their head and introduces a strengths-based rather than deficits-based perspective on this brain type. In her forty-plus years coaching individuals with ADHD, Gignoux has...

Among the achievements of Irish medicine in the twentieth century was ending the persistent epidemic of tuberculosis throughout the island, and one of the central figures in that effort was Dorothy Stopford Price. In her book Dorothy Stopford Price: Rebel Doctor (Irish Academic Press, 2014), Anne Mac Lellan provides readers with an account of the life of a pioneering MD and medical researcher. The...