New Books in Medicine

Like it or not, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) has an enormous influence in deciding what qualifies as a mental health disorder in the United States and beyond. The each revision of the DSM directly influences people’s lives, guides treatment, and has important legal and economic consequences.  In her book, The Making of DSM-III: A Diagnostic Manual’...

T. J. Hinrichs and Linda L. Barnes have produced a volume that will change the way we learn about and teach the history of health and healing in China and beyond. Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History (Harvard University Press, 2012) collects ten chronologically-organized chapters that each explore practices of health and healing in a specific historical period, ranging from oracle...

Dorothea was a widow who treated Martin Luther, the Duke of Saxony, and throngs of poor peasants with her medicinal waters. Anna was the powerful wife of the Elector of Saxony who favored testing medical remedies on others before using them on her friends and family. Elisabeth was an invalid patient whose preferred treatments included topical remedies and ministrations from the “almighty physician...

It is common today to treat depression and other mental disorders as concrete illnesses – akin to having pneumonia or the flu. In fact, being prescribed a pill after complaining to your family doctor about feeling depressed is a common occurrence. But are mental disorders really illnesses the way that a sinus infection is? Gary Greenberg, in his fascinating new book The Book of Woe: The DSM and th...

“This is a history of promises.”So begins Nathaniel Comfort‘s gripping and beautifully written new book on the relationships between and entanglements of medical genetic and eugenics in the history of the twentieth century. Based on a rich documentary and oral history archive, The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine (Yale University Press, 2012) reframes th...

Identical twins, separated at birth, raised in different families, and reunited in adulthood. In 1979, psychology researchers in Minnesota found some twins who had been reunited after a lifetime of separation, and brought them in to participate in a research study. And so began the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart. At the time, psychology leaned heavily toward the nurture side of the nature-n...

Before the Second World War, very few Americans visited psychologists or psychiatrists. Today, millions and millions of Americans do. How did seeing a “shrink” become, quite suddenly, a typical part of the “American Experience?” In his fascinating book Shrink: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in America (Nebraska University Press, 2013), Lawrence R. Samuel examines the arrival, remarkable grow...

If you have studied neuroscience, memory, or even basic psychology, it is likely that you have heard of the famous amnesic patient Henry Molaison, or “H.M.” as he was known during his lifetime. In 1953, Henry underwent an experimental brain surgery in hopes of finding a cure for his severe epilepsy. As a result, he developed a severe case of amnesia. Unable to encode new memories into long-term st...

There are pigeons, cats, and Martians here. There are CT scanners, dentures, computers large enough to fill rooms, war games, and neural networks. In Biomedical Computing: Digitizing Life in the United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), Joe November mobilizes this ecology of instruments and objects, people and programs, in a story that maps out the early years of the introduction of co...

Every hundred years or so, the Supreme Court decides a question with truly vast economic implications. In 2012 such a decision was handed down, in a case that had the potential to affect the economy in the near term more than any court case ever had. The substance of the case, and its lasting legal implications, are the subject of Andrew Koppelman’s The Tough Luck Constitution and the Assault on H...

The liberal media in the Western World takes a firm line on how two of the big issues facing Africa intersect – bluntly speaking Africa’s high levels of religiosity have contributed substantially to its high levels of HIV infection. Religion and AIDS in Africa (Oxford UP, 2012), however, tells a different story, and one based upon an impressive amount of data. For a start, the story that the autho...

This past August, the saga of Lance Armstrong came to its inglorious end. The seven-time champion of the Tour de France and Olympic medalist ended his defense against charges that he had engaged in blood doping during his cycling career. In the judgment of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, the end of Armstrong’s challenge was effectively a concession of guilt. The body responded by stripping Armstrong...

Volker Scheid and Hugh MacPherson‘s Integrating East Asian Medicine into Contemporary Healthcare (Churchill Livingstone, 2011) is the result of a wonderfully transdisciplinary project that aims to bring scholars and practitioners of East Asian medicine together in a common dialogue that also informs and is shaped by cutting-edge work in Science Studies. Not a typical conference volume, the book is...

When a mother listens to the beats of her own heart, where angst, fear and fortitude compete, and then beautifully weaves emotion into a story about her ongoing journey to support a bipolar son, then you know something significant has happened in African American literature. At least I did, when I read Charlotte Pierce-Baker‘s insightful memoir, This Fragile Life: A Mother’s Story of a Bipolar Son...

One of the best things about co-hosting New Books in STS is the opportunity to discover books like this one. Sherine Hamdy has given us something special in Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt (University of California Press, 2012). Framed as a study of the history and ethnography of organ transplantation in modern Egypt, Hamdy’s work use...

In her new book, The Pipes Plan: The Top Ten Ways to Dismantle and Replace Obamacare (Regnery Publishing, 2012), Sally C. Pipes, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Pacific Research Institute, argues that the Obama health care law will make our health care system worse and provides a step-by-step plan for how to dismantle and replace it. She also proposes an alternative, free market-based...

What would a Presidential campaign be without a good dose of reproductive politics? To be sure, many of us are surprised to see contraception, and not just abortion, called into question – but maybe that’s because the intensity of abortion politics has allowed us to forget just how recently the issue of contraception was as fraught as the issue of abortion. And in any case, recent tussles over tee...

Southern Medicine for Southern People: Vietnamese Medicine in the Making (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) gives me hope for the future of edited volumes. Not only is it a fascinating and coherent treatment of the history and practice of Vietnamese medicine, but it’s also a wonderfully interdisciplinary collection of approaches that incorporates work by social scientists, humanists, and medica...

Marta Hanson‘s book is a rich study of conceptions of space in medical thought and practice. Ranging from a deep history of the geographic imagination in China to an account of the SARS outbreak of the 21st century, Hanson’s book maps the transformations of medicine and healing in late imperial China that accompanied transforming geographies of empire. Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Di...

Forty-five years after her death, the reproductive rights activist Margaret Sanger remains a polarizing figure. Conservatives attack her social liberalism while liberals shy away from her perceived advocacy of eugenics and her supposed socialist tendencies. Though she was a pivotal 20th century figure, Sanger’s own voice has been drowned out by the cacophony of controversy. As renown feminist hist...

For the past half century, Alcoholics Anonymous and its 12-step recovery program has been the dominant method for treating alcohol abuse in the United States. Reservation communities have been no exception. But as Erica Prussing vividly describes in her new book,White Man’s Water: The Politics of Sobriety in a Native American Community (University of Arizona Press, 2011), a one-size-fits-all appro...

In what must be one of the most well-organized and clearly-written books in the history of academic writing, Yi-Li Wu‘s book, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 2010), introduces readers to a rich history of women’s medicine (fuke) in the context of late imperial China. Reproducing Women offers much more than a history of i...

The instructor of my freshman physics course fit the stereotype of a physics professor: unkempt white hair, black glasses case in the breast pocket of his short-sleeved shirt, thick German accent, and a tendency to mumble to himself while mulling over formula on the chalkboard. I was not his most attentive student, and finished the term with a grade of C (for which I was ecstatically grateful). Ju...

When in medical school, I found myself drawn to the study of infectious diseases in large part because of the mixture of science and anthropology – infectious diseases are always about the way we interact with the world around us, what we do with whom and when and where and how often. Take the recent examples of the global spread of pandemic influenza (a respiratory virus spread in the air) and th...

If a parent decides not to vaccinate their children, is that an individual choice, or is it a serious threat to the public health? In Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All (Basic Books, 2011), Dr. Paul Offit discusses the very real threats to the public health created by the anti-vaccine movement, both in the U.S. and around the world. In the book, Dr. Offit reviews the hi...