Healing Traditions by
2009 Herskovits Award finalist In August 2004, South Africa officially sought to legally recognize the practice of traditional healers. Largely in response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and limited both by the number of practitioners and by patients' access to treatment, biomedical practitioners looked toward the country's traditional healers as important agents in the development of medical education and treatment. This collaboration has not been easy. The two medical cultures embrace different ideas about the body and the origin of illness, but they do share a history of commercial and ideological competition and different relations to state power. Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820-1948 provides a long-overdue historical perspective to these interactions and an understanding that is vital for the development of medical strategies to effectively deal with South Africa's healthcare challenges. Between 1820 and 1948 traditional healers in Natal, South Africa, transformed themselves from politically powerful men and women who challenged colonial rule and law into successful entrepreneurs who competed for turf and patients with white biomedical doctors and pharmacists. To understand what is "traditional" about traditional medicine, Flint argues that we must consider the cultural actors and processes not commonly associated with African therapeutics: white biomedical practitioners, Indian healers, and the implementing of white rule. Carefully crafted, well written, and powerfully argued, Flint's analysis of the ways that indigenous medical knowledge and therapeutic practices were forged, contested, and transformed over two centuries is highly illuminating, as is her demonstration that many "traditional" practices changed over time. Her discussion of African and Indian medical encounters opens up a whole new way of thinking about the social basis of health and healing in South Africa. This important book will be core reading for classes and future scholarship on health and healing in Africa.
Exploring Empathy with Medical Students by
This book investigates new insights into the factors influencing empathy in medical students. Addressing the widely perceived empathy gap in teaching and medical practice, the book presents a new study into how this emotion is facilitated in the UK undergraduate medical curriculum, and its influence on doctor-patient relationships. The author utilises Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to investigate how medical students' perspective on empathy changed throughout their education. It presents the risks students perceive when connecting emotionally with patients; their use of detachment as a taught coping mechanism; and the question of how they regulate their emotions. The book reveals the tension between students' connection with and detachment from a patient and their aim to achieve an appropriate balance. The author presents a number of factors which seem to enhance empathy, and explores the balance of scientific biomedical versus psychosocial approaches in medical training. In contrast to the commonly-reported opinion that there has been decline in medical students' empathy, this book contends that student empathy in fact increased during their training. This new study offers invaluable insight into how students and practitioners may be supported in dealing appropriately with their emotions as well as with those of their patients, thereby facilitating more humane medical care.
An American Crisis by
Black men are increasingly underrepresented in medical schools and in the medical profession. A diverse workforce is a key attribute of quality healthcare and research suggests that a diverse workforce may help to advance cultural competency and increase access to high-quality health care, especially for underserved populations. Conversely, lack of diversity in the health workforce threatens health care quality and access and contributes to health disparities. In this way, the growing absence of Black men in medicine is especially troubling, because their absence in medicine may have adverse consequences for health care access, quality, and outcomes among Black Americans and Americans overall. To better understand the factors that contribute to the low participation of Black men in the medical profession, facilitate discussion of current strategies used to increase their participation in medical education, and explore new strategies along the educational and professional pipeline that may have potential to increase participation in medicine, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the Cobb Institute jointly convened a 2-day workshop in November 2017, in Washington, DC. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.
American Indian Medicine Ways by
Indigenous people of wisdom have offered prayers of power, protection, and healing since the dawn of time. From Wovoka, the Ghost Dance prophet, to contemporary healer Kenneth Coosewoon, medicine people have called on the spiritual world to help humans in their relationships with each other and the natural world. Many American Indians--past and present--have had the ability to use power to access wisdom, knowledge, and spiritual understanding. This groundbreaking collection provides fascinating stories of wisdom, spiritual power, and forces within tribal communities that have influenced the past and may influence the future. Through discussions of omens, prophecies, war, peace, ceremony, ritual, and cultural items such as masks, prayer sticks, sweat lodges, and peyote, this volume offers examples of the ways in which Native American beliefs in spirits have been and remain a fundamental aspect of history and culture. Drawing from written and oral sources, the book offers readers a greater understanding of creation narratives, oral histories, and songs that speak of healers, spirits, and power from tribes across the North American continent. American Indian medicine ways and spiritual power remain vital today. With the help of spirits, people can heal the sick, protect communities from natural disasters, and mediate power of many kinds between the spiritual and corporeal worlds. As the contributors to this volume illustrate, healers are the connective cloth between the ancient past and the present, and their influence is significant for future generations. CONTRIBUTORS R. David Edmunds Joseph B. Herring Benjamin Jenkins Troy R. Johnson Michelle Lorimer L. G. Moses Richard D. Scheuerman Al Logan Slagle Clifford E. Trafzer
Resident Duty Hours by
Medical residents in hospitals are often required to be on duty for long hours. In 2003 the organization overseeing graduate medical education adopted common program requirements to restrict resident workweeks, including limits to an average of 80 hours over 4 weeks and the longest consecutive period of work to 30 hours in order to protect patients and residents from unsafe conditions resulting from excessive fatigue. Resident Duty Hours provides a timely examination of how those requirements were implemented and their impact on safety, education, and the training institutions. An in-depth review of the evidence on sleep and human performance indicated a need to increase opportunities for sleep during residency training to prevent acute and chronic sleep deprivation and minimize the risk of fatigue-related errors. In addition to recommending opportunities for on-duty sleep during long duty periods and breaks for sleep of appropriate lengths between work periods, the committee also recommends enhancements of supervision, appropriate workload, and changes in the work environment to improve conditions for safety and learning. All residents, medical educators, those involved with academic training institutions, specialty societies, professional groups, and consumer/patient safety organizations will find this book useful to advocate for an improved culture of safety.
Caring for Equality by
African Americans today continue to suffer disproportionately from heart disease, diabetes, and other health problems. In Caring for Equality David McBride chronicles the struggle by African Americans and their white allies to improve poor black health conditions as well as inadequate medical care--caused by slavery, racism, and discrimination--since the arrival of African slaves in America. Black American health progress resulted from the steady influence of what David McBride calls the health equality ideal: the principle that health of black Americans could and should be equal to that of whites and other Americans. Including a timeline, selected primary sources, and an extensive bibliographic essay, McBride's book provides a superb starting point for students and readers who want to explore in greater depth this important and understudied topic in African American history.
The Good Doctors by
The Medical Committee for Human Rights was organized in 1964 to support civil rights activists during Mississippi's Freedom Summer. MCHR volunteers exposed racism within the American Medical Association, desegregated southern hospitals, set up free clinics in inner cities, and created the model for the community health center. They were early advocates of single-payer universal health insurance. In The Good Doctors, celebrated historian John Dittmer gives an insightful account of a group of idealists whose message and example are an inspiration to all who believe that "Health Care is a Human Right."
Medicalizing Blackness by
In 1748, as yellow fever raged in Charleston, South Carolina, doctor John Lining remarked, "There is something very singular in the constitution of the Negroes, which renders them not liable to this fever." Lining's comments presaged ideas about blackness that would endure in medical discourses and beyond. In this fascinating medical history, Rana A. Hogarth examines the creation and circulation of medical ideas about blackness in the Atlantic World during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She shows how white physicians deployed blackness as a medically significant marker of difference and used medical knowledge to improve plantation labor efficiency, safeguard colonial and civic interests, and enhance control over black bodies during the era of slavery. Hogarth refigures Atlantic slave societies as medical frontiers of knowledge production on the topic of racial difference. Rather than looking to their counterparts in Europe who collected and dissected bodies to gain knowledge about race, white physicians in Atlantic slaveholding regions created and tested ideas about race based on the contexts in which they lived and practiced. What emerges in sharp relief is the ways in which blackness was reified in medical discourses and used to perpetuate notions of white supremacy.
Medical Bondage by
The accomplishments of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistulae repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage,/em> breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as "medical superbodies" highly suited for medical experimentation. In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white "ladies." Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities.Medical Bondage moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. It also retells the story of black enslaved women and of Irish immigrant women from the perspective of these exploited groups and thus restores for us a picture of their lives.
To Make the Wounded Whole by
In the decades since it was identified in 1981, HIV/AIDS has devastated African American communities. Members of those communities mobilized to fight the epidemic and its consequences from the beginning of the AIDS activist movement. They struggled not only to overcome the stigma and denial surrounding a "white gay disease" in Black America, but also to bring resources to struggling communities that were often dismissed as too "hard to reach." To Make the Wounded Whole offers the first history of African American AIDS activism in all of its depth and breadth. Dan Royles introduces a diverse constellation of activists, including medical professionals, Black gay intellectuals, church pastors, Nation of Islam leaders, recovering drug users, and Black feminists who pursued a wide array of grassroots approaches to slow the epidemic's spread and address its impacts. Through interlinked stories from Philadelphia and Atlanta to South Africa and back again, Royles documents the diverse, creative, and global work of African American activists in the decades-long battle against HIV/AIDS.
A History of Dentistry in the U. S. Army to World War II by
A detailed history of the development of military dentistry in the United States, from beginnings in the early 17th century, through the professionalization of dentistry in the 19th century, dental care on both sides of the Civil War, the establishment of the US Army Dental Corps in 1909, and the expansion of the Corps through World War I and afterward, to the verge of the Second World War.
Indian Sisters by
Health and medicine cannot be understood without considering the role of nurses, both as professionals and as working women. In India, unlike other countries, nurses have suffered an exceptional degree of neglect at the hands of state, a situation that has been detrimental to the quality of both rural and urban health care. Charting the history of the development of nursing in India over 100 years, Indian Sisters examines the reasons why nurses have so consistently been sidelined and excluded from health care governance and policymaking. The book challenges the routine suggestion that nursing's poor status is mainly attributable to socio-cultural factors, such as caste, limitations on female mobility and social taboos. It argues instead that many of its problems are due to an under-achieved relationship between a patriarchal state on the one hand, and weak professional nursing organisations shaped by their colonial roots on the other. It also explores how the recent phenomenon of large-scale emigration of nurses to the West (leading to better pay, working conditions and career prospects) has transformed the profession, lifting its status dramatically. At the same time, it raises questions about the implications of emigration for the fate of health care system in India. An important contribution to the growing academic genre of nursing history, the book is essential reading for scholars and students of health care, the history of medicine, gender and women's studies, sociology, and migration studies. It will also be useful to policymakers and health professionals.
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Beside the Troubled Waters by
A memoir by an African American physician in Alabama whose story in many ways typifies the lives and careers of black doctors in the south during the segregationist era Beside the Troubled Waters is a memoir by an African American physician in Alabama whose story in many ways typifies the lives and careers of black doctors in the south during the segregationist era while also illustrating the diversity of the black experience in the medical profession. Based on interviews conducted with Hereford over ten years, the account includes his childhood and youth as the son of a black sharecropper and Primitive Baptist minister in Madison County, Alabama, during the Depression; his education at Huntsville's all-black CouncillSchool and medical training at MeharryMedicalCollege in Nashville; his medical practice in Huntsville's black community beginning in 1956; his efforts to overcome the racism he met in the white medical community; his participation in the civil rights movement in Huntsville; and his later problems with the Medicaid program and state medical authorities, which eventually led to the loss of his license. Hereford's memoir stands out because of its medical and civil rights themes, and also because of its compelling account of the professional ruin Hereford encountered after 37 years of practice, as the end of segregation and the federal role in medical care placed black doctors in competition with white ones for the first time.
Breaking Ground by
While Louis W. Sullivan was a student at Morehouse College, Morehouse president Benjamin Mays said something to the student body that stuck with him for the rest of his life. "The tragedy of life is not failing to reach our goals," Mays said. "It is not having goals to reach." In Breaking Ground, Sullivan recounts his extraordinary life beginning with his childhood in Jim Crow south Georgia and continuing through his trailblazing endeavors training to become a physician in an almost entirely white environment in the Northeast, founding and then leading the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, and serving as secretary of Health and Human Services in President George H. W. Bush's administration. Throughout this extraordinary life Sullivan has passionately championed both improved health care and increased access to medical professions for the poor and people of color. At five years old, Louis Sullivan declared to his mother that he wanted to be a doctor. Given the harsh segregation in Blakely, Georgia, and its lack of adequate schools for African Americans at the time, his parents sent Louis and his brother, Walter, to Savannah and later Atlanta, where greater educational opportunities existed for blacks. After attending Booker T. Washington High School and Morehouse College, Sullivan went to medical school at Boston University-he was the sole African American student in his class. He eventually became the chief of hematology there until Hugh Gloster, the president of Morehouse College, presented him with an opportunity he couldn't refuse: Would Sullivan be the founding dean of Morehouse's new medical school? He agreed and went on to create a state-of-the-art institution dedicated to helping poor and minority students become doctors. During this period he established long-lasting relationships with George H. W. and Barbara Bush that would eventually result in his becoming the secretary of Health and Human Services in 1989. Sullivan details his experiences in Washington dealing with the burgeoning AIDS crisis, PETA activists, and antismoking efforts, along with his efforts to push through comprehensive health care reform decades before the Affordable Care Act. Along the way his interactions with a cast of politicos, including Thurgood Marshall, Jack Kemp, Clarence Thomas, Jesse Helms, and the Bushes, capture vividly a particular moment in recent history. Sullivan's life-from Morehouse to the White House and his ongoing work with medical students in South Africa-is the embodiment of the hopes and progress that the civil rights movement fought to achieve. His story should inspire future generations-of all backgrounds-to aspire to great things.
The Good Doctor by
Drawing upon real accounts of negligence, incompetence, and distrust, this book seeks to identify the key competencies of a good doctor, the ways in which medical care fails, and the roadblocks to ensuring that every licensed doctor is capable. Arguing that it is possible to improve patient care--by lifting the veils of secrecy and better informing patients, by establishing more effective ways of checking doctors' competence, and by ensuring that medical watchdogs protect the public--this discussion offers an expert's perspective on health care.
Learning to Heal by
What is it like to be a student nurse? What are the joys, the stresses, the transcendent moments, the fall-off-your-bed- laughing moments, and the terrors that have to be faced and stared down? And how might nurses, looking back, relate these experiences in ways that bring these memories to life again and provide historical context for how nursing education has changed and yet remained the same? In brave, revealing, and often humorous poetry and prose, Learning to Heal explores these questions with contributions by nurses from a variety of social, ethnic, and geographical backgrounds. Readers meet a black nursing student who is surrounded by white teachers and patients in 1940, a mother who rises every morning at 5 A.M. to help her family ready for their day before she herself heads to anatomy class, and an itinerant Jewish teenager whois asked, "What will you become?" These individuals, and many other women and men, share personal stories of finding their way to nursing school, where they begin a long, often wonderful, and sometimes daunting, journey. Many of the nurse-authors are experienced, well- published writers; others are academics, widely known in their fields; but each offers a unique perspective on nursing education. Notably, an essay by Minnie Brown Carter and an interview with Helen L. Albert provide valuable ethnographies of underrepresented voices. Through strong, moving essays and poems that explore various aspects of student nursing and provide historical perspective on nursing and nursing education, all have stories to tell. Learning to Heal tells them in ways that will appeal to many readers, both in and out of the nursing and medical professions, and to educators in the medical humanities.
Florence Nightingale: an Introduction to Her Life and Family. the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale by
Florence Nightingale: An Introduction to Her Life and Family introduces the Collected Works by giving an overview of Nightingale's life and the faith that guided it and by outlining the main social reform concerns on which she worked from her 'call to service' at age sixteen to old age. This volume reports correspondence (selected from the thousands of surviving letters) with her mother, father and sister and a wide extended family. There is material on Nightingale's 'domestic arrangements', from recipes, cat care and relations with servants to her contributions to charities, church and social reform causes. Much new and original material comes to light, and a remarkably different portrait of Nightingale, one with a more nuanced view of her family relationships, emerges.
