New Books In Medicine

Today’s episode focuses on the policy challenges and politics of public healthcare in Southeast Asia, a topic which has become increasingly visible and important in Southeast Asia and in the study of the region over the past decades in the context of expanding public healthcare programs in many countries across the region and the recent experience of the global pandemic. To discuss these issues, we are joined by Professor Sarah Shair-Rosenfield, who has been conducting research on public healthcare in Indonesia and the Philippines over the past several years. Sarah Shair-Rosenfield is a Professor of Comparative Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of York here in the UK. She received her PhD from the University of North Carolina and then taught at Arizona State University and the University of Essex before taking up a professorial chair at the University of York. She is the author of Electoral Reform and the Fate of New Democracies: Lessons from the Indonesian C

Medical schools have increasingly incorporated the humanities and social sciences into their teaching, seeking to make future physicians more empathetic and more concerned with equity. In practice, however, these good intentions have not translated into critical consciousness. Humanities and social sciences education has often not only failed to deliver on its promise but even entrenched the inequalities that the medical profession set out to address.  In Curricular Injustice: How U.S. Medical Schools Reproduce Inequalities (Columbia UP, 2024), Lauren D. Olsen examines how U.S. medical school faculty conceived, designed, and implemented their vision of education, tracing the failures of curricular reform. She argues that the way medical students encounter humanities and social sciences material in practice has served to reinforce the status quo by teaching them to individualize systemic problems. Students learn to avoid advocacy, critique, and attention to structural inequalities—while also gathering that it

In Health Freaks: America's Diet Champions and the Specter of Chronic Illness (University of North Carolina Press, 2024) Dr. Travis A. Weisse tells a new history of modern diets in America that goes beyond the familiar narrative of the nation's collective failure to lose weight. By exploring how the popularity of diets grew alongside patients' frustrations with the limitations and failures of the American healthcare system in the face of chronic disease, Weisse argues that millions of Americans sought "fad" diets—such as the notorious Atkins program which ushered in the low-carbohydrate craze—to wrest control of their health from pessimistic doctors and lifelong pharmaceutical regimens. Drawing on novel archival sources and a wide variety of popular media, Dr. Weisse shows the lengths to which twentieth-century American dieters went to heal themselves outside the borders of orthodox medicine and the subsequent political and scientific backlash they received. Through colorful profiles of the leaders of four ma

Around the world, millions are forcibly displaced by conflict, climate change, and persecution. Some cross international borders, while others are displaced within their own countries. In We Wait for a Miracle: Health Care and the Forcibly Displaced (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Muhammad H. Zaman shares poignant stories across continents to highlight the health care experiences of refugees and forced migrants. For many of these people, health risks unfortunately become part of the fabric of everyday life as they navigate new countries that treat them with varying degrees of care and indifference. Across widely varied local systems, countries of origin, health concerns, and other contexts, Zaman finds that barriers to health care share these key factors: trust, social network, efficiency of the health system, and the regulatory framework of the host environment. A combination of these factors explains difficulties in accessing health care across the geographic and geopolitical spectrum and challenges the existing

In Radical Acts: HIV/AIDS Activism in Late Twentieth-Century England (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), Dr George Severs draws on activist campaign literature and materials, broadcast media, and new oral history interviews to reconstruct the overlooked world of radical AIDS activism in England. This book provides one of the first detailed histories of the radical HIV/AIDS movement in England, following ACT UP's travels from New York to London via prominent queer intellectuals, and reconstructing the vibrant theatrical campaigns staged by ACT UP groups across England.  But Radical Acts also highlights expressions of activism that were far more common than demonstrations and marches. Manifestations of a political commitment to ameliorating the injustices facing people living with HIV permeated most aspects of everyday life. These forms of 'everyday activism' played out in workplaces, universities and church halls across England, as well as through networks that stretched across Europe and North America. This book bre

People with dementia are uniquely qualified to discuss the challenges of their condition and the features of effective support, but their voices are all too often drowned out in research and debates about policy. According to People with Dementia at the Heart of Research: Co-Producing Research through The Dementia Enquirers Model (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2024) by Rachael Litherland & Philly Hare, it's time for that to change. Dementia Enquirers is an ambitious and novel programme of work which has tested out what it means for people with dementia to lead research and has developed a new 'driving seat' approach to co-research. This ground-breaking book features 26 research projects led by groups of people with dementia, supported by group facilitators and academics, to make their voices heard. Topics include giving up driving, GP dementia reviews, living alone with dementia, and using AI platforms such as smart speakers. The book also describes how people with dementia shaped the entire programme, and add

Today I sit down with Volker Scheid, an interdisciplinary scholar and longtime practitioner of Chinese medicine. Together, we take an intellectual deep dive into his thoughts about the importance of blurring disciplinary boundaries and how “meta-practice” can make sense of the many different kinds of Chinese medicines. Along the way, Volker and I discuss the commensurability of Chinese medicine and biomedicine, the importance of connecting the self with the ten thousand things, and how premodern ideas can be the basis of a new politics for modern times. If you want to hear more from experts on Buddhism, Asian medicine, and embodied spirituality then subscribe to Blue Beryl and don’t miss an episode! PLEASE NOTE: Shortly, we will be changing our name to Black Beryl. Your subscription will automatically update and no action is necessary on your part. Thanks for your continued support! Resources mentioned in this episode: Volker’s website Volker Scheid, Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and Syn

In the 1980s, as HIV/AIDS ravaged queer communities and communities of color in the United States and beyond, a straight white teenager named Ryan White emerged as the face of the epidemic. Diagnosed with hemophilia at birth, Ryan contracted HIV through contaminated blood products. In 1985, he became a household name after he was barred from attending his Indiana middle school. As Ryan appeared on nightly news broadcasts and graced the covers of popular magazines, he was embraced by music icons and well-known athletes, achieving a curious kind of stardom.  Analyzing his struggle and celebrity, Paul M. Renfro's powerful biography grapples with the contested meanings of Ryan's life, death, and afterlives. As Renfro argues in The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America (UNC Press, 2024), Ryan's fight to attend school forced the American public to reckon with prevailing misconceptions about the AIDS epidemic. Yet his story also reinforced the hierarchies at the heart of the AIDS crisis. Becau

The word "pharmacopoeia" has come to have many meanings, although it is commonly understood to be a book describing approved compositions and standards for drugs. In 1813 the Royal College of Physicians of London considered a proposal to develop an imperial British pharmacopoeia - at a time when separate official pharmacopoeias existed for England, Scotland, and Ireland. A unified British pharmacopoeia was published in 1864, and by 1914 it was considered suitable for the whole Empire. Pharmacopoeias, Drug Regulation, and Empires: Making Medicines Official in Britain's Imperial World, 1618-1968  (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024) by Dr. Stuart Anderson traces the 350-year development of officially sanctioned pharmacopoeias across the British Empire, first from local to national pharmacopoeias, and later to a standardised pharmacopoeia that would apply throughout Britain’s imperial world. The evolution of British pharmacopoeias and the professionalisation of medicine saw developments including a transition

Sick Note: A History of the British Welfare State (Oxford UP, 2022) is a history of how the British state asked, 'who is really sick?' Tracing medical certification for absence from work from 1948 to 2010, Gareth Millward shows that doctors, employers, employees, politicians, media commentators, and citizens concerned themselves with measuring sickness. At various times, each understood that a signed note from a doctor was not enough to 'prove' whether someone was really sick. Yet, with no better alternative on offer, the sick note survived in practice and in the popular imagination - just like the welfare state itself.  Sick Note reveals the interplay between medical, employment, and social security policy. The physical note became an integral part of working and living in Britain, while the term 'sick note' was often deployed rhetorically as a mocking nickname or symbol of Britain's economic and political troubles. Using government policy documents, popular media, internet archives, and contemporary researc

The question of whether mental disorders are disorders of the brain has led to a long-running and controversial dispute within psychiatry, psychology and philosophy of mind and psychology. While recent work in neuroscience frequently tries to identify underlying brain dysfunction in mental disorders, detractors argue that labelling mental disorders as brain disorders is reductive and can result in harmful social effects. Are Mental Disorders Brain Disorders? (Routledge, 2024) brings a much-needed philosophical perspective to bear on this important question. Anneli Jefferson argues that while there is widespread agreement on paradigmatic cases of brain disorder such as brain cancer, Parkinson's or Alzheimer’s dementia, there is far less clarity on what the general, defining characteristics of brain disorders are. She identifies influential notions of brain disorder and shows why these are problematic. On her own, alternative, account, what counts as dysfunctional at the level of the brain frequently depends on

Carceral Recovery: Prisons, Drug Markets, and the New Pharmaceutical Self (Lexington Books, 2023) explores the interrelation between carceral conditions and substance use by considering the intersections between drug markets, sidewalks, households, and prisons in Baltimore. Sanaullah Khan argues that while housing, medicalization, and incarceration fundamentally create the conditions for substance use, individuals are increasingly experiencing the paradoxes of care and punishment by being propelled into a new regime of recovery which creates new pharmaceuticalized identities. By shedding light on how addiction and the impetus for healing moves through families and institutions of the state, Khan provides an account of the different competing forces that shape substance use, recovery, and relapse. Through a combination of archival research and ethnography, the book makes a case for disentangling punishment from recovery. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becomin

The “uncut” penis is viewed by some as attractive or erotic, and by others as ugly or undesirable. Secular parents of male infants worry about whether or not the foreskin should be removed so their little boy can grow up to “look like dad” or to avoid imagined bullying in the locker room. Medical experts and public health organisations argue back and forth about whether circumcision is medically necessary, while “intactivists” advocate that removing an infant’s foreskin without their consent is mutilation. Uncut: A Cultural Analysis of the Foreskin (University of Regina Press, 2024) by Dr. Jonathan Allen takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the foreskin and its contentious position in contemporary Anglo-American culture. From language to art, from religion to medicine and public health, Uncut is a provocative book that asks us to ask ourselves what we know and don’t know about this seemingly small piece of skin. Drawing on all these threads, Dr.. Allan leads us through the history and cultural

Today I talked with Stijn Vanheule about Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy: A Road Map to Hope and Recovery for Families and Caregivers (Other Press, 2024). Are we all a little crazy? Roughly 15 percent of the population will have a psychotic experience, in which they lose contact with reality. Yet we often struggle to understand and talk about psychosis.  Drawing on his work in Lacanian psychoanalysis, Stijn Vanheule seeks to answer this question, which carries significant implications for mental health as a whole. With a combination of theory from Freud to Lacan, present-day research, and compelling examples from his own patients and well-known figures such as director David Lynch and artist Yayoi Kusama, he explores psychosis in an engaging way that can benefit those suffering from it as well as the people who care for and interact with them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Poverty, Gender and Health in the Slums of Bangladesh: Children of Crows (Routledge, 2024) provides comprehensive ethnographic accounts that depict the daily life experiences and health hardships encountered by young women and their families living in the slums of Dhaka city and the injustices they face.  The analysis focuses on two specific historical eras: 2002-2003 and 2020-2022 and shows that despite recent improvements in employment opportunities and greater mobility for young women, their lives reflect ongoing challenges reminiscent of those faced two decades earlier. While national and global organizations acknowledge the nation's economic and social progress, those on the outskirts of society continue to grapple with enduring poverty. They are excluded from the advantages of economic growth, oppressed by unjust local, national, and global systems, discriminatory laws, and policies. Their struggles go unnoticed as they confront a slew of challenges, including slum evictions, enforced lockdowns, income

What happens after colonial industries have run their course—after the factory closes and the fields go fallow? Set in the cinchona plantations of India’s Darjeeling Hills, Quinine's Remains: Empire’s Medicine and the Life Thereafter (U California Press, 2024) chronicles the history and aftermaths of quinine. Harvested from cinchona bark, quinine was malaria’s only remedy until the twentieth-century advent of synthetic drugs, and it was vital to the British Empire. Today, the cinchona plantations—and the roughly fifty thousand people who call them home—remain. Their futures, however, are unclear. The Indian government has threatened to privatize or shut down this seemingly obsolete and crumbling industry, but the plantation community, led by strident trade unions, has successfully resisted. Overgrown cinchona fields and shuttered quinine factories may appear the stuff of postcolonial and postindustrial ruination, but quinine’s remains are not dead. Rather, they have become the site of urgent efforts to redefi

The long-awaited essay collection from one of the most influential voices in disability activism that detonates a bomb in our collective understanding of care and illness, showing us that sickness is a fact of life. In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson riots, and sick with a chronic condition that rendered them housebound, Johanna Hedva turned to the page to ask: How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can't get out of bed? It was not long before this essay, "Sick Woman Theory", became a seminal work on disability, because in reframing illness as not just a biological experience but a social one, Hedva argues that under capitalism--a system that limits our worth to the productivity of our bodies--we must reach for the revolutionary act of caring for ourselves and others. How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom (Zando-Hillman Grad Books, 2024) expands upon Hedva's paradigm-shifting perspective in a series of slyly subversive and razor-sharp essays that range from the theore

A funny thing happened to historian Michael Vann* on the way to his PhD thesis. While he was doing his research on French colonialism and the urbanist project in Hanoi, he came across an intriguing dossier: “Destruction of animals in the city”. The documents he found started him on a research path that led to a section of his dissertation, then an article that gained a wide academic and non-academic readership, and now The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford UP, 2018). But this isn’t your typical historical monograph. One of the latest volumes in Oxford University Press’s Graphic History Series, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt (with illustrations by Liz Clarke), explores the history of modernization, urbanization, and the spread of epidemic disease in the era of “New Imperialism” in an exciting and highly engaging format. The remaking of Hanoi as a capital of French empire from the end of the nineteenth century had unintended consequences. In the state-of-the-art s

It’s 2006, and S. L. Wisenberg is teaching writing at one of Chicago’s great universities and living a busy life when she’s gobsmacked by a sudden cancer diagnosis. In small but powerful journal entries, she bemoans friends who’ve died, expresses disdain for her body, worries about her future, recalls previous adventures, and jokes about the seriousness of her illness. She doesn’t let the fear and discomfort stop her from throwing her left breast a farewell party. Now, fifteen years later, SL Wisenberg’s journey of self-acceptance, Adventures of Cancer Bitch (Tortoise Books, 2024) has been reissued without page numbers, but with additional entries, notes about her life, and updates about cancer. S. L. Wisenberg was born in Texas and has lived in Chicago, more or less, since she was 18. She is the author of a fiction collection, The Sweetheart Is In; the essay collections Holocaust Girls: History, Memory & Other Obsessions and The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home. In 2009 she published a chronicle, The

In Soviet Nightingales: Care under Communism (Cornell UP, 2022), Susan Grant examines the history of nursing care in the Soviet Union from its nineteenth-century origins in Russia through the end of the Soviet state. With the advent of the USSR, nurses were instrumental in helping to build the New Soviet Person and in constructing a socialist society. In the interview, we explore Susan's approach to navigating an extensive timeline, the significance of care as a central concept within the female-dominated nursing profession, and the importance of flexibility when working with a diverse range of sources, some of which can be challenging to locate. Alisa Kuzmina is a PhD Candidate at the University of Minnesota, specializing in Cultural Cold War history, with a focus on Soviet and American marriage policies and the social-cultural norms surrounding them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicin