New Books In Public Health
Episodes
Luz María Hernández Sáenz, "Carving a Niche: The Medical Profession in Mexico 1800-1870" (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2018)
16 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In Carving a Niche: The Medical Profession in Mexico 1800-1870 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018), Luz María Hernández Sáenz follows the tra...
Fay Bound Alberti, "A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion" (Oxford UP, 2019)
14 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Before the global pandemic of Covid-19 arrived, public health experts in the U.S. and U.K. were warning of the epidemic of loneliness. Loneliness stea...
Elisheva A. Perelman, "American Evangelists and Tuberculosis in Modern Japan" (Hong Kong UP, 2020)
12 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Elisheva A. Perelman's new book American Evangelists and Tuberculosis in Modern Japan (Hong Kong University Press, 2020) examines the consequences of...
Impacts of Covid-19 on Japanese society with Kamila Szczepanska and Yoko Demelius
05 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of Covid-19 podcasts, Silja Keva talks to Kamila Szczepanska and Yoko Demelius about the impacts of the pandemic in Japan. While the s...
Controlling the Scientific Narrative: Randomized Controlled Trials and The Manipulation of “Control”
03 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Modern science uses the “randomized controlled trial”—whereby people are randomly allocated either the drug or a placebo—as a gold standard to...
Donald Stevens, "Mexico in the Time of Cholera" (U New Mexico Press, 2019)
02 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Donald F. Stevens offers us a portrait of early republican life in his new book, Mexico in the Time of Cholera, published in 2019 by the University of...
Manuel Barcia, "The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade" (Yale UP, 2020)
27 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
As we now know, epidemics and pandemics are not new phenomena. In her new book The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transat...
Dealing with COVID-19: The Perils of Using Previous Crises as a Reference Point
20 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The recent COVID-19 pandemic has received unprecedented media coverage in the past 3 months. A large part of this coverage includes comparisons of the...
Epidemic Management in China with Lauri Paltemaa
14 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the first of our COVID-19 podcasts, Lauri Paltemaa joins Outi Luova for a conversation on China's efforts to manage the COVID-19 epidemic, which he...
30 In Focus: Nir Eyal on (the deontology of) “Challenge Testing” a Covid Vaccine
07 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On April 27, David D. Kirkpatrick reported in the N. Y. Times that Oxford’s Jenner Center is close to starting human trials on a potential Covid-19 ...
Howard Friedman, "Ultimate Price: The Value We Place on Life" (U California Press, 2020)
30 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Howard Friedman's new book Ultimate Price: The Value We Place on Life (University of California Press, 2020) should be required reading for anyone sit...
Carlo Caduff, "The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger" (U California Press, 2015)
16 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Carlo Caduff’s The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger (University of California Press, 2015) is an ethnographic inquiry...
Sara E. Davies, "Containing Contagion: The Politics of Disease Outbreaks in Southeast Asia" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)
15 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
At the start of 2020 few of us would have recognized the face of the current director general of the World Health Organization. Three months later, an...
Travis Lupick, "Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle with Addiction" (Arsenal, 2108)
08 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
North America is in the grips of a drug epidemic; with the introduction of fentanyl, the chances of a fatal overdose are greater than ever, prompting ...
Travis Bell et al., "CTE, Media, and the NFL: Framing a Public Health Crisis as a Football Epidemic" (Lexington, 2019)
16 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Today we are joined by Travis Bell, Janelle Applequist, and Christian Dotson-Pierson to discuss their new book CTE, Media, and the NFL: Framing a Publ...
Sandro Galea, "Well: What We Need to Talk About When We Talk About Health" (Oxford UP, 2019)
10 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In Well: What We Need to Talk About When We Talk About Health (Oxford University Press, 2019), physician Sandro Galea examines what Americans miss whe...
Daniel Skinner, "Medical Necessity: Health Care Access and the Politics of Decision Making" (U Minnesota Press, 2019)
24 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The definition of medical necessity has morphed over the years, from a singular physician’s determination to a complex and dynamic political contest...
Rachel Louise Moran, "Governing Bodies: American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern Physique" (U Penn Press, 2018)
14 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How did the modern, American body come into being? According to Rachel Louise Moran this is a story to be told through the lens of the advisory state....
Andrea Kitta, "The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore" (Utah State UP, 2019)
17 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Disease is a social issue and not just a medical one. This is the central tenet underlying The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore (...
John P. Davis, "Russia in the Time of Cholera" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018)
29 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The idea of “backwardness” often plagues historical writing on Russia. In Russia in the Time of Cholera: Disease under Romanovs and Soviets (Bloom...
Michael G. Vann, "The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam" (Oxford UP, 2018)
26 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Susan Opotow, "New York After 9/11" (Fordham UP, 2019)
19 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The impact of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the country have been widely discussed—but what about the impact on New York City, specifically? In thei...
Theodore Dalrymple, "False Positive: A Year of Error, Omission, and Political Correctness in the New England Journal of Medicine" (Encounter Books, 2019)
17 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Theodore Dalrymple is a retired physician in Great Britain, who has written an account of his year’s-worth of reading the New England Journal of Med...
Sharra L. Vostral, "Toxic Shock: A Social History" (NYU Press, 2018)
02 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1978, doctors in Denver, Colorado observed several healthy children who suddenly and mysteriously developed a serious, life-threatening illness wit...
Okezi Otovo, "Progressive Mothers, Better Babies: Race, Public Health, and the State in Brazil, 1850-1945" (U Texas Press, 2016)
30 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Okezi Otovo’s Progressive Mothers, Better Babies: Race, Public Health, and the State in Brazil, 1850-1945 (U Texas Press, 2016) explores the interse...
Donna Dickenson, "Me Medicine vs. We Medicine: Reclaiming Biotechnology for the Common Good" (Columbia UP, 2016)
26 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Personalized healthcare―or what the award-winning author Donna Dickenson calls "Me Medicine"―is radically transforming our longstanding "one-size-...
Tricia Starks, "Smoking Under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia" (Cornell UP, 2018)
22 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
How and when did Russia become a country of smokers? Why did makhorka and papirosy become ubiquitous products of tobacco consumption? Tricia Starks ex...
Alex Broadbent, "Philosophy of Medicine" (Oxford UP, 2019)
19 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Alex Broadbent's Philosophy of Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2019) asks two central questions about medicine: what is it, and what should we thi...
Katie Batza, "Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2018)
15 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The AIDS crisis of the 1980s looms large in recent histories of sexuality, medicine, and politics, and justly so—an unknown virus without a cure rav...
William Caferro, "Petrarch's War: Florence and the Black Death in Context" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
03 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1349 the City-Republic of Florence had just endured a horrific epidemic of bubonic plague, that contagion that became known as the Black Death. Nev...
Paul Ramírez, "Enlightened Immunity: Mexico’s Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason" (Stanford UP, 2018)
24 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Paul Ramírez’s first book explores how laypeople impacted the new medical techniques and technologies implemented by the imperial state in the fina...
Stephan Bullard, "A Day-by-Day Chronicle of the 2013-2016 Ebola Outbreak" (Springer, 2018)
07 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Why did Ebola, a virus so deadly that it killed or immobilized its victims within days, have time to become a full-blown epidemic? That’s what happe...
Jonathan Marks, "The Perils of Partnership: Industry Influence, Institutional Integrity, and Public Health" (Oxford UP, 2019)
02 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
It is an article of faith in many circles that the most effective and efficient way to solve a broad range of local and national problems is through p...
James L. A. Webb, "The Long Struggle against Malaria in Tropical Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2016)
24 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
It is estimated that malaria kills between 650,000 to 1.2 million people every year; experts believe that nearly 90 percent of these deaths occur in A...
Lukas Engelmann, "Mapping AIDS: Visual Histories of an Enduring Epidemic" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
17 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
What role do visual media play in establishing a medical phenomenon? Who mobilizes these representations, and to what end? In Mapping AIDS: Visual His...
Vivian Percy, "Saving Jenny: Rescuing Our Youth from America's Opioid and Suicide Epidemic" (Radius Books, 2018)
01 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Normal turned to PTSD and a substance abuse nightmare for Jenny the instant a taxi struck her, catapulting her twenty feet across a busy New York City...
Joseph Jarvis, "The Purple World: Healing the Harm in American Health Care" (Scrivener Books, 2018)
15 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
American’s pay double what every other developed nation in the world pays for healthcare. Does that mean that we are the healthiest? No. In fact, we...
Peter Hotez, "Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism: My Journey as a Vaccine Scientist, Pediatrician, and Autism Dad" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018)
07 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Peter Hotez is a pediatrician-scientist who develops vaccines for neglected tropical diseases affecting the worlds poor. He is also the father of ...
Leigh Goodmark, "Decriminalizing Domestic Violence: A Balanced Policy Approach to Intimate Partner Violence" (U California Press, 2018)
04 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Thanks to the efforts of activists concerned that the problem of “battered women” was being ignored -- and treated as a private, family matter rat...
Dave Chase, "The Opioid Crisis Wake Up Call: Health Care is Stealing the American Dream. Here is How We Take It Back" (Health Rosetta Media, 2018)
22 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The opioid crisis in America is considered by many to be the worst national public health crisis in the last 100 years. In his new book, The Opioid Cr...
Joshua Sharfstein, “The Public Health Crisis Survival Guide: Leadership and Management in Trying Times” (Oxford UP, 2018)
21 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Joshua Sharfstein has learned a lot as from his years of experience as a public health leader. He has dealt with everything from a rabid raccoon, ...
Michelle Perro and Vincanne Adams, “What’s Making Our Children Sick?” (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017)
23 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Pediatrician and integrative medicine practitioner Michelle Perro, MD, has been treating an increasing number of children with complex chronic illness...
Dorothy H. Crawford, “Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped our History” (Oxford UP, 2018)
09 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The history of mankind is interlinked with microbes. As humans evolved and became more advanced, microbes evolved right along with us. Through infecti...
Matthew R. Pembleton, “Containing Addiction: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the Origins of America’s Global Drug Wars” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017
25 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
It’s common to place the start of the War on Drugs with the Nixon or Reagan Administrations, but as Matthew Pembleton tells us, those are only phase...
Martha Few, “For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala” (U Arizona Press, 2015)
18 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Martha Few’s For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala (University of Arizona Press, 2015) describe...
Laura Spinney, “Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World” (PublicAffairs, 2017)
09 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was one of the greatest human disasters of all time. It infected a third of the people on Earth–from the poorest immigr...
Jonathan Engel, “Unaffordable: American Healthcare from Johnson to Trump” (U Wisconsin Press, 2018)
19 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Earlier this year, Jamila Michener visited the podcast to talk about her new book, Fragmented Democracy, about Medicaid and the state-based structure ...
Urmi Engineer Willoughby, “Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteeth-Century New Orleans” (LSU Press, 2017)
23 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
A disease cannot be fully understood unless considered in its environmental context. That conviction drives Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Ninetee...
Jonathan D. Quick, “The End of Epidemics: The Looming Threat to Humanity and How to Stop It” (St. Martin’s Press, 2018)
16 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
A leading doctor offers answers on the one of the most urgent questions of our time: How do we prevent the next global pandemic? The 2014 Ebola epidem...
Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs, “Jonas Salk: A Life” (Oxford UP, 2015)
29 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Polio was a scourge that terrified generations of people throughout the United States and the rest of the world until Jonas Salk’s vaccine provided ...
Anita Hannig, “Beyond Surgery: Injury, Healing, and Religion at an Ethiopian Hospital (U. Chicago Press, 2017)
10 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Anita Hannig‘s first book, Beyond Surgery: Injury, Healing, and Religion at an Ethiopian Hospital (University of Chicago Press, 2017) is an in-depth...
Travis Linnemann, “Meth Wars: Police, Media, Power” (NYU Press, 2016)
15 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
If all you knew about methamphetamines came from popular culture (“Breaking Bad”) or government anti-drug campaigns (“Faces of Meth”), then yo...
Anthony M. Petro, “After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion” (Oxford UP, 2015)
02 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
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, Afte...
Robert Peckham, “Epidemics in Modern Asia” (Cambridge UP, 2016)
06 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Robert Peckham’s Epidemics in Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores the crucial yet under-explored role that epidemics have played...
Daniel Amsterdam, “Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen’s Campaign for a Civic Welfare State” (Penn Press, 2016)
03 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
On the podcast this week is Daniel Amsterdam, author of Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen’s Campaign for a Civic Welfare State (Penn Press, 2016). He ...
Sam Quinones, “Dreamland: The True Tale of American’s Opiate Epidemic” (Bloomsbury Press, 2015)
08 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
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 int...
Mark Navin, “Values and Vaccine Refusal: Hard Questions in Epistemology, Ethics, and Health Care” (Routledge, 2016)
01 Jul 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Communities of parents who refuse, delay, or selectively decline to vaccinate their children pose familiar moral and political questions concerning pu...
Richard C. Keller, “Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003” (University of Chicago Press, 2015)
23 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In August 2003, a heat wave in France killed close to 15,000 people, the majority of whom were over 75. Prominent among the dead were a group of victi...
Elena Conis, “Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization” (University of Chicago, 2014)
02 Feb 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The 1960s marked a “new era of vaccination,” when Americans eagerly exposed their arms and hind ends for shots that would prevent a range of every...
John P. DiMoia, “Reconstructing Bodies: Biomedicine, Health, and Nation-Building in South Korea Since 1945” (Stanford UP, 2013)
27 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
For a patient choosing among available forms of healing in the medical marketplace of mid-20th century South Korea, the process was akin to shopping. ...
Kate Brown, “Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters” (Oxford UP, 2013)
11 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Kate Brown‘s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a ...
Mark A. Largent, “Vaccine: The Debate in Modern America” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012)
06 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Children born in the 1970s and 1980s received just a handful of vaccinations: measles, rubella, and a few others. Beginning the 1990s, the numbers of ...
Marian Moser Jones, “The American Red Cross from Clara Barton to the New Deal” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012)
26 Jul 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Is there an institution in the United States that enjoys a better reputation than the American Red Cross? In her thorough, accessible new book The Ame...
Daniel W. Webster and Jon S. Vernick, “Reducing Gun Violence in America” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013)
15 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
We’ve all heard the saying that when arguing we should ‘disagree without being disagreeable’ but, when it comes to guns, we often find ourselves...
Marta Hanson, “Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China” (Routledge, 2011)
24 Jan 2012
Contributed by Lukas
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 imaginati...
Eric C. Schneider, “Smack: Heroin and the American City” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)
15 Jun 2011
Contributed by Lukas
When I arrived at college in the early 1980s, drugs were cool, music was cool, and drug-music was especially cool. The coolest of the cool drug-music ...
Elizabeth Pisani, “The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS” (Norton, 2008)
24 Apr 2011
Contributed by Lukas
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 – ...
Paul Offit, “Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All” (Basic Books, 2011)
25 Mar 2011
Contributed by Lukas
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: ...