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Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, Volume 6
This sixth volume in the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale reports Nightingale’s considerable accomplishments in the development of a public health care system based on health promotion and disease prevention. It follows directly from her understanding of social science and broader social reform activities, which were related in Society and Politics (Volume 5). Public Health Care includes a critical edition of Notes on Nursing for the Labouring Classes, papers on mortality in aboriginal schools and hospitals, and on rural health. It reports much unknown material on Nightingale’s signal contribution of bringing professional nursing into the dreaded workhouse infirmaries. This collection presents letters and notes on a wide range of issues from specific diseases to germ theory, and relates some of her own extensive work as a nurse practitioner, which included organizing referrals to doctors and providing related care.
Currently, Volumes 1 to 11 are available in e-book version by subscription or from university and college libraries through the following vendors: Canadian Electronic Library, Ebrary, MyiLibrary, and Netlibrary.
Local Responses to Health Care Needs
In community after community, pro bono and student-run health clinics have sprung up over the past 30 years, providing critically needed care to medically underserved populations. Free Clinics is a mosaic formed by accounts of such clinics around the United States. These wide-ranging narratives—from urban to rural, from primary care to behavioral health care—provide examples that will assist other communities seeking to find the model that best fits their needs. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has improved access to health care for many Americans, but millions remain and will remain uninsured or underinsured. Free clinics provide non-emergency care to those in need. Nationwide, professionals can be found offering volunteer services at these clinics. Contributors to this volume—typically people with personal familiarity (as clinicians or area residents) with the clinics they write about—cover a variety of topics, including a review of the literature, data-driven accounts of clinic usage, and ethical guidelines for student-run clinics. They describe the motivations of clinic staff, the day-to-day work of a family nurse practitioner working in clinics and teaching at a university, the challenges and rewards of providing health care for homeless people, and more. Student-run clinics are the topic of the second section: in addition to providing care to a small subset of those in need, student-run clinics are an important venue for training future clinicians and helping the seeds of altruism with which many enter their professions to germinate. Free Clinics will be useful to policymakers, students and faculty in public health and health policy programs, and clinicians and students who are embarking on launching new clinics.
Disease Prevention and the Environmental Breast Cancer Movement
Challenging the broader cultural milieu of pink ribbon symbolism and breast cancer "awareness" campaigns, this movement has grown from a handful of community-based organizations into a national entity, shaping the cultural, political, and public health landscape. Much of the activists' everyday work revolves around describing how the so called "cancer industry" downplays possible environmental links to protect their political and economic interests and they demand that the public play a role in scientific, policy, and public health decision-making to build a new framework of breast cancer prevention.
From Pink to Green successfully explores the intersection between breast cancer activism and the environmental health sciences, incorporating public and scientific debates as well as policy implications to public health and environmental agendas.
Health and Medical Care in America
One of America's leading public health experts finds a host of ills in this country's health care system: • The United States spends nearly twice as much on health care as the rest of the developed world, yet has higher infant mortality rates and shorter longevity than most nations. • We have access to many different drugs that accomplish the same end at varying costs, and nearly all are cheaper abroad. • Our life span had doubled over the past century before we developed effective drugs to treat most diseases or even considered altering the human genome. • The benefits of almost all newly developed treatments are marginal, while their costs are high. In his blunt assessment of the state of public health in America, Alfred Sommer argues that human behavior has a stronger effect on wellness than almost any other factor. Despite exciting advances in genomic research and cutting-edge medicine, Sommer explains, most illness can be avoided or managed with simple, low-tech habits such as proper hand washing, regular exercise, a balanced diet, and not smoking. But, as he also shows, this is easier said than done. Sommer finds that our fascination with medical advances sometimes keeps us from taking responsibility for our individual well-being. Instead of focusing on prevention, we wait for medical science to cure us once we become sick. Humorous, sometimes acerbic, and always well informed, Sommer’s thought-provoking book will change the way you look at health care in America.
Contesting Community and Defining Difference in U.S. Public Health Programs
As local governments and organizations assume more responsibility for ensuring the public health, identity politics play an increasing yet largely unexamined role in public and policy attitudes toward local problems. In Governing How We Care, medical anthropologist Susan Shaw examines the relationship between government and citizens using case studies of needle exchange and Welfare-to-Work programs to illustrate the meanings of cultural difference, ethnicity, and inequality in health care.
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted over six years in a small New England city, Shaw presents critical perspectives on public health intervention efforts. She looks at online developments in health care and makes important correlations between poverty and health care in the urban United States. Shaw also highlights the new concepts of community and forms of identity that emerge in our efforts to provide effective health care. Governing How We Care shows how government-sponsored community health and health care programs operate in an age of neoliberalism.
Late in the summer of 1880, a wave of odors emanated from the sewers of Paris. As the stench lingered, outraged residents feared that the foul air would breed an epidemic. Fifteen years later—when the City of Light was in the grips of another Great Stink—the landscape of health and disease had changed dramatically. Parisians held their noses and protested, but this time few feared that the odors would spread disease. Historian David S. Barnes examines the birth of a new microbe-centered science of public health during the 1880s and 1890s, when the germ theory of disease burst into public consciousness. Tracing a series of developments in French science, medicine, politics, and culture, Barnes reveals how the science and practice of public health changed during the heyday of the Bacteriological Revolution. Despite its many innovations, however, the new science of germs did not entirely sweep away the older "sanitarian" view of public health. The longstanding conviction that disease could be traced to filthy people, places, and substances remained strong, even as it was translated into the language of bacteriology. Ultimately, the attitudes of physicians and the French public were shaped by political struggles between republicans and the clergy, by aggressive efforts to educate and "civilize" the peasantry, and by long-term shifts in the public's ability to tolerate the odor of bodily substances. This fascinating study sheds new light on the scientific and social factors that continue to influence the public's lingering uncertainty over how disease can—and cannot—be spread.
The Health Care Safety Net in a Post-Reform World examines how national health care reform will impact safety net programs that serve low-income and uninsured patients. The “safety net” refers to the collection of hospitals, clinics, and doctors who treat disadvantaged people, including those without insurance, regardless of their ability to pay. Despite comprehensive national health care reform, over twenty million people will remain uninsured. And many of those who obtain insurance from reform will continue to face shortages of providers in their communities willing or able to serve them. As the demand for care grows with expanded insurance, so will the pressure on an overstretched safety net.
This book, with contributions from leading health care scholars, is the first comprehensive assessment of the safety net in over a decade. Rather than view health insurance and the health care safety net as alternatives to each other, it examines their potential to be complementary aspects of a broader effort to achieve equity and quality in health care access. It also considers whether the safety net can be improved and strengthened to a level that can provide truly universal access, both through expanded insurance and the creation of a well-integrated and reasonably supported network of direct health care access for the uninsured.
Seeing safety net institutions as key components of post-health care reform in the United States—as opposed to stop-gap measures or as part of the problem—is a bold idea. And as presented in this volume, it is an idea whose time has come.
A Social and Structural Approach
It is estimated that more than 50 million Latinos live in the United States. This is projected to more than double by 2050. In Health Issues in Latino Males experts from public health, medicine, and sociology examine the issues affecting Latino men's health and recommend policies to overcome inequities and better serve this population. It includes an extensive appendix charting epidemiological data on Latino health.
Chronic Disease and Slow Death in Nineteenth-Century France
Incurable and Intolerable looks at the history of incurable illness from a variety of perspectives, including doctors, patients, families, religious counsel, and policy makers. This compellingly documented history illuminates the physical, emotional, social, and existential consequences of chronic disease and terminal illness, and offers an original look at the world of palliative medicine, politics, religion, and charity. Jason Szabo encourages a more careful scrutiny of today's attitudes, policies, and practices surrounding "imminent death" and its effects on society.
Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation
For most of the first half of the twentieth century, tuberculosis ranked among the top three causes of mortality among urban African Americans. Often afflicting an entire family or large segments of a neighborhood, the plague of TB was as mysterious as it was fatal. Samuel Kelton Roberts Jr. examines how individuals and institutions--black and white, public and private--responded to the challenges of tuberculosis in a segregated society.
