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In the 1980s, a research team led by Parisian scientists identified several unique DNA sequences, or haplotypes, linked to sickle cell anemia in African populations. After casual observations of how patients managed this painful blood disorder, the researchers in question postulated that the Senegalese type was less severe. The Enculturated Gene traces how this genetic discourse has blotted from view the roles that Senegalese patients and doctors have played in making sickle cell \"mild\" in a social setting where public health priorities and economic austerity programs have forced people to improvise informal strategies of care.

Drug users are typically portrayed as worthless slackers, burdens on society, and just plain useless-culturally, morally, and economically. By contrast, this book argues that the social construction of some people as useless is in fact extremely useful to other people. Leading medical anthropologists Merrill Singer and J. Bryan Page analyze media representations, drug policy, and underlying social structures to show what industries and social sectors benefit from the criminalization, demonization, and even popular glamorization of addicts. Synthesizing a broad range of key literature and advancing innovative arguments about the social construction of drug users and their role in contemporary society, this book is an important contribution to public health, medical anthropology, popular culture, and related fields.

When soldiers at Fort Carson were charged with a series of 14 murders, PTSD and other \"invisible wounds of war\" were thrown into the national spotlight. With these events as their starting point, Jean Scandlyn and Sarah Hautzinger argue for a new approach to combat stress and trauma, seeing them not just as individual medical pathologies but as fundamentally collective cultural phenomena. Their deep ethnographic research, including unusual access to affected soldiers at Fort Carson, also engaged an extended labyrinth of friends, family, communities, military culture, social services, bureaucracies, the media, and many other layers of society. Through this profound and moving book, they insist that invisible combat injuries are a social challenge demanding collective reconciliation with the post-9/11 wars. Introduction Part I: Coming Home 1. Lethal Warriors at Home 2. \"Best Home Town in the Army\" 3. Doing Dirty Work 4. PTSD = Pulling the Stigma Down 5. Decentering PTSD Part II: The Supporting Cast 6. Codeswitching : \"So, why do you have frostbite?\" 7. \"This is Our Playground\": Family Readiness Groups 8. Waiting to Serve 9. Appropriate Accommodation, or Exceptionalism for Supercitizens? 10. \"This Land is Not for Sale\": Pinon Canyon and Army Expansionism Part III: Dialogue 11. \"You're Not a Victim, You're a Volunteer\" 12. \"Closing the Gaps\": Seeking Civilian-Military Dialogue 13. \"Clueless Civilians\" and Others 14. The Day after Veterans Day: Listening to the Homefront Conclusion: Toward a Collective Reckoning with the Post-9/11 Wars

Outbreak narratives have proliferated for the past quarter century, and now they have reached epidemic proportions. From28 Days Laterto24toThe Walking Dead, movies, TV shows, and books are filled with zombie viruses, bioengineered plagues, and disease-ravaged bands of survivors. Even news reports indulge in thrilling scenarios about potential global pandemics like SARS and Ebola. Why have outbreak narratives infected our public discourse, and how have they affected the way Americans view the world?InGoing Viral, Dahlia Schweitzer probes outbreak narratives in film, television, and a variety of other media, putting them in conversation with rhetoric from government authorities and news organizations that have capitalized on public fears about our changing world. She identifies three distinct types of outbreak narrative, each corresponding to a specific contemporary anxiety: globalization, terrorism, and the end of civilization. Schweitzer considers how these fears, stoked by both fictional outbreak narratives and official sources, have influenced the ways Americans relate to their neighbors, perceive foreigners, and regard social institutions.Looking at everything fromI Am LegendtoThe X FilestoWorld War Z, this book examines how outbreak narratives both excite and horrify us, conjuring our nightmares while letting us indulge in fantasies about fighting infected Others.Going Viralthus raises provocative questions about the cost of public paranoia and the power brokers who profit from it.Supplemental Study Materials for \"Going Viral\":https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/going-viral-dahlia-schweitzerDahlia Schweitzer- Going Viral:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xF0V7WL9ow

Black & Blue is the first systematic description of how American doctors think about racial differences and how this kind of thinking affects the treatment of their black patients. The standard studies of medical racism examine past medical abuses of black people and do not address the racially motivated thinking and behaviors of physicians practicing medicine today. Black & Blue penetrates the physician's private sphere where racial fantasies and misinformation distort diagnoses and treatments. Doctors have always absorbed the racial stereotypes and folkloric beliefs about racial differences that permeate the general population. Within the world of medicine this racial folklore has infiltrated all of the medical sub-disciplines, from cardiology to gynecology to psychiatry. Doctors have thus imposed white or black racial identities upon every organ system of the human body, along with racial interpretations of black children, the black elderly, the black athlete, black musicality, black pain thresholds, and other aspects of black minds and bodies. The American medical establishment does not readily absorb either historical or current information about medical racism. For this reason, racial enlightenment will not reach medical schools until the current race-aversive curricula include new historical and sociological perspectives.

Between its founding in 1966 and its formal end in 1980, the Black Panther Party blazed a distinctive trail in American political culture. The Black Panthers are most often remembered for their revolutionary rhetoric and militant action. Here Alondra Nelson deftly recovers an indispensable but lesser-known aspect of the organization's broader struggle for social justice: health care. The Black Panther Party's health activism-its network of free health clinics, its campaign to raise awareness about genetic disease, and its challenges to medical discrimination-was an expression of its founding political philosophy and also a recognition that poor blacks were both underserved by mainstream medicine and overexposed to its harms. Drawing on extensive historical research as well as interviews with former members of the Black Panther Party, Nelson argues that the Party's focus on health care was both practical and ideological. Building on a long tradition of medical self-sufficiency among African Americans, the Panthers' People's Free Medical Clinics administered basic preventive care, tested for lead poisoning and hypertension, and helped with housing, employment, and social services. In 1971, the party launched a campaign to address sickle-cell anemia. In addition to establishing screening programs and educational outreach efforts, it exposed the racial biases of the medical system that had largely ignored sickle-cell anemia, a disease that predominantly affected people of African descent. The Black Panther Party's understanding of health as a basic human right and its engagement with the social implications of genetics anticipated current debates about the politics of health and race. That legacy-and that struggle-continues today in the commitment of health activists and the fight for universal health care.

Disability and Inequality explores the lived experiences of persons with disabilities (PWDs) in Jamaica.

The women's health movement shocked and scandalised when it burst into Australian politics in the early 1970s. It cast the light of day onto taboo subjects such as sexual assault, abortion and domestic violence, provoking outrage and condemnation. Some of the services women created for themselves were subjected to police raids; sex education material was branded 'indecent'. Moreover, women dared to criticise revered institutions, such as the medical system. Yet for all its perceived radicalism, the movement was part of a much broader and relatively conventional international health reform push,  which included the 'new' public health movement, the community health centre movement and, in Australia, the Aboriginal health movement, all of which were critical of the way medical systems had been organised during the 20th century. The women who joined the movement came from diverse backgrounds and included immigrant and refugee women, Aboriginal women and Anglo women. Initially, groups worked separately for the most part but as time went on, they found ways to cooperate and collaborate. This book presents an account of the ideas, the diverse and shared efforts and the enduring hard work of women's health activists, drawn together in one volume for the first time. This relentless activism gradually had an impact on public policy and slowly brought forth major attitudinal changes. The book also identifies the opportunities for health reform that were created along the way, opportunities which deserve to be more fully embraced.

Since the naming of hepatitis C in 1989, knowledge about the disease has grown exponentially. So too, however, has the stigma with which it is linked. Associated with injecting drug use and tainted blood scandals, hepatitis C inspires fear and blame. Making Disease, Making Citizens takes a timely look at the disease, those directly affected by it and its social and cultural implications. Drawing on personal interviews and a range of textual sources, the book presents a scholarly and engaging analysis of a newly identified and highly controversial disease and its relationship to philosophies of health, risk and harm in the West. It maps the social and medical negotiations taking place around the disease, shedding light on the ways these negotiations are also co-producing new selves. Adopting a feminist science and technology studies approach, this theoretically sophisticated, empirically informed analysis of the social construction of disease and the philosophy of health will appeal to those with interests in the sociology of health and medicine, health communication and harm reduction, and science and technology studies.

The politics and science of health and disease remain contested terrain among scientists, health practitioners, policy makers, industry, communities, and the public. Stakeholders in disputes about illnesses or conditions disagree over their fundamental causes as well as how they should be treated and prevented. This thought-provoking book crosses disciplinary boundaries by engaging with both public health policy and social science, asserting that science, activism, and policy are not separate issues and showing how the contribution of environmental factors in disease is often overlooked.