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Combining attention to lived experience with the critical tools of ethics, this book explores why many women who use the tools of high-tech assisted reproduction tend to use them repeatedly, even when the results are unsuccessful. This book offers a humanistic account of infertility and its resolution in a twenty-first-century American context.

Every day, thousands of people quietly face decisions as agonizing as those made famous in the Terri Schiavo case. Throughout that controversy, all kinds of people--politicians, religious leaders, legal and medical experts--made emphatic statements about the facts and offered even more certain opinions about what should be done. To many, courts were either ordering Terri's death by starvation or vindicating her constitutional rights. Both sides called for simple answers. If That Ever Happens to Me details why these simple answers were not right for Terri Schiavo and why they are not right for end-of-life decisions today.Lois Shepherd looks behind labels like "e;starvation,"e; "e;care,"e; or "e;medical treatment"e; to consider what care and feeding really mean, when feeding tubes might be removed, and why disability groups, the faithful, and even the dying themselves often suggest end-of-life solutions that they might later regret. For example, Shepherd cautions against living wills as a pat answer. She provides evidence that demanding letter-perfect documents can actually weaken, rather than bolster, patient choice. The actions taken and decisions made during Terri Schiavo's final years will continue to have repercussions for thousands of others--those nearing death, their families, health-care professionals, attorneys, lawmakers, clergy, media, researchers, and ethicists. If That Ever Happens to Me is an excellent choice for anyone interested in end-of-life law, policy, and ethics--particularly readers seeking a deeper understanding of the issues raised by Terri Schiavo's case.

In a country riven by regional differences, All Health Politics Is Local shatters the notion of a shared national health agenda. It shows that health has always been political and shaped not just by formal policy but also by grassroots community battles.

By comparing institutions in Hawai'i and Louisiana designed to incarcerate individuals with a highly stigmatized disease, this work provides a study of the complex relationship between US imperialism and public health policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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. Reactionary white politicians and health officials promoted "e;racial hygiene"e; and sought to control TB through Jim Crow quarantines, Roberts explains. African Americans, in turn, protested the segregated, overcrowded housing that was the true root of the tuberculosis problem. Moderate white and black political leadership reconfigured definitions of health and citizenship, extending some rights while constraining others. Meanwhile, those who suffered with the disease--as its victims or as family and neighbors--made the daily adjustments required by the devastating effects of the "e;white plague."e;Exploring the politics of race, reform, and public health, Infectious Fear uses the tuberculosis crisis to illuminate the limits of racialized medicine and the roots of modern health disparities. Ultimately, it reveals a disturbing picture of the United States' health history while offering a vision of a more democratic future.

Highlighting the rise of Parents Anonymous and connecting their activism to the sexual abuse moral panic that swept America in the 1980s, Mical Raz argues that these panics and policies - as well as biased viewpoints regarding race, class, and gender - played a powerful role shaping perceptions of child abuse.

In this collection of essays, Lawrence O. Gostin, an internationally recognized scholar of AIDS law and policy, confronts the most pressing and controversial issues surrounding AIDS in America and around the world. He shows how HIV/AIDS affects the entire population - infected and uninfected - by influencing social norms, the economy, and the US's role as a world leader.

Over the last twenty years, type 2 diabetes skyrocketed to the forefront of global public health concern. In this book, Mari Armstrong-Hough examines the rise and response to the disease in two societies: the United States and Japan. Both societies have faced rising rates of diabetes, but their social and biomedical responses to its ascendance have diverged.

Amid ongoing debate about health care reform, the need for informed analyses of health policy is greater than ever. The twelve original essays in this volume show that common public debates routinely bypass complex ethical, sociocultural, historical, and political questions about how we should address ideals of justice and equality in health care.

What's Wrong with the Poor?: Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty

One of medicine's most remarkable therapeutic triumphs was the discovery of insulin in 1921. But the author demonstrates that the transformation of the disease from fatal condition into a chronic illness is tinged with irony and one which illuminates the human consequences of medical intervention.

In a work that spans the twentieth century, Nancy Tomes questions the popular - and largely unexamined - idea that in order to get good health care, people must learn to shop for it. Remaking the American Patient explores the consequences of the consumer economy and American medicine having come of age at exactly the same time.

Science Has No Sex: The Life of Marie Zakrzewska, M.D.

Doctoring the South: Southern Physicians and Everyday Medicine in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

From the untimely deaths of young athletes to chronic disease among retired players, roiling debates over tackle football have profound implications for more than one million American boysusome as young as five years olduwho play the sport every year. In this book, Kathleen Bachynksi offers the first history of youth tackle football and debates over its safety.

Chronicles and analyzes what the new legal status and changing political environment have meant for abortion providers and their patients. Johanna Schoen sheds light on the little-studied experience of performing and receiving abortion care from the 1970s to the rise of the antiabortion movement and the escalation of antiabortion tactics in the 1980s to the 1990s and beyond.

From 1915 to 1920, Progressive reformers led a spirited but unsuccessful crusade for compulsory health insurance in New York State. Beatrix Hoffman shows that this first health insurance campaign was a crucial moment in the creation of the American welfare state and health care system.

Offers a piercing view of the role of science in nineteenth-century women's rights movements and provides historical perspective on the debates about gender and science. This title presents a full-length biography of Jacobi, the most significant woman physician of her era and an outspoken advocate for women's rights.

This work chronicles the history of sickle cell anaemia in the US, tracing its transformation from an ""invisible"" malady to a powerful, yet contested, cultural symbol of African American pain and suffering.

Is there a place for complementary and alternative therapies in modern health care? This book discusses the need for establishing rules and standards to facilitate appropriate integration of conventional and complementary and alternative medical CAM therapies.

Those who work in bioethics and the medical humanities come from many different backgrounds: health care, philosophy, law, social sciences, religious studies, and more. The work they do also varies widely. Writing as a participant in this developing field, Judith Andre offers a model to unify its diversity.

These essays provide the groundwork for a philosophical discussion of the ethical and cultural dimensions of the popularity of SSRI antidepressants. They do not question that these drugs can alleviate suffering. What they do question is the popularity of these drugs and that popularity's relationship to American culture and ideas of selfhood.

In this multidisciplinary study, Ann Folwell Stanford reads literature written by US women of colour to propose a rethinking of modern medical practice. Drawing on feminist ethics to explore the work of 11 novelists, she argues that personal health and social justice are inextricably linked.

In February 2003, an undocumented immigrant teen, Jesica Santillan, from Mexico lay dying in a prominent American hospital due to a stunning medical oversight. This volume draws together experts from various fields to understand the dramatic events, the major players, and the core issues at stake.

Between 1932 and 1972 approximately 600 African American men in Alabama served unwittingly as guinea pigs in the Tuskegee syphilis study. This volume gathers articles, contemporary newspaper accounts, selections from reports and letters, and other reconsiderations of the study.

Advocates of rapid access to medicines and critics fearful of inadequate testing both argue that globalization will result in the easy transfer of pharmaceuticals around the world. In Pharmacopolitics, Arthur Daemmrich challenges their assumptions by comparing drug laws, clinical trials and monitoring systems in the US and Germany.

A re-examination of research ethics across a broad range of disciplines. It combines case studies and commentaries by a multidisciplinary group of scholars and researchers to explore such issues as informed consent, conflict of interest, confidentiality, and research on illegal behaviour.