Ebook The Epidemiological Imagination

Public health is once again in the spotlight after several decades of being eclipsed by high tech, individually-oriented medical science. The reasons for this are not hard to find - the ever escalating costs of medical care, growing disillusionment with the return on investment, particularly for the poorer sections of the community, and a growing recognition of the importance of health promotion and preventative strategies which focus on the environmental and behavioural determinants of health and disease. At the heart of the public health perspective is an emphasis on understanding whole populations through the application of epidemiological analysis. This reader addresses the need to make available some of the classics of epidemiology to the new generations of students who are now trained in public-health, and to share with them the excitement of the epidemiological method. There is a wealth of experience in our collective public-health past and as we shape the new public health there is a danger of ignoring lessons from the old. By drawing on the choices of leading contemporary epidemiologists in selecting published papers both old and new, this volume aims to make the classics accessible to teachers and students alike.

A reader of key articles about epidemiology and public health.

This accessible and clearly-structured book offers a comprehensive insight into the methods and principles of epidemiological study alongside an analysis of the broad context in which epidemiological work is undertaken. Chapters on sources of epidemiological data, on epidemiological study designs and on basic statistical measures for epidemiological studies are used to introduce the reader to the traditional underpinnings of epidemiological work. Attention then shifts to a wider canvas. Consideration is given to the critical reading of epidemiological research both as a way of demonstrating how different aspects of epidemiological study come together in published work and as the basis for a discussion of the centrality of epidemiological research in the development of evidence-based health care. The key facets of evidence-based health care are assessed. A more discursive and critical assessment of epidemiology is also presented in which attention is drawn to the need to develop alternative epidemiologies which draw on lay knowledge and recognise the socio-political context of factors influencing health status. The book concludes with a description of the everyday practice of epidemiology in a UK health authority context.

Harvard Medical School, Boston. Textbook for medical and public health students.

"This is a very comprehensive book on the subject matter with references that users can access and follow through. It is well structured and the writing style is appropriate for a wide range of students." Mo Nowrung, University of East Anglia, UK We are facing an epidemic of work stress. But why should problems at work which previously led to industrial disputes and political activity now be experienced as a cause of physical or mental illness? This book combines a critique of the scientific evidence relating to work stress, with an account of the social, historical and cultural changes that produced this phenomenon. The analysis is grounded in workers' accounts of their experiences of work stress, derived from the authors' qualitative research. Sociological theories of embodiment, emotions and medicalization are employed to explore the role of subjectivity in mediating the relationship between work and ill health. This book concludes with an exploration of the consequences of adopting the passive identity of 'work stress victim', and the extent to which individuals resist the medicalization of their problems. It will be of interest to a range of students and researchers in the social sciences, particularly those with an interest in medical sociology, sociology of work, management studies and industrial relations.

This edited collection brings together new research by world-leading historians and anthropologists to examine the interaction between images of plague in different temporal and spatial contexts, and the imagination of the disease from the Middle Ages to today. The chapters in this book illuminate to what extent the image of plague has not simply reflected, but also impacted the way in which the disease is experienced in different historical periods. The book asks what is the contribution of the entanglement between epidemic image and imagination to the persistence of plague as a category of human suffering across so many centuries, in spite of profound shifts in our medical understanding of the disease. What is it that makes plague such a visually charismatic subject? And why is the medical, religious and lay imagination of plague so consistently determined by the visual register? In answering these questions, this volume takes the study of plague images beyond its usual, art-historical framework, so as to examine them and their relation to the imagination of plague from medical, historical, visual anthropological, and postcolonial perspectives.

DIVShows how narratives of contagion structure communities of belonging and how the lessons of these narratives are incorporated into sociological theories of cultural transmission and community formation./div

The imagination, our capacity to entertain thoughts and ideas "in the mind's eye," is indispensable in science as elsewhere in human life. Indeed, common scientific practices such as modeling and idealization rely on the imagination to construct simplified, stylized scenarios essential for scientific understanding. Yet the philosophy of science has traditionally shied away from according an important role to the imagination, wary of psychologizing fundamental scientific concepts like explanation and justification. In recent years, however, advances in thinking about creativity and fiction, and their relation to theorizing and understanding, have prompted a move away from older philosophical perspectives and toward a greater acknowledgement of the place of the imagination in scientific practice. Meanwhile, psychologists have engaged in significant experimental work on the role of the imagination in causal thinking and probabilistic reasoning. The Scientific Imagination delves into this burgeoning area of debate at the intersection of the philosophy and practice of science, bringing together the work of leading researchers in philosophy and psychology. Philosophers discuss such topics as modeling, idealization, metaphor and explanation, examining their role within science as well as how they affect questions in metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of language. Psychologists discuss how our imaginative capacities develop and how they work, their relationships with processes of reasoning, and how they compare to related capacities, such as categorization and counterfactual thinking. Together, these contributions combine to provide a comprehensive and exciting picture of the scientific imagination.

This innovative textbook brings together modern concepts in mathematical epidemiology, computational modeling, physics-based simulation, data science, and machine learning to understand one of the most significant problems of our current time, the outbreak dynamics and outbreak control of COVID-19. It teaches the relevant tools to model and simulate nonlinear dynamic systems in view of a global pandemic that is acutely relevant to human health. If you are a student, educator, basic scientist, or medical researcher in the natural or social sciences, or someone passionate about big data and human health: This book is for you! It serves as a textbook for undergraduates and graduate students, and a monograph for researchers and scientists. It can be used in the mathematical life sciences suitable for courses in applied mathematics, biomedical engineering, biostatistics, computer science, data science, epidemiology, health sciences, machine learning, mathematical biology, numerical methods, and probabilistic programming. This book is a personal reflection on the role of data-driven modeling during the COVID-19 pandemic, motivated by the curiosity to understand it.