The Forgotten Medicine

Debates over health care have focused for so long on economics that the proper goals for medicine seem to be taken for granted; yet problems in health care stem as much from a lack of agreement about the goals and priorities of medicine as from the way systems function. This book asks basic questions about the purposes and ends of medicine and shows that the answers have practical implications for future health care delivery, medical research, and the education of medical students. The Hastings Center coordinated teams of physicians, nurses, public health experts, philosophers, theologians, politicians, health care administrators, social workers, and lawyers in fourteen countries to explore these issues. In this volume, they articulate four basic goals of medicine — prevention of disease, relief of suffering, care of the ill, and avoidance of premature death — and examine them in light of the cultural, political, and economic pressures under which medicine functions. In reporting these findings, the contributors touch on a wide range of diverse issues such as genetic technology, Chinese medicine, care of the elderly, and prevention and public health. The Goals of Medicine clearly demonstrates the importance of clarifying the purposes of medicine before attempting to change the economic and organizational systems. It warns that without such examination, any reform efforts may be fruitless.

After about 1895, when Wellcome (1853-) had already made a considerable fortune in the pharmaceutical industry and had traveled extensively looking for new drugs or new sources for established ones, he began developing his collecting interests, and began his medical museum about 1903. An exhibition based on it was mounted at the British Museum in 2003, and is here documented. There is no index. Distributed by The David Brown Book Company. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

This book fills a void. Never before has a comprehensive history of phage therapy—a once-neglected, now resurgent field—been written. Kuchment writes from the perspective of the eager student of history for the common reader.

A window into the mind of a brilliant Chinese scholar-physician.

Physical Signs in Medicine and Surgery - An Atlas of Rare, Lost and Forgotten Physical Signs: The work for this text began over two decades ago as Dr. Ashley White was researching ancient diseases and their initial presentations for prevention of future pandemic plagues. This evidence based paleopathology research has granted Dr. White access to some of the world's most sensitive archaeological sites. These locations have been in England, Scotland, North and Central America, Nine additional countries in Europe, Asia - including Russia and China, the Middle East, North and Sub-Sahara Africa, and South America including the Amazon Basin. This comprehensive Atlas was originally conceived for doctors providing needed care in dangerous, rugged and remote situations often created by catastrophe, disasters, epidemics, and military conflicts. It is within these serious environments that this Atlas can assist practitioners find the most obscure and difficult diagnosis where access to x-rays and modern laboratory equipment are often impossible. Designed with a unique reference style of key words tagged to known medical systems the Atlas functions as an easy to use clinical field manual whether in use in an advanced medical care unit or in the harsh realm of the jungle. This extensive compendium of rare medical findings, together with an incredible group of landmark essays make this the most complete Atlas of physical signs ever published.

The main objective of this book is to bring together multidisciplinary contributions from leading authorities on the properties and roles of water in cell systems which are otherwise dispersed in the literature and difficult to gather. The authors are drawn from areas of physics, chemistry, biology and physiology, where water plays a central role. The book focuses on current research and developments in the theoretical and experimental studies of water in biological systems and compounds, such as interaction with hydrophobic or hydrophilic structures, protein and membrane surfaces. It provides insights into the importance of water in cellular processes and physiology and, ultimately, in life, brain function, and health.

In Renaissance Italy women from all walks of life played a central role in health care and the early development of medical science. Observing that the frontlines of care are often found in the household and other spaces thought of as female, Sharon Strocchia encourages us to rethink women's place in the history of medicine.

A fascinating look at a bizarre, forgotten epidemic from the national bestselling author of The American Plague. In 1918, a world war raged, and a lethal strain of influenza circled the globe. In the midst of all this death, a bizarre disease appeared in Europe. Eventually known as encephalitis lethargica, or sleeping sickness, it spread worldwide, leaving millions dead or locked in institutions. Then, in 1927, it disappeared as suddenly as it arrived. Asleep, set in 1920s and '30s New York, follows a group of neurologists through hospitals and asylums as they try to solve this epidemic and treat its victims-who learned the worst fate was not dying of it, but surviving it.