July 2014 | The Health Culture

The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy — August 2014

Posted by Jan on July 30, 2014 @ 6:27 pm

The August issue of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy does not have a specific theme. The nine articles address a number of quite interesting issues, among them:

How existential psychotherapy can offer powerful insights to patients recovering from severe mental disorders such as psychosis
How a preference in athletics for natural talent over artificial enhancements (such as doping) may reflect “unsavory beliefs about ‘nature’s aristocracy’ ”
How rich, educated, white males may be just as, if not more, vulnerable to threats posed by physician-assisted suicide and voluntary active euthanasia than members of marginalized groups
When the decision is made not to administer artificial hydration and nutrition, can the responsibility for the patient’s death be attributed to the underlying pathology, even when that is not the cause of death
The right to procreate: Is it possible for prospective mothers to wrong prospective fathers by bearing their child

Note that the articles in this journal are not open access and that I have added the emphasis in the following extracts and abstracts. Read more

Social history of medicine — August 2014

Posted by Jan on July 25, 2014 @ 2:51 pm

The August issue of Social History of Medicine contains eight original articles:

Late 19th/early 20th century food adulteration in an increasingly industrialized and globalized world and the search for safety standards
The shift in cancer education in the 1950s, no longer downplaying post-operative recovery
The 20th century shift in British veterinary medicine towards small animals (dogs, cats), as the need to attend to horses declined (open access)
How complaints about the quality of London drinking water in the 18th century reflected the new popularity of bathing for health and social attitudes towards bathers from the lower classes
A re-evaluation of the prevalence of venereal disease at the time of the World War I (open access)
How quacks preyed on people with hearing loss in mid-19th century Britain
How the 1975 TV play, ‘Through the Night,’ portraying what it was like to experience breast cancer treatment, registered with medical professionals and activists who complained of ‘the machinery of authoritarian care’ (open access)
Did Axel Holst and Theodor Frølich actually develop an animal model of experimental research?

There are also a large number of book reviews, including:

Writing History in the Age of Biomedicine by Roger Cooter with Claudia Stein
Emotions and Health, 1200–1700 by Elena Carrera (ed.)
The Age of Stress: Science and the Search for Stability by Mark Jackson
Before Bioethics: A History of American Medical Ethics from the Colonial Period to the Bioethics Revolution by Robert Baker

For-profit medicine and why the rich don’t have to care about the rest of us

Posted by Jan on July 21, 2014 @ 2:32 pm

Jill Lepore has an article in a recent New Yorker called The Disruption Machine: What the gospel of innovation gets wrong. Her target is Clayton M. Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma and, specifically, disruptive innovation. As usual with Lepore, her essay is personable and well-argued. What I liked most about it, though, was its brief discussion of how unfortunate it is that professions such as higher education and medicine are being privatized (if they’re not already) and administered to maximize efficiency, making profits more important than students or patients. (emphasis added) Read more

Why women should not ride bicycles: The medical opinion in 1896

Posted by Jan on July 19, 2014 @ 12:55 pm

In the 1890s, bicycles became safer and more comfortable to ride (detailed in this Wikipedia entry on the history of the bicycle). This may have something to do with the increased number of women who were attracted to bicycle riding. (There’s a correlation, but the causation is undoubtedly much more complex.)

Some celebrated this development. Susan B. Anthony, for example:

Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel … the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences – July 2014

Posted by Jan on July 12, 2014 @ 4:33 pm

In the July issue of Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences:

A comparison of 19th century public health measures and the contemporary approach to the AIDS pandemic
The conflict between the medical profession and religion in their attempts to portray habitual drunkenness
The understanding of dementia paralytica in the Netherlands at a time when psychiatry was attempting to establish itself as a medical profession
Adelle Davis’ role in creating the ideology of nutritionism.

There’s also a commentary on the Adelle Davis article, an ‘In Memoriam’ for Sherwin B. Nuland, and reviews of ten books (of which I’ve featured here only two).

Thanks to h-madness (a great blog) for bringing my attention to this new issue. Somatosphere (a most excellent blog — highly recommended) often covers this journal, but I haven’t yet seen the July issue there, so I’ll go ahead and post these abstracts. Note that all articles (other than their abstracts/extracts) are behind a paywall. (emphasis added in what follows) Read more

Monthly Archives: July 2014