Spreading Germs discusses how modern ideas on the bacterial causes of communicable diseases were constructed and spread within the British medical profession in the last third of the nineteenth century. Michael Worboys surveys many existing interpretations of this pivotal moment in modern medicine. He shows that there were many germ theories of disease, and that these were developed and used in different ways across veterinary medicine, surgery, public health and general medicine. The growth of bacteriology is considered in relation to the evolution of medical practice rather than as a separate science of germs.
In the first half of this century, Henry Ernest Sigerist was widely regarded as the world's leading historian of medicine. A brilliant teacher and lecturer, Sigerist made medical history exciting and relevant for a whole generation of young physicians, medical students, historians, and the general public. A Marxist sympathizer and advocate of socialized medicine, he also had an enormous and controversial influence on the medical politics of his time. In Making Medical History historians Elizabeth Fee and Theodore M. Brown bring together individuals from various disciplines, many of whom knew Henry Sigerist, all of whom help to illuminate why, thirty-five years after his death, he continues to be revered by many public health professionals and medical historians. Sigerist came to the Johns Hopkins Institute of the History of Medicine in 1932, arriving from Leipzig to succeed William Henry Welch as director. During Sigerist's tenure at Hopkins, his many accomplishments included founding the leading scholarly journal in the field, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine; transforming the American Association for the History of Medicine into a professional organization; and recruiting and mentoring such luminaries as Owsei Temkin, Ludwig Edelstein, and Erwin Ackerknecht. Organized into three main sections--biographical, historiographical, and political--Making Medical History includes discussions of Sigerist's influence on the history of medicine, medical sociology, and health policy. Today, as the American health care system undergoes tremendous structural changes, Sigerist's work and vision are newly relevant, and his dramatically effective presentation of medical history willcome as a revelation to a new generation of readers. Contributors: Nora Sigerist Beeson, Marcel H. Bickel, Theodore M. Brown, Leslie A. Falk, Elizabeth Fee, John F. Hutchinson, Ingrid Kstner, Walter J. Lear, Michael R. McVaugh, Genevieve Miller, Milton I. Roemer, Owsei Temkin, Ilza Veith, and Heinrich von Staden.
Freyhofer gives the reader the opportunity to follow the exchange between prosecutors and defendants as well as the final reasoning of the court."--BOOK JACKET.
Traces the development of the sanitary and health problems of New York City from earliest Dutch times to the culmination of a nineteenth-century reform movement that produced the Metropolitan Health Act of 1866, the forerunner of the present New York City Department of Health. Professor Duffy shows the city's transition from a clean and healthy colonial settlement to an epidemic-ridden community in the eighteenth century, as the city outgrew its health and sanitation facilities. He describes the slow growth of a demand for adequate health laws in the mid-nineteenth century, leading to the establishment of the first permanent health agency in 1866.
This collection of essays explores efforts to control and prevent cancer in North America and Europe. On both sides of the Atlantic, control programs emerged in the early twentieth century, and most were focused on early detection and treatment. Yet, those initiatives took very different forms in different countries. Experts disagreed on how to persuade the public to go to their doctors, what should be the role of public education, how cancer services should be delivered, who should provide them, which forms of therapy were most appropriate to particular cancers, and where to draw the line between therapy and prevention. Focusing on the United States and Britain, this volume examines why these differences emerged, how they shaped national programs of control, and how control programs in the early twentieth century presaged and set the conditions for the emergence of prevention-oriented programs in the 1960s and 1970s. Featuring works by leading medical historians on subjects such as the portrayal of cancer in the movies, feminist surgeons, risk factors for breast cancer, and the emergence of clinical trials, Cancer in the Twentieth Century will engage historians of medicine and public health as well as health policy analysts, medical sociologists and anthropologists, and medical researchers and practitioners.
Healthcare decision makers in search of reliable information that compares health interventions increasingly turn to systematic reviews for the best summary of the evidence. Systematic reviews identify, select, assess, and synthesize the findings of similar but separate studies, and can help clarify what is known and not known about the potential benefits and harms of drugs, devices, and other healthcare services. Systematic reviews can be helpful for clinicians who want to integrate research findings into their daily practices, for patients to make well-informed choices about their own care, for professional medical societies and other organizations that develop clinical practice guidelines. Too often systematic reviews are of uncertain or poor quality. There are no universally accepted standards for developing systematic reviews leading to variability in how conflicts of interest and biases are handled, how evidence is appraised, and the overall scientific rigor of the process. In Finding What Works in Health Care the Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommends 21 standards for developing high-quality systematic reviews of comparative effectiveness research. The standards address the entire systematic review process from the initial steps of formulating the topic and building the review team to producing a detailed final report that synthesizes what the evidence shows and where knowledge gaps remain. Finding What Works in Health Care also proposes a framework for improving the quality of the science underpinning systematic reviews. This book will serve as a vital resource for both sponsors and producers of systematic reviews of comparative effectiveness research.
