This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.
This collection of ten essays by leading scholars in the social history of medicine provides a window into the world of the hospital, exploring the increasing complexity of both its internal and external dynamics as well as the relationship between the two. An introductory essay describes and evaluates the shifting balance between the hospital's moral and medical purposes, tracing the social, technical, physical, and medical developments that have continually shaped the image and activities of the general hospital from 1800 to the 1980s. Part One of the book places American general hospitals in the larger context of their regional, ethnic, religious, and racial communities. It contains four essays, including two case studies of local hospitals-one urban, the other rural-in transition, a photographic essay of life in community hospitals, and an account of the attempt to move black hospitals into the mainstream during the years 1920 to 1945. Part Two focuses on the professional communities within the hospital, Four essays explore the impact of technology on the modern hospital, science and the nursing profession, the changing education of hospital administrators, and the coming of age, in the 1960s, of the first hospital workers' union. A concluding article addresses crucial public policy issues and consider s prospects for the future of the American general hospital.
In the definitive history of a twentieth-century public health disaster, Alan Derickson recounts how, for decades after methods of prevention were known, hundreds of thousands of American miners suffered and died from black lung, a respiratory illness caused by the inhalation of coal mine dust. The combined failure of government, medicine, and industry to halt the spread of this disease—and even to acknowledge its existence—resulted in a national tragedy, the effects of which are still being felt. The book begins in the late nineteenth century, when the disorders brought on by exposure to coal mine dust were first identified as components of a debilitating and distinctive illness. For several decades thereafter, coal miners' dust disease was accepted, in both lay and professional circles, as a major industrial disease. Derickson describes how after the turn of the century medical professionals and industry representatives worked to discredit and supplant knowledge about black lung, with such success that this disease ceased to be recognized. Many authorities maintained that breathing coal mine dust was actually beneficial to health. Derickson shows that activists ultimately forced society to overcome its complacency about this deadly and preventable disease. He chronicles the growth of an unprecedented movement—from the turn-of-the-century miners' union, to the social medicine activists in the mid-twentieth century, and the black lung insurgents of the late sixties—which eventually won landmark protections and compensation with the enactment of the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act in 1969. An extraordinary work of scholarship, Black Lung exposes the enormous human cost of producing the energy source responsible for making the United States the world's preeminent industrial nation.
An extensively documented collection of essays examining various aspects of Irish-American life in Philadelphia over a major portion of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Urban presents the NEA in its historical context, turning a fair and clear eye on this powerful and controversial organization, and using this context to both criticize and commend. The culmination of a three decade long study, this unique volume presents an unusually thorough and much needed holistic view of the NEA.
