A Book Of Medical Discourses

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.

This book critically explores from a comparative international perspective the role medicine plays in constructing and managing natural and social risks, including those belonging to modern medical technology and expertise. Drawing together chapters written by professional practitioners and social scientists from the UK, South America, Australia and Europe, the book offers readers an insightful and thought-provoking analysis of how modern medicine has transformed our understanding of both ourselves and the world around us, but in so doing has arguably failed to fully recognize and account for, its unintended and negative effects. This is an essential read for social scientists, practitioners and policymakers who want to better understand how they can develop new ways of thinking about how modern medicine can promote social goods and enhance public health.

Book Features: • 24 pages, 7 1⁄2 inches x 10 inches • Ages 6-10, Grades 1-4 leveled readers, Lexile 690L • Simple, easy-to-read pages with full-color illustrations • Includes a timeline and extension activity • Reading/teaching tips and discussion questions included Leader In Medicine: In Leaders Like Us: Rebecca Lee Crumpler, 1st-4th graders learn about the accomplishments of Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first African American woman to become a doctor in the United States. Inspirational: With captivating illustrations that bring Crumpler’s story to life, readers learn about her early life and greatest accomplishments as an important African American leader in medicine. Build Reading Skills: This engaging 24-page children’s book will help students improve comprehension and build confidence with discussion questions, a timeline of events, and a fun extension activity. Leveled Books: Part of the Leaders Like Us series, the simple, easy-to-read pages and full-color illustrations in this kid’s book support comprehension of the story of the inspirational leader and amazing doctor. Why Rourke Educational Media: Since 1980, Rourke Publishing Company has specialized in publishing engaging and diverse non-fiction and fiction books for children in a wide range of subjects that support reading success on a level that has no limits.

This book is the result of years of fieldwork at a public hospital located in an immigrant neighborhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It focuses on the relationships between diversity and inequality in access to mental healthcare through the discourse practices, tactics and strategies deployed by patients with widely varying cultural, linguistic and social backgrounds. As an action-research process, it helped change communicative practices at the Hospital’s outpatient mental healthcare service. The book focuses on the entire process and its outcomes, arguing in favor of a critical, situated perspective on discourse analysis, theoretically and practically oriented to social change. It also proposes a different approach to doctor-patient communication, usually conducted from an ethnocentric perspective which does not take into account cultural, social and economic diversity. It reviews many topics that are somehow classical in doctor-patient communication analysis, but from a different point of view: issues such as the sequential organization of primary care encounters, diagnostic formulations, asymmetry and accommodation, etc., are now examined from a locally grounded ethnographic perspective. This change is not only theoretical but also political, as it helps understand patient practices of resistance, identity-making and solidarity in contexts of inequality.

This volume rethinks the role of the Sino-Japanese medical classics during the early modern period in light of antiquarianism, languages, and medical philology. Philology in particular allows the authors to address the changing meaning of the same term, which often reflected well-known metaphors in the source language that were transposed to the target language. Each essay touches on the reliability of received medical texts and their modern fate.

This compelling account of the author's experience with a chronic pain disorder and subsequent interaction with the American health care system goes to the heart of the workings of power and culture in the biomedical domain. It is a medical whodunit full of mysterious misdiagnosis, subtle power plays, and shrewd detective work. Setting a new standard for the practice of autoethnography, Susan Greenhalgh presents a case study of her intense encounter with an enthusiastic young specialist who, through creative interpretation of the diagnostic criteria for a newly emerging chronic disease, became convinced she had a painful, essentially untreatable, lifelong muscle condition called fibromyalgia. Greenhalgh traces the ruinous effects of this diagnosis on her inner world, bodily health, and overall well-being. Under the Medical Gaze serves as a powerful illustration of medicine's power to create and inflict suffering, to define disease and the self, and to manage relationships and lives. Greenhalgh ultimately learns that she had been misdiagnosed and begins the long process of undoing the physical and emotional damage brought about by her nearly catastrophic treatment. In considering how things could go so awry, she embarks on a cogent and powerful analysis of the sociopolitical sources of pain through feminist, cultural, and political understandings of the nature of medical discourse and practice in the United States. She develops fresh arguments about the power of medicine to medicalize our selves and lives, the seductions of medical science, and the deep, psychologically rooted difficulties women patients face in interactions with male physicians. In the end, Under the Medical Gaze goes beyond the critique of biomedicine to probe the social roots of chronic pain and therapeutic alternatives that rely on neither the body-cure of conventional medicine nor the mind-cure of some alternative medicines, but rather a broader set of strategies that address the sociopolitical sources of pain.

Material Discourses of Health and Illness applies discursive approaches to the field of health psychology, in stark contrast to the bio-medical model of health and illness. The discursive approach uses the person's experience and feelings as the central focus of interest, whereas the more traditional models regarded these as coincidental and relatively unimportant. The book provides an accessible and compelling introduction to social constructionist and discursive approaches to those with limited previous knowledge of socio-linguistic theory and research. It provides practical examples of how these approaches can be applied to the field of health psychology with a collection of sophisticated discursive analyses which demonstrate the distinctive contribution that can be made by psychologists to a field that has been largely dominated by sociologists and anthropologists.

In 1748, as yellow fever raged in Charleston, South Carolina, doctor John Lining remarked, "There is something very singular in the constitution of the Negroes, which renders them not liable to this fever." Lining's comments presaged ideas about blackness that would endure in medical discourses and beyond. In this fascinating medical history, Rana A. Hogarth examines the creation and circulation of medical ideas about blackness in the Atlantic World during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She shows how white physicians deployed blackness as a medically significant marker of difference and used medical knowledge to improve plantation labor efficiency, safeguard colonial and civic interests, and enhance control over black bodies during the era of slavery. Hogarth refigures Atlantic slave societies as medical frontiers of knowledge production on the topic of racial difference. Rather than looking to their counterparts in Europe who collected and dissected bodies to gain knowledge about race, white physicians in Atlantic slaveholding regions created and tested ideas about race based on the contexts in which they lived and practiced. What emerges in sharp relief is the ways in which blackness was reified in medical discourses and used to perpetuate notions of white supremacy.