Captain Of All These Men Of Death

Tuberculosis mortality in the United States and in Britain was declining in the late nineteenth century but rising in Ireland. Why Ireland’s pattern of tuberculosis mortality was different is the subject of this book.

When Robert Contreras attempts to enlist in World War II, his medical exam reveals he has tuberculosis and he is committed to a frightful sanatorium. Amid his relapses and recoveries he meets a series of women who have an effect on his life: a mysterious French doctor, another patient, a sinister acquaintance from a Los Angeles barrio. Meanwhile, the hospital newsletter describes how tuberculosis patients have been treated throughout history, often alienated and administered bizarre treatments. The author equates these to modern medical experimentation and the superstitious pagan practices of witchcraft and satanism of the California barrios. Based on a true story of the author's uncle.

Russell Hill is the author of three Edgar-nominated novels as well as several other books. His work has been translated into French, German, Polish, Japanese, and Spanish, and one novel, The Lord God Bird, has been optioned for a movie. Hill is an avid fly fisherman, has written for outdoor magazines, and has taught writing for forty years. He still lives in California where he has spent most of his life.

Tuberculosis was once the feared "White Plague." Today, with sanatoria closed and a battery of drugs available to fight it, TB may seem to be on the way out. The grim facts tell a different story. Captain of Death: The Story of Tuberculosis recounts the early evidence of the disease, the stories of some noteable people who suffered from it, the work of those who cared for afflicted patients, and the struggle of researchers to understand it and develop effective treatments for it. The book brings to the reader a clear understanding of the past, present, and future of the disease John Bunyon called "Captain among these Men of Death" in 1660.

The contributors to Captivating Technology examine how carceral technologies such as electronic ankle monitors and predictive-policing algorithms are being deployed to classify and coerce specific populations and whether these innovations can be appropriated and reimagined for more liberatory ends.

This work offers a social and cultural history of Victorian medicine "from below," as experienced by ordinary practitioners and patients, often described in their own words. Health, Medicine, and Society in Victorian England is a human story of medicine in 19th-century England. It's a story of how a diverse and competitive assortment of apothecary apprentices, surgeons who learned their trade by doing, and physicians schooled in ancient Greek medicine but lacking in any actual experience with patients, was gradually formed into a medical profession with uniform standards of education and qualification. It's a story of how medical men struggled with "new" diseases such as cholera and "old" ones known for centuries, such as tuberculosis, syphilis, and smallpox, largely in the absence of effective drugs or treatments, and so were often reduced to standing helplessly by as their patients died. It's a story of how surgeons, empowered first by anesthesia and later by antiseptic technique, vastly expanded the field of surgery—sometimes with major benefits for patients, but sometimes with disastrous results. Above all, it's a story of how gender and class ideology dominated both practitioners and patients. Women were stridently excluded from medical education and practice of any kind until the end of the century, but were hailed into the new field of nursing, which was felt to be "natural" to the gentler sex. Only the poor were admitted to hospitals until the last decades of the century, and while they often received compassionate care, they were also treated as "cases" of disease and experimented upon with freedom. Yet because medical knowledge was growing by leaps and bounds, Victorians were fascinated with this new field and wrote novels, poetry, essays, letters, and diaries, which illuminate their experience of health and disease for us. Newly developed techniques of photography, as well as improved print illustrations, help us to picture this fascinating world. This vivid history of Victorian medicine is enriched with many literary examples and visual images drawn from the period.