Sickness

This book combines new research data with findings from present-day health surveys to examine the history of ill health and its outcomes, whether recovery or death, in Europe and North America from the 17th century to the present. Some forecasts about future sickness rates and trends are included.

“God is said in Scripture to send what he can (but doth not) hinder from being sent.” – Edward Bird (1726)God has been taking the blame for sickness and disease for centuries. We have been told that He sends sickness as an aid to spiritual growth and piety or as a punishment for sin. Vast amounts of Scripture have been cited to support this claim.This idea has contributed to the lack of faith prevalent in the church today for healing and deliverance. After all, if God gave a person sickness then His willingness to heal is questionable. Faith can only be present where the will of God is known. However, if sickness is seen as an enemy of God then faith in God’s willingness to heal is more likely to rise.Numerous apologetic books have been written in support of divine healing, but most have not dealt completely with the many Biblical passages that appear to make God the direct cause of sickness. This book is different in that it will look at these difficult Bible passages in light of the permissive idiom of the ancient Hebrew language, in which God is often said to do the things that He merely allowed or permitted to happen. Those passages in both the Old and New Testaments that make God appear to be a cold and cruel dispenser of sickness and disease will be seen in a new light. You will see God’s loving character vindicated, your Bible will be a fresh source of blessing, and your faith in God for health and healing will soar.

This is the story of a professor of Medical Sociology, diagnosed with colon cancer. He undergoes the appropriate medical treatment. Passing through that trajectory, he realizes that things happen that he never read about in the professional literature. During his illness and rehabilitation he scribbles down notes about what is happening to him, what he is observing and what things do not tally with his knowledge of the sociological literature. This continuous connection of personal experience with academic literature is what makes this book such a powerful account of the ‘everyday’ life of a sick person. Recommended to teachers and students in the field of social health research; to everyone who works in health care, professionals as well as volunteers; and to men and women who themselves are experiencing a serious illness.

Among the array of diseases which brought death to Tudor England, the sweating sickness stood out, for the speed with which it struck, its dreadful effects on its victims and the death rates which it produced, that together generated a fear verging on panic when it was identified. The sweating sickness attacked the cities, towns and the countryside, not sparing the palaces. It threatened everyone, from the king in his castle to the beggars at his gates, including members of the dynasty and the political structure, the courtiers and those who directed the government, the church and the law. Contemporaries could do little more than make a bolt for it, and that included the king and his closest advisors, who moved furtively in a small group from one house to another away from London. The principal epidemics came between 1485, when it made its first appearance, and 1551, and it was confined to England and Wales, apart from one major eruption across northern Europe in 1529. Known as the English disease, this rapidly acting virus became Henry VIII’s overriding fear, aggravating his well-known hypochondria and controlling his movements. The nature of the sweating sickness, its incidence and impact are all examined in this book, in the context not only of Tudor England and the problems of the Henrician succession, but also in the context of epidemic disease in Europe more widely. This book teases out the similarities and differences between ‘the sweat’ and its better-known, if equally feared, contemporary infectious disease, bubonic plague.

Sickness and disability is a key economic policy concern for many OECD countries. Medical conditions, or problems labelled as such by societies and policy systems, are proving an increasing obstacle to raising labour force participation and keeping ...

A slow rotation room in a laboratory environment provides an excellent instrument for the study of motion sickness because the experimenter can control not only the stressful Coriolis accelerations, but also other important procedural and environmental variables. By exploiting this control, combined with the judicious selection of experimental subjects, it was possible to confirm many previous findings and demonstrate that manifestations of disturbances in the vestibular system fall into two distinct categories. In the first category are reflex phenomena evoked by Coriolis accelerations when the head is rotated out of the plane of the room's rotation, and revealed through systems which, under natural stimulus conditions, have functional articulations with vestibular receiving areas. The symptomatology in the second category comprises an epiphenomenon superimposed on any manifestation of the first, when the unusual vestibular activity, presumably through facilitory-inhibitory processes, irradiates to cells or cell assemblies not normally stimulated. Selected experimental findings are used in defining the characteristics of manifestations in the two categories and in demonstrating the nature of the facultative linkage between the otherwise independent systems underlying manifestations in the two categories.