thisiskoi.com: Medical apartheid

Label: Medical apartheid

If you’re going to have a heart attack, an organ transplant, or a joint replacement, here’s the key to getting the very best medical care: be a white, straight, middle-class male. This book by a pioneering black surgeon takes on one of the few critically important topics that haven’t figured in the heated debate over health care reform—the largely hidden yet massive injustice of bias in medical treatment. Growing up in Jim Crow–era Tennessee and training and teaching in overwhelmingly white medical institutions, Gus White witnessed firsthand how prejudice works in the world of medicine. And while race relations have changed dramatically, old ways of thinking die hard. In Seeing Patients White draws upon his experience in startlingly different worlds to make sense of the unconscious bias that riddles medical treatment, and to explore what it means for health care in a diverse twenty-first-century America. White and co-author David Chanoff use extensive research and interviews with leading physicians to show how subconscious stereotyping influences doctor-patient interactions, diagnosis, and treatment. Their book brings together insights from the worlds of social psychology, neuroscience, and clinical practice to define the issues clearly and, most importantly, to outline a concrete approach to fixing this fundamental inequity in the delivery of health care. [Augustus_A._White_III]_Seeing_Patients_Unconscio_BookZZ.org_

Using original primary sources, this book uncovers and analyzes for the first time the politics of fertility and the battle over birth control in South Africa from 1910 (the year the country was formed) to 1945. It examines the nature and achievements of the South African birth-control movement in pre-apartheid South Africa, including the establishment of voluntary birth-control organizations in urban centers, the national birth-control coalition, and the clinic practices of the country's first birth-control clinics. The book spotlights important actors such as the birth controllers themselves, the women who utilized the clinics' services and the Department of Public Health, placing these within an international as well as national context. [Susanne_M._Klausen]_Race__Maternity_and_the_Polit_BookZZ.org_

Today AIDS dominates the headlines, but a century ago it was fears of syphilis epidemics. This book looks at how the spread of syphilis was linked to socio-economic transformation as land dispossession, migrancy and urbanization disrupted social networks--factors similarly important in the AIDS crisis. Medical explanations of syphilis and state medical policy were also shaped by contemporary beliefs about race. Doctors drew on ideas from social darwinism, eugenics, and social anthropology to explain the incidence of syphilis among poor whites and Africans, and to define "normal" abnormal sexual behavior for racial groups. Karen Jochelson - The Colour of Disease [2001][A]

For most of the first half of the twentieth century, tuberculosis ranked among the top three causes of mortality among urban African Americans. Often afflicting an entire family or large segments of a neighborhood, the plague of TB was as mysterious as it was fatal. Samuel Kelton Roberts Jr. examines how individuals and institutions--black and white, public and private--responded to the challenges of tuberculosis in a segregated society. Reactionary white politicians and health officials promoted "racial hygiene" and sought to control TB through Jim Crow quarantines, Roberts explains. African Americans, in turn, protested the segregated, overcrowded housing that was the true root of the tuberculosis problem. Moderate white and black political leadership reconfigured definitions of health and citizenship, extending some rights while constraining others. Meanwhile, those who suffered with the disease--as its victims or as family and neighbors--made the daily adjustments required by the devastating effects of the "white plague." Exploring the politics of race, reform, and public health, Infectious Fear uses the tuberculosis crisis to illuminate the limits of racialized medicine and the roots of modern health disparities. Ultimately, it reveals a disturbing picture of the United States' health history while offering a vision of a more democratic future [Samuel_Kelton_Roberts_Jr.]_Infectious_Fear_Polit_BookZZ.org_

The bestselling landmark account of the first emergence of the Ebola virus. A highly infectious, deadly virus from the central African rain forest suddenly appears in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There is no cure. In a few days 90 percent of its victims are dead. A secret military SWAT team of soldiers and scientists is mobilized to stop the outbreak of this exotic "hot" virus. The Hot Zone tells this dramatic story, giving a hair-raising account of the appearance of rare and lethal viruses and their "crashes" into the human race. Shocking, frightening, and impossible to ignore, The Hot Zone proves that truth really is scarier than fiction. 0385479565_0385495226zon

In this study Professor Sheridan presents a rich and wide-ranging account of the health care of slaves in the British West Indies, from 1680-1834. He demonstrates that while Caribbean island settlements were viewed by mercantile statesmen and economists as ideal colonies, the physical and medical realities were very different. The study is based on wide research in archival materials in Great Britain, the West Indies and the United States. By steeping himself in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources, Professor Sheridan is able to recreate the milieu of a past era: he tells us what the slave doctors wrote and how they functioned, and he presents a storehouse of information on how and why the slaves sickened and died. By bringing together these diverse medical demographic and economic sources, Professor Sheridan casts new light on the history of slavery in the Americas.