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The introduction of new medicines has dramatically improved the quantity and quality of individual and public health while contributing trillions of dollars to the global economy. In spite of these past successes--and indeed because of them--our ability to deliver new medicines may be quickly coming to an end. Moving from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, A Prescription for Change reveals how changing business strategies combined with scientific hubris have altered the way new medicines are discovered, with dire implications for both health and the economy. To explain how we have arrived at this pivotal moment, Michael Kinch recounts the history of pharmaceutical and biotechnological advances in the twentieth century. Kinch relates stories of the individuals and organizations that built the modern infrastructure that supports the development of innovative new medicines. He shows that an accelerating cycle of acquisition and downsizing is cannibalizing that infrastructure Kinch demonstrates the dismantling of the pharmaceutical and biotechnological research and development enterprises could also provide opportunities to innovate new models that sustain and expand the introduction of newer and better breakthrough medicines in the years to come.

This book is a story of continuity and transformation. Cornell medical school has been a leader in education, patient care, and research—from its founding as Cornell University Medical College in 1898, to its renaming as Weill Cornell Medical College in 1998, and now in its current incarnation as Weill Cornell Medicine. The book situates the history of Cornell's medical school in the context of the development of modern medicine and health care. It examines the triumphs, struggles, and controversies the medical college has undergone. It recounts events surrounding the medical school's beginnings as one of the first to accept female students, its pioneering efforts to provide health care to patients in the emerging middle class, wartime and the creation of overseas military hospitals, medical research ranging from the effects of alcohol during Prohibition to classified partnerships with the Central Intelligence Agency, and the impact of the Depression, 1960s counterculture, and the Vietnam War on the institution. The book describes how the medical school built itself back up after nearing the brink of financial ruin in the late 1970s, with philanthropic support and a renewal of its longstanding commitments to biomedical innovation and discovery. Central to this story is the closely intertwined, and at times tumultuous, relationship between Weill Cornell and its hospital affiliate, now known as New York-Presbyterian. Today the medical school's reach extends from its home base in Manhattan to a branch campus in Qatar and to partnerships with institutions in Houston, Tanzania, and Haiti. As the book relates, the medical college has never been better poised to improve health around the globe than it is now.

A collection of essays about the Colonial Medical Service of Africa in which a group of distinguished colonial historians illustrate the diversity and active collaborations to be found in the untidy reality of government medical provision. The authors present important case studies in a series of essays covering former British colonial dependencies in Africa, including Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zanzibar. These studies reveal many new insights into the enactments of colonial policy and the ways in which colonial doctors negotiated the day-to-day reality during the height of Imperial rule in Africa. The book provides essential reading for scholars and students of colonial history, medical history and colonial administration.

This book shows how data people leave on the Internet is being employed to answer questions of health and medicine. When we use search engines such as Google or Bing, post messages on social networks, read email or browse the web, we generate a digital trail that is reflective of our activities both online and offline. In the last few years, these digital trails have been used to advance medical research in a variety of ways, including the discovery new side effects of medical drugs, demonstration of the links between eating disorders and the portrayal of celebrities in the media, and the monitoring infectious diseases. More generally, the questions Internet data can answer are difficult and even impossible to answer using traditional tools of medical research, because these data provide unprecedented access to the daily activities of very large populations with fewer biases than those of traditional research tools. Much of the recent discussions on the use of Internet data have been focused on the dangers to personal privacy as a result of the collection of these data. This books shows that this information can serve as a benefit to mankind, without sacrificing the privacy of individuals. As evidence, the book discusses studies that utilized Internet data to advance medical research in a variety of areas, ranging from personal questions to those of public health.

Since the 1990s, the English-speaking world has seen the rise of a neuroculture derived from neurology and neuroscience. The Neurologists is a book that asks how did we arrive at this moment? What is it about neurology and neuroscience that makes neuroculture seem self-evident? To tell this story The Neurologists charts a chronological course from the time of the French Revolution to after the ‘Decade of the Brain’ that outlines the rise of medical and scientific neurology and the emergence of neuroculture. With its focus chiefly on Great Britain, arguably the place where it all began, The Neurologists describes how Victorian physicians located in a medical culture that privileged general knowledge over narrow specialism came to be transformed into the specialized physicians now called neurologists. The Neurologists therefore recasts the received history of neurology and the history of professions and specialties. It provides new insights into the social, cultural, and institutional practices of British medical and scientific culture in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Delving into how and why physicians and scientists were interested in nerves, the nervous system, the brain, and the psyche, The Neurologists explores how Renaissance-styled men and women of medicine and science made neurology the medical field seemingly most concerned by the ‘philosophical status of man.’

Diagnosing Folklore aspires to provide an inclusive forum for an expansive conversation on the sensitive, raw, and powerful processes that shape and imbue meaning in the lives of individuals and communities beleaguered by stigmatization, conflicting public perceptions, and contextual constraints. This volume aims to showcase current ideas and debates, as well as promote the larger study of disability, health, and trauma within folkloristics, and helping bridge the gaps between the folklore discipline and disability studies.

While many commentators have pointed to the lack of compassion and empathy in medicine, their critiques, for the most part, have not considered seriously the deeper philosophical, psychological, and ontological reasons why clinicians and medical students might choose to conceive of medicine as an endeavor concerned solely with the biological workings of the body. Thus, this book examines why it is that existential suffering tends to be overlooked in medical practice and education, as well as the ways in which contemporary medical epistemology and pedagogy not only perpetuate but are indeed shaped by the human tendency to flee from the reality of death and vulnerability. It also explores how students and doctors perceive medicine, including what it means to be a doctor and what responsibilities doctors have toward addressing existential suffering. Contending that the being of the physician is constituted by the other who calls out to her in his suffering, this book argues that the doctor is, in fact, called to attend to suffering that extends beyond the biological. It also discusses how future physicians might be “brought back to themselves” and oriented toward a deeper sense of care through a pedagogy that encourages intentional reflection and values the cultivation of the self, openness to vulnerability, and a fuller conception of what it means to be a healer.

This volume explores gender and health in the East Asian region during the long twentieth century. The nine chapters represent cases studies from China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, with complex interactions of biology, body, gender, and modernity from the 1870s to the present. The book is organized into three sections. The first series of chapters highlight processes that standardize gendered bodies in theories of physical development and reproductive technologies in modern and postcolonial East Asia in face of changing political and demographic needs and realities. The second section focuses on women producing and consuming health knowledge, facilitated by growing consumer and media cultures, where the marketing of health and medical products and knowledge not only competed with the state over the formation of gender and body norms and roles, but allowed for selective production and consumption by women themselves. The final section of three chapters examine how labor requirements, military cultures, and demographic policies shaped and were shaped by competing visions of masculinity, influenced by changing medical authorities and legitimacy of colonial powers and postcolonial nation-states. By illuminating these flows of knowledge, influences, and reactions, this volume highlights the prominent role that biopolitics of health and gender has played in knitting and shaping the East Asian region as we know it today.

This book is the first comprehensive history of Irish women in medicine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It focuses on the debates surrounding women's admission to Irish medical schools, the geographical and social backgrounds of early women medical students, their educational experiences and subsequent careers. It is the first collective biography of the 760 women who studied medicine at Irish institutions in the period and, in contrast to previous histories, puts forward the idea that women medical students and doctors were treated fairly and often favourably by the Irish medical hierarchy. It highlights the distinctiveness of Irish medical education in contrast with that in Britain and is also unique in terms of the combination of rich sources it draws upon, such as official university records from Irish universities, medical journals, Irish newspapers, Irish student magazines, the memoirs of Irish women doctors, and oral history accounts. This book reconsiders the history of women in medicine, higher education and the professions in Ireland. It will appeal not only to medical historians, social historians and women's historians in Ireland, the UK and abroad but also to members of the general public.

In this book, R. J. Hankinson traces the history of investigation into the nature of cause and explanation, from the beginnings of Ancient Greek philosophy in 600 bc, through the Graeco‐Roman world, to the end of pagan antiquity in c.500 ad The book consists of chapter‐length studies of the Presocratics, Plato, Aristotle (two chapters), Atomism, Stoicism, Scepticism, and Neoplatonism, as well as the Sophistic movement, and Ancient Medicine. Hankinson is principally concerned with the following questions: ‘What did the Greeks understand by a cause?’, and ‘How did the Greeks conceive adequacy in explanation?’. The Ancient Greeks (excepting the Sceptics) are united in their belief that the world and at least some of its process can be rendered intelligible, and that this can be rendered by an inquiry into the nature of things, with reasoned argument as the appropriate method of exhibiting the real structure of the world. Thus, the Greek thinkers set the standards for science, because they are guided by logic and observation in their analysis of causation; but one can also recognize the growth of interest among the Greeks in the nature of explanation itself. The question that becomes central to the development of Greek philosophical science is whether nature can be understood in terms of teleology, or solely in terms of mechanical laws. Hankinson is interested in how the concepts of cause and explanation function in a properly scientific context; but he extends his investigation of these concepts to questions of freedom and responsibility, and fate and astrology, and also the treatment of disease. Hankinson points out that causes and explanations are connected ideas: an explanation is the proffering of reasons, and this involves an account of causes; they are, nevertheless, different concepts—causes are actual items, events, agents, facts, states of affairs, whereas explanations are propositional. Hankinson isolates certain causal principles that recur throughout Greek philosophy: for instance, the principle of sufficient reason, the principle of causal synonymy, and the principle that nothing can come to be from nothing.