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Suzanne D. Schneider

Mexican Community Health and the Politics of Health Reform

The struggle of Mexicans to secure quality health care is the focal point of this study. Large-scale transformations in Mexico's national health care system have resulted in budget cuts, increased user fees and decreased public services. At the local level community-based health groups that practice popular medicine are addressing the challenge by training health promoters in a variety of preventive and healing practices and offering low-cost services in community clinics. Their health care approach integrates local and global practices ranging from Mexican herbalism to Chinese medicine. Suzanne Schneider's ethnographic study of grassroots health groups in Morelos, Mexico, addresses the lives of the participants and the groups' contributions to community health. What draws women to these groups? Are they reacting to their experiences with formal health care? To what extent are the groups' teachings applied in the household and accepted throughout the community? Does group participation offer women new sources of empowerment or avenues to income generation? Does the government support these groups? How do they fit into larger trends of health care reform and the shift toward ...

Alix Kates Shulman

To Love What Is: A Marriage Transformed

One day it happens: the dreaded event that will change your life forever. For Alix Kates Shulman, it happened in a remote seaside cabin on a coastal Maine island--where the very isolation that makes for a perfect artist's retreat can also put life at risk. Shulman woke to find that her beloved husband had fallen the nine feet from their sleeping loft and was lying on the floor below, deathly still. Though Scott would survive, he suffered an injury that left him seriously brain impaired. He was the same--but not the same. In this elegant memoir, Shulman describes the ongoing anxieties and risks--and surprising rewards--she experiences as she reorganizes her world to care for her husband and discovers that what might have seemed a life sentence to some has evolved into something unexpectedly rich.

Michael Bliss

The Making of Modern Medicine: Turning Points in the Treatment of Disease

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, we have become accustomed to medical breakthroughs and conditioned to assume that, regardless of illnesses, doctors almost certainly will be able to help--not just by diagnosing us and alleviating our pain, but by actually treating or even curing diseases, and significantly improving our lives. For most of human history, however, that was far from the case, as veteran medical historian Michael Bliss explains in The Making of Modern Medicine. Focusing on a few key moments in the transformation of medical care, Bliss reveals the way that new discoveries and new approaches led doctors and patients alike to discard fatalism and their traditional religious acceptance of suffering in favor of a new faith in health care and in the capacity of doctors to treat disease. He takes readers in his account to three turning points--a devastating smallpox outbreak in Montreal in 1885, the founding of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Medical School, and the discovery of insulin--and recounts the lives of three crucial figures--researcher Frederick Banting, surgeon Harvey Cushing, and physician William Osler--turning medical history into a fascinating story of ...