Medicine / Healthcare: general issues / topics Books

Book SynopsisAfter years at the margins of medical history, the relationship between war and medicine is at last beginning to move centre-stage. The essays in this volume focus on one important aspect of that relationship: the practice and development of medicine within the armed forces from the late nineteenth century through to the end of the Second World War. During this crucial period, medicine came to occupy an important position in military life, especially during the two world wars when manpower was at a premium. Good medical provisions were vital to the conservation of manpower, protecting servicemen from disease and returning the sick and wounded to duty in the shortest possible time. A detailed knowledge of the serviceman's mind and body enabled the authorities to calculate and standardise rations, training and disciplinary procedures. Spanning the laboratory and the battlefield, and covering a range of national contexts, the essays in this volume provide valuable insights into different national styles and priorities. They also examine the relationship between medical personnel and the armed forces as a whole, by looking at such matters as the prevention of disease, the treatment of psychiatric casualties and the development of medical science. The volume as a whole demonstrates that medicine became an increasingly important part of military life in the era of modern warfare, and suggests new avenues and approaches for future study.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Notes on Contributors Mark HARRISON: Medicine and the Management of Modern Warfare: An Introduction J.T.H. CONNOR: ‘Before the World in Concealed Disgrace': Physicians, Professionalization and the 1898 Cuban Campaign of the Spanish American War Leo van BERGEN: ‘The Malingerers are to Blame': The Dutch Military Health Service before and during the First World War Michael WORBOYS: Almroth Wright at Netley: Modern Medicine and the Military in Britain, 1892-1902 Claire HERRICK: ‘The Conquest of the Silent Foe': British and American Military Medical Reform Rhetoric and the Russo-Japanese War Cay-Rüdiger PRÜLL: Pathology at War 1914-1918: Germany and Britain in Comparison Ian R. WHITEHEAD: The British Medical Officer on the Western Front: The Training of Doctors for War Mark HARRISON: Disease, Discipline and Dissent: The Indian Army in France and England, 1914-1915 Lesley A. HALL: ‘War always brings it on': War, STDs, the Military, and the Civilian Population in Britain, 1850-1950 Mark HARRISON: Sex and the Citizen Soldier: Health, Morals and Discipline in the British Army during the Second World War Hans POLS: The Repression of War Trauma in American Psychiatry after World War II Index

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Book SynopsisThis book critically assesses the implications of modern medicine's claim to be a natural science. Medicine models its scientific and clinical self-understanding on an obsolete positivist conception of science, reality, and consciousness. In this view, the body is modeled as a biological machine, disease as breakdown of the machine, and therapy as physical measures to fix the machine. The problems besetting medical science and practice are rooted in the inadequacy of the positivist philosophical assumptions regarding the nature of science, reality and consciousness To base the diagnostic practices and therapeutic regimes purely on knowledge of physical processes in the human body is, in view of this analysis, at best grossly inadequate, at worst thoroughly dehumanizing (Anton van Niekerk: Editorial Foreword). This means that medicine's clinical method cannot be transformed without transforming the underlying view of science, of reality, and of the human person. The book proposes a broader model of science which overcomes the outdated dichotomy between human and natural sciences. Science is viewed as an interdisciplinary exercise generating multiple perspectives. The insights of the human sciences are essential for scientific clinical medicine. Utilizing evolutionary biology and complexity theory, the author proposes an alternative understanding of reality and human consciousness as a basis for a transformed clinical method. Reality is a hierarchy of systems of increasing complexity. Different levels can be distinguished, namely material systems, living material systems, conscious living material systems and self-conscious living material systems. Each level represents a new manner of being which requires a different scientific discourse of understanding. Using this model of reality the author argues against understanding human consciousness as a byproduct of physical processes in the brain. The human person is a self-conscious, complex, psycho-somatic system, whose well-being is conditioned by much more than physical processes.Trade Review”I enjoyed this book, and found the argument stimulating. It does offer a basis for understanding medical research and practice in ways which are likely to be particularly relevant to general practitioners and other primary health care professionals.” – Christopher Dowrick, Professor of Primary Medical Care, University of Liverpool, UK, in: The European Journal of General Practice, Vol. 6, No. 4, December 2000Table of ContentsEditorial Foreword. Guest Editorial. Preface. Acknowledgments. ONE The Story Behind the Story. TWO The Positivistic Natural-Science Paradigm. THREE Biomedicine: The Nature of Positivist Medicine. FOUR The Limitations of Positivist Medicine. FIVE A Comprehensive Model of Science. SIX What Is Reality? SEVEN Reality Is a Complex System. EIGHT What Is Consciousness? NINE Consciousness Is Sensation. TEN And the Flesh Became Mind: Toward an Evolutionary Systems-View of Conscious Animals. ELEVEN Matter, Mind, and Morals. TWELVE From Sensation to Clinical Method. References. About the Author. Index.

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Book SynopsisContemporary French Poetics finds its origin in part in the International Colloquium on French and Francophone Literature in the 1990’s held at Dalhousie University in September 1998. A certain number of the papers given at that time, and since reworked in some fair measure, take their place here alongside other studies subsequently invited. In all they form a broad and varyingly focused set of cogent and pertinent appraisals of very recent French, and to some degree francophone, poetic practice and its shifting, becoming conceptual underpinnings. Studies offered range from those devoted to the work of established contemporary figures such as Bonnefoy and Du Bouchet, Stétié and Deguy, Noël and Chedid to discussions of younger generation writing by poets as diverse as Pinson and Leclair, Bancquart and Emaz, Maulpoix and Després, Morency and Zins. All center, however, upon work essentially produced over the last ten years.Table of ContentsJohn T. NAUGHTON: Louis-René des Forêts’ Ostinato. Jean-Claude PINSON: James Sacré, lyrique “grammairien” . Pierre NEPVEU: Figures du paysage dans la poésie québécoise actuelle. Michael BISHOP : Stétié, Bonnefoy, Deguy “Verbalité” et “Promesse de Terre Promise”. Daniel LEUWERS: Pinson story. Philippe MET: La Part (Orale) de Soi et de l’Autre dans la Poésie Récente d’André Du Bouchet. Steven WINSPUR: L’écriture-flash: Ernaux, Brossard, Noël. Hans R. RUNTE: L’Acadie poétique du dedans. John STOUT : Michelle Grangaud’s Oulipian Aesthetics : Anagrams, Inventories, and Poèmes fondues. Yves CHARNET: “Poème à hauteur d’homme”: Notes sur le “parler ras” d’Antoine Émaz. Michael BROPHY : Jacques Dupin et l’enjeu d’un “rebondissement illimité”. Martin SORRELL : Variable Geometries : Space in the Poetry of Louise Herlin. Irène OORE: Célébration du quotidien de Colette Nys-Mazure: une esthétique, und spiritualité, une éthique. Sarah DRUET : Jean-Michel Maulpoix dans le domaine public de la poésie: une nouvelle quête d’impersonnalité. Christopher ELSON : Sidérer : Deguy, Quignard, Lévi-Strauss et l’écriture du désastre. Peter SCHULMAN : Soleil noir, encre noire: les contemplations “zen” de Céline Zins. Anja PEARRE: Le voile d’Isis chez Yves Bonnefoy. Patrick COLEMAN: Toucher le fond: L’exigence américaine de René Lapierre. Adelaide M. RUSSO: Le Propre du temps: Le retour de Marcelin Pleynet à la question du langage. Karen BOUWER: Sans lieu sinon l’attente de Marie-Claire Bancquart: Une poésie digestive. Peter DORRINGTON: Solidarité et sourire: Yves Leclair. Glenn FETZER: Pierre Alferi, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Yves di Manno : traversées de la parole poétique. Sergio VILLANI: Andrée Chedid et Le Radeau de la Méduse.

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Book SynopsisThis book is a contribution to humanistic studies of illness. Medical humanities are by nature cross-disciplinary, and in recent years studies in this field have been recognized as a platform for dialogue between the “two cultures” of the natural sciences and the humanities. Illness in Context is a result of an encounter of several disciplines, including medicine, history and literature. The main stress is on the literary perspectives of the interdisciplinary collaboration. The reading practices highlighting the clinical, phenomenological and archeological approaches to illness take as their point of departure the living text, that is, the literary experience mediated and created by the text. Literature is seen not solely as a medium for the representation of experiences of illness, but also as a historical praxis involved in the forging of our common understanding of illness. In contrast to traditional literary analysis – primarily oriented toward the interpretation of the literary work’s meaning – the project will emphasize description and understanding of how literature itself performs as a means of interpretation of reality. The target group for this book comprises professionals in the various disciplines, and students of health and culture. The ambition is to contribute to teaching in humanistic illness research, and function as a topical resource book that formulates controversial problems in the crucial meeting of medicine and the humanities.Table of ContentsKnut Stene-Johansen and Frederik Tygstrup: Introduction: Illness in Context Clinic Deborah Kirklin: The Search for Meaning in Modern Medicine Jan C. Frich: Dialogue and Creativity: Narrative in the Clinical Encounter Drude von der Fehr: Clinical Tales and the Artlike Creativity of the Body Vincent Colapietro: Signs of Illness Phenomenology Hélène Cixous: From The Day I Wasn’t There Frederik Tygstrup: The Blue Chair. A Literary Report on Dementia in America Gérard Danou: Henri Michaux in Search of his Tempo, or Great Health Knut Stene-Johansen: Tolstoy and the Making of the Inhuman Archeology Anne Kveim Lie: Treatment Politics: The Rise of Radesyge Hospitals in Norway Eric Hamraouï: Metaphors, Figures and Description in Sénac’s Traité de la structure du coeur, de son action et de ses maladies (1749) Hilde Bondevik: Who’s Afraid of Amalie Skram? Hysteria and Rebellion in Amalie Skram’s Novels of Mental Hospitals Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer: Like a high black wave. Jørgen Stein and the Spanish Flu Johan Redin: Pathogenesis: Life, Literature and Animality. Medical Theory and Biological Nihilism in Eighteenth-Century Thought Notes on Contributors

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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