Description
Book SynopsisAt a time when clinical care and biomedical research generate as much angst as they offer cures, this volume provides valuable insight into how the practice of medicine has evolved, where it is going, and how lessons from history can improve its prognosis.
Trade ReviewCogently written and well documented, the book will benefit medical practitioners, and will be especially useful to those who make medical policy. Highly recommended. Choice 2008 This collection of essays, drawing on Rosenberg's half-century career as one of our preeminent historians of medicine, will be well appreciated by fellow historians and their students, but it ought to be required reading for health care providers, payers, policy makers, and patients. -- Elizabeth Siegel Watkins Journal of American History 2008 Our Present Complaint... is a timely book. It examines important concepts and history that people need to be aware of and think through if they seek to understand and address the many problems with the American medical system. -- Sharon A. Falkenheimer Themelios 2008 [Rosenberg] reminds us that the problems addressed by disciplines such as bioethics and interdisiplinary communities such as that of health policy are inevitably situated and configured by a broader context to which ethicists and policy makers would do well to pay attention. -- Thomas S. Huddle, M.D., Ph.D. Journal of the History of Medicine 2009
Table of Contents1. Introduction: The History of Our Present Complaint
2. The Tyranny of Diagnosis: Specific Entities and Individual Experience
3. Contested Boundaries: Psychiatry, Disease, and Diagnosis
4. Banishing Risk: Or, the More Things Change, the More They Remain the Same
5. Pathologies of Progress: The Idea of Civilization as Risk
6. The New Enchantment: Genetics, Medicine, and Society
7. Alternative to What? Complementary to Whom? On the Scientific Project in Medicine
8. Holism in Twentieth-Century Medicine: Always in Opposition
9. Mechanism and Morality: On Bioethics in Context
10. Anticipated Consequences: Historians, History, and Health Policy
Acknowledgments
Index
