San Antonio College Library

Expands on the author's earlier book Textbook of Medical Ethics (1989) offering healthcare workers and students a new perspective on ethical practice. The book focuses on the social conditions in which medical practice occurs and how ethical healthcare decisions involves nurses, social workers, psychologists, technicians, and patients as well as physicians. This thoroughly revised and expanded edition addresses historical and theoretical underpinnings...

"Our nation's health care system is in crisis. Although no other country in the world allocates as large a portion of its GDP to health care as does the United States, it is clear that the most basic health needs of many Americans are not being met, with disastrous implications for both the individual and our society as a whole. Health Care Reform in the Nineties presents the first extensive study of this long-neglected issue. This compilation is...

Challenging purely biomedical definitions of women's health, Women's Health: Complexities and Differences draws attention to social, cultural, and behavioral elements crucial to a broader understanding of the issues. The contributors to this volume raise important questions about the directions currently being taken to improve women's health in the United States: Is women's health merely the absence of disease? What have been the consequences of promoting...

"The Deadly Truth chronicles the complex interactions between disease and the peoples of America from the pre-Columbian world to the present. Grob's ultimate lesson is stark but valuable: there can be no final victory over disease. The world in which we live undergoes constant change, which in turn creates novel risks to human health and life. We conquer particular diseases, but others always arise in their stead. In a powerful challenge to our tendency...

Why were a handful of Spaniards able to overthrow the Aztec Empire? The dramatic destruction of the Aztecs has prompted historians, anthropologists, demographers, and epidemiologists to look closely at the health and nutrition of the Valley of Mexico. If the Aztecs were overcrowded, living at the edge of starvation, and incapable of treating disease effectively, then their decimation by the Europeans becomes much easier to understand. Bernard Ortiz...

"This book mounts a critique of current health economics and provides a better way of looking at the economics of health and health care. It argues that health economics has been too dominated by the economics of health care and has largely ignored the impact of poverty, inequality, poor housing, and lack of education on health. It is suggested that some of the structural issues of economies, particularly the individualism of neo liberalism which...

"In The Truth about Health Care, David Mechanic explains how health care in America has evolved in ways that favor a myriad of economic, professional, and political interests over those of patients. While money has always had a place in medical care, "big money" and the quest for profits has become dominant, making meaningful reforms difficult to achieve. Mechanic acknowledges that railing against these influences, which are here to stay, can achieve...

The authors describe how, under threat from biological terrorism & novel epidemics, such as SARS, interest in funding a robust public health system has grown across the US.