San Antonio College Library

"Polio, with its haunting images of disabled children and the iron lung, was one of the iconic diseases of the 20th century. In the 1950s, only the atomic bomb frightened Americans more than this debilitating scourge which could break into any home and paralyse or kill a healthy child. Now, vaccination has pushed polio to the brink of extinction - but its complete eradication may still elude us. Mankind's struggle to defeat polio was one of the grand...

"In this sweeping approach to the history of disease, historian J.N. Hays chronicles perceptions and responses to plague and pestilence over two thousand years of Western history. Hays frames disease as a multidimensional construct, situated at the intersection of history, politics, culture, and medicine, and rooted in mentalities and social relations as much as in biological conditions of pathology. He shows how diseases affect social and political...

In this incisive examination of lead poisoning during the past half century, Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner focus on one of the most contentious and bitter battles in the history of public health. Lead Wars details how the nature of the epidemic has changed and highlights the dilemmas public health agencies face today in terms of prevention strategies and chronic illness linked to low levels of toxic exposure. The authors use the opinion by Maryland's...

Tannenbaum gives readers a comprehensive overview picture of medical practices from 1600 to 1800. She covers all aspects of medicine from surgery to the role of religion in healing, and describes the way in which all three cultures in colonial America-- European, African, and Native American-- thought about medicine.

"Historian David S. Barnes examines the birth of a new microbe-centered science of public health during the 1880s and 1890s, when the germ theory of disease burst into public consciousness. Tracing a series of developments in French science, medicine, politics, and culture, Barnes reveals how the science and practice of public health changed during the heyday of the bacteriological revolution." "This study sheds light on the scientific and social...

"Between 1800 and 2000 life expectancy at birth rose from about thirty years to a global average of sixty-seven years, and to more than seventy-five years in favored countries. This dramatic change, called the health transition, is characterized by a transition in how long people expected to live and in how they expected to die. The most common age at death jumped from infancy to old age. Most people lived to know their children as adults, and most...

In Pure and Modern Milk, the author tells the history of a nearly universal consumer product, and sheds light on America's food industry. Today, she notes, milk reaches supermarkets in an entirely different state than it had at its creation. Cows march into milking parlors, where tubes are attached to their teats, and the product of their lactation is mechanically pumped into tanks. Enormous, expensive machines pasteurize it, fortify it with vitamins,...

"In Fevered Measures, John Mckiernan-González examines public health campaigns along the Texas-Mexico border between 1848 and 1942 and reveals the changing medical and political frameworks U.S. health authorities used when facing the threat of epidemic disease. The medical borders created by these officials changed with each contagion and sometimes varied from the existing national borders. Federal officers sought to distinguish Mexican citizens...