Germs at Bay


Book Description

Examines America's experience with a wide range of quarantine practices over the past 400 years and the political, economic, immigration, and public health considerations that have prompted success or failure within the evolving role of public health. The novel strain of coronavirus that emerged in late 2019 and became a worldwide pandemic in 2020 is only one of more than 87 new or emerging pathogens discovered since 1980 that have posed a risk to public health. While many may consider quarantine an antiquated practice, it is often one of the only defenses against new and dangerous communicable diseases. Tracing the United States' quarantine practices through the colonial, postcolonial, and modern eras, Germs at Bay provides an eye-opening look at how quarantine has worked despite routine dismissal of its value. This book is for anyone seeking to understand the challenges of controlling the spread of COVID-19 and helps readers internalize the lessons learned from the pandemic. Few titles provide this level of primary source data on the United States' long reliance on quarantine practices and the political, social, and economic factors that have influenced them.







On Their Own Terms


Book Description

In On Their Own Terms, Benjamin A. Elman offers a much-needed synthesis of early Chinese science during the Jesuit period (1600-1800) and the modern sciences as they evolved in China under Protestant influence (1840s-1900). By 1600 Europe was ahead of Asia in producing basic machines, such as clocks, levers, and pulleys, that would be necessary for the mechanization of agriculture and industry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Elman shows, Europeans still sought from the Chinese their secrets of producing silk, fine textiles, and porcelain, as well as large-scale tea cultivation. Chinese literati borrowed in turn new algebraic notations of Hindu-Arabic origin, Tychonic cosmology, Euclidian geometry, and various computational advances. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, imperial reformers, early Republicans, Guomindang party cadres, and Chinese Communists have all prioritized science and technology. In this book, Elman gives a nuanced account of the ways in which native Chinese science evolved over four centuries, under the influence of both Jesuit and Protestant missionaries. In the end, he argues, the Chinese produced modern science on their own terms.




Doctors


Book Description

From the author of How We Die, the extraordinary story of the development of modern medicine, told through the lives of the physician-scientists who paved the way. How does medical science advance? Popular historians would have us believe that a few heroic individuals, possessing superhuman talents, lead an unselfish quest to better the human condition. But as renowned Yale surgeon and medical historian Sherwin B. Nuland shows in this brilliant collection of linked life portraits, the theory bears little resemblance to the truth. Through the centuries, the men and women who have shaped the world of medicine have been not only very human, but also very much the products of their own times and places. Presenting compelling studies of great medical innovators and pioneers, Doctors gives us a fascinating history of modern medicine. Ranging from the legendary Father of Medicine, Hippocrates, to Andreas Vesalius, whose Renaissance masterwork on anatomy offered invaluable new insight into the human body, to Helen Taussig, founder of pediatric cardiology and co-inventor of the original "blue baby" operation, here is a volume filled with the spirit of ideas and the thrill of discovery.




Advances in Experimental Surgery


Book Description

Experimental surgery is an important link for the development in clinical surgery, research and teaching. Experimental surgery was part of the most important surgical discoveries in the past century. Since 1901 nine Nobel Prizes have been awarded to the pioneers had remarkable achievements in the basic or practical surgery. In recent 20 years, experimental surgery has achieved new advances, like laparoscopic and robotic surgery, tissue engineering, and gene therapy which are widely applied in clinic surgery. The present book covers wide experimental surgery in preclinical research models subdivided in two volumes. Volume I introduces surgical basic notions, techniques, and different surgical models involved in basic experimental surgery and review the biomechanical models, ischemia/reperfusion injury models, repair and regeneration models, and organ and tissue transplantation models, respectively. Volume II introduces several specific experimental models such as laparoscopic and bariatric experimental surgical models. The second volume also introduces graft-versus-host disease, and other experimental models. Review the advances and development of recent techniques such as tissue engineering, organ preservation, wound healing and scarring, gene therapy and robotic surgery. The book documents the enormous volume of knowledge we have acquired in the field of experimental surgery. In this book, we have invited experts from the United States, Canada, France, Germany, China, Japan, Korea, UK, Sweden, Netherland, Hungary and Turkey to contribute 36 chapters in the fields of their expertise. These two volumes are the compilation of basic experimental surgery and updated advances of new development in this field that will be invaluable to surgeons, residents, graduate students, surgical researchers, physicians, immunologists, veterinarians and nurses in surgery.










A History of Science


Book Description




A Calculus of Suffering


Book Description

Analyzes the impact of anesthesia on nineteenth-century medicine, discusses the advantages and disadvantages of anesthesia, and explains how rules for its use were developed




Handbook of Sepsis


Book Description

This practically oriented book provides an up-to-date overview of all significant aspects of the pathogenesis of sepsis and its management, including within the intensive care unit. Readers will find information on the involvement of the coagulation and endocrine systems during sepsis and on the use of biomarkers to diagnose sepsis and allow early intervention. International clinical practice guidelines for the management of sepsis are presented, and individual chapters focus on aspects such as fluid resuscitation, vasopressor therapy, response to multiorgan failure, antimicrobial therapy, and adjunctive immunotherapy. The closing section looks forward to the coming decade, discussing novel trial designs, sepsis in low- and middle-income countries, and emerging management approaches. The book is internatio nal in scope, with contributions from leading experts worldwide. It will be of value to residents and professionals/practitioners in the fields of infectious diseases and internal medicine, as well as to GPs and medical students.