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The
Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of
the Product That Defined America
by
Dr. Allan M. Brandt
The definitive history of the cigarette, the product
that shaped twentieth-century America--from modern advertising to science,
from regulatory politics to our sense of glamour and style.
The industrial manufacture of cigarettes began in the
late nineteenth century, but it wasn't until the invention of the modern
consumer, advertising campaign--pioneered by cigarette brands--that
the product really took off at the turn of the century. The cigarette
became an indispensable accessory of glamour and sex appeal: from Marlene
Dietrich to Humphrey Bogart to Anne Bancroft, we have imagined stars
with cigarettes in their mouths, and imitated them.
The cigarette--the ultimate icon of our consumer culture--serves
as a vehicle for historian Allan Brandt to explore critical aspects
of American life. From agriculture to big business, from medicine to
politics, The Cigarette Century shows how smoking came to be
so deeply implicated in our culture, science, policy, and law. In this
magisterial book, Brandt demonstrates how the cigarette reflects the
most powerful debates of our time about risk, responsibility, and human
health. The Cigarette Century reaches across many disciplines
to form a broad and compelling synthesis, showing how one humble (and
largely useless) product came to play such a dominant role in our lives
and deaths.
Perscribing
by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease
by Dr. Jeremy A. Greene
In Prescribing by Numbers, Jeremy A. Greene examines
the mechanisms by which drugs and chronic disease categories define
one another within medical research, clinical practice, and pharmaceutical
marketing, and he explores how this interaction has profoundly altered
the experience, politics, ethics, and economy of health in late-twentieth-century
America.
Prescribing by Numbers highlights the complex historical role of pharmaceuticals
in the transformation of disease categories. Greene narrates the expanding
definition of the three principal cardiovascular risk factors—hypertension,
diabetes, and high cholesterol—each intersecting with the career of
a particular pharmaceutical agent. Drawing on documents from corporate
archives and contemporary pharmaceutical marketing literature in concert
with the clinical literature and the records of researchers, clinicians,
and public health advocates, Greene produces a fascinating account of
the expansion of the pharmaceutical treatment of chronic disease over
the past fifty years. While acknowledging the influence of pharmaceutical
marketing on physicians, Greene avoids demonizing drug companies. Rather,
his provocative and comprehensive analysis sheds light on the increasing
presence of the subjectively healthy but highly medicated individual
in the American medical landscape, suggesting how historical analysis
can help to address the problems inherent in the program of pharmaceutical
prevention.
AIDS
and Social Policy in China
Edited by Joan Kauffman, Arthur Kleinman and
Anthony Saich
Published by Harvard University Asia Center Publications,
this is the first English language book on China's AIDS epidemic. This
edited book, which is made up of papers originally presented at a Harvard
University workshop on Social Policies and HIV/AIDS in China in May
2004, provides a picture of the current state of the epidemic, a social
science and interdisciplinary perspective on gaps in the response, and
a blueprint for needed actions. Contributors comprise some of the world's
leading Chinese and international researchers, policy-makers, and civil
society representatives working on HIV/AIDS in China. The multi-disciplinary
work provides a social science perspective and analysis of the epidemic,
offers a framework for thinking about the spread of HIV in China, and
includes suggestions for an effective policy response that also addresses
social determinants.
WHAT REALLY
MATTERS
Living a Moral Life Amidst Uncertainty and Danger
by Arthur Kleinman
Life can sometimes thrust us into troubling circumstances
that threaten to undo our thin mastery over those things that matter
most. In this moving and thought-provoking volume, Arthur Kleinman tells
the unsettling stories of a handful of men and women, some of whom have
lived through some of the most fundamental transitions of the turbulent
twentieth century. Here we meet an American veteran of World War II,
tortured by the memory of the atrocities he committed while a soldier
in the Pacific. A French-American woman aiding refugees in sub-Saharan
Africa, facing the utter chaos of a society where life has become meaningless.
A Chinese doctor trying to stay alive during Mao's cultural revolution,
discovering that the only values that matter are those that get you
beyond the next threat. These individuals have found themselves caught
in circumstances where those things that matter most to them--their
desires, status, relationships, resources, political and religious commitments,
life itself--have been challenged by the society around them. Each is
caught up in existential moral experiences that define what it means
to be human, with an intensity that makes their life narratives arresting.
Their stories reveal just how malleable moral life is, and just how
central danger is to our worlds and our livelihood. Indeed, Kleinman
offers in this book a groundbreaking approach to ethics, examining "who
we are" through some of the most disturbing issues of our time--war,
globalization, poverty, social injustice, sex, and religion--all in
the context of actual lived moral life. Here then are riveting stories
of ordinary men and women, in extraordinary times and threatening situations,
making sense of their worlds and facing profound challenges to what
matters most in their lives.
The
Health Care Mess: How We Got Into It and What it will Take to Get Out
by Julius B. Richmond and Rashi Fein
If we can decode the human genome and fashion working
machines out of atoms, why can't we navigate the quagmire that is our
health care system? In this important new book, Julius Richmond and
Rashi Fein recount the fraught history of health care in America since
the 1960s. After the advent of Medicare and Medicaid and with the progressive
goal to make advances in medical care available to all, medical costs
began their upward spiral. Cost control measures failed and led to the
HMO revolution, turning patients into consumers and doctors into providers.
The swelling ranks of Americans without any insurance at all dragged
the United States to the bottom of the list of industrialized nations.
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