As American Melancholy reveals, if you read about depression anywhere today--medical journal, popular magazine, National Institute of Mental Health pamphlet, or pharmaceutical company drug promotional literature--you will find three main pieces of information either explicitly stated or strongly implied: depression is a disease (like any other physical disease); it is extraordinarily prevalent in the world; and it occurs about twice as frequently in women as in men. Yet, depression was not classified as a disease until the 1980 publication of the American Psychiatric Association's...

Unevenly distributed resources and rising costs have become enduring problems in the American health care system. Health care is more expensive in the United States than in other wealthy nations, and access varies significantly across space and social classes. James A. Schafer Jr. shows that these problems are not inevitable features of modern medicine, but instead reflect the informal organization of health care in a free market system in which profit and demand, rather than social welfare and public health needs, direct the distribution and cost of crucial resources.

The Business...

Smelting is an industrial process involving the extraction of metal from ore. During this process, impurities in ore--including arsenic, lead, and cadmium--may be released from smoke stacks, contaminating air, water, and soil with toxic-heavy metals.

The problem of public health harm from smelter emissions received little official attention for much for the twentieth century. Though people living near smelters periodically complained that their health was impaired by both sulfur dioxide and heavy metals, for much of the century there was strong deference to industry claims that smelter...

Traditionally, the history of the birth control movement has been told through the accounts of the leaders, organizations, and legislation that shaped the campaign. Recently, historians have begun examining the cultural work of printed media, including newspapers, magazines, and even novels in fostering support for the cause. Broadcasting Birth Control builds on this new scholarship to explore the films and radio and television broadcasts developed by twentieth-century birth control advocates to promote family planning at home in the United States, and in the expanding international...

Classrooms and Clinics is the first book-length assessment of the development of public school health policies from the late nineteenth century through the early years of the Great Depression. Richard A. Meckel examines the efforts of early twentieth-century child health care advocates and reformers to utilize urban schools to deliver health care services to socioeconomically disadvantaged and medically underserved children in the primary grades. Their goal, Meckel shows, was to improve the children's health and thereby improve their academic performance. Meckel situates these efforts within...

While mental illness and mental health care are increasingly recognized and accepted in today's society, awareness of the most severely mentally ill-as well as those who care for them-is still dominated by stereotypes. Managing Madness in the Community dispels the myth. Readers will see how treatment options often depend on the social status, race, and gender of both clients and carers; how ideas in the field of mental health care-conflicting priorities and approaches-actually affect what happens on the ground; and how, amid the competing demands of clients and families, government agencies,...

Malaria is one of the leading killers in the world today. Though drugs against malaria have a long history, attempts to develop novel therapeutics spanned the twentieth century and continue today. In this historical study, Leo B. Slater shows the roots and branches of an enormous drug development project during World War II. Fighting around the globe, American soldiers were at high risk for contracting malaria, yet quinine-a natural cure-became harder to acquire. A U.S. government-funded antimalarial program, initiated by the National Research Council, brought together diverse laboratories...

Known as "The Great Killer" and "The White Plague," few diseases influenced American life as much as tuberculosis. Sufferers migrated to mountain or desert climates believed to ameliorate symptoms. Architects designed homes with sleeping porches and verandas so sufferers could spend time in the open air. The disease even developed its own consumer culture complete with invalid beds, spittoons, sputum collection devices, and disinfectants. The "preventorium," an institution designed to protect children from the ravages of the disease, emerged in this era of Progressive ideals in public health....

Current public health literature suggests that the mentally ill may represent as much as half of the smokers in America. In Smoking Privileges, Laura D. Hirshbein highlights the complex problem of mentally ill smokers, placing it in the context of changes in psychiatry, in the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries, and in the experience of mental illness over the last century.Hirshbein, a medical historian and clinical psychiatrist, first shows how cigarettes functioned in the old system of psychiatric care, revealing that mental health providers long ago noted the important...

The sudden call, the race to the hospital, the high-stakes operation--the drama of transplant surgery is well known. But what happens before and after the surgery? In Transplanting Care, Laura L. Heinemann examines the daily lives of midwestern organ transplant patients and those who care for them, from pretransplant preparations through to the long posttransplant recovery. Heinemann points out that as efforts to control healthcare costs gain urgency--and as new surgical techniques, drug therapies, and home medical equipment advance--most of the transplant process now takes place at...