The history of Kupat Holim, the health organization of workers in Israel, began at the 2nd Convention of Jewish agricultural workers in Judea in December 1911. Due to the lack of health services within the economic means of the workers, and the refusal of the farmer-employers to extend health services to their employees, the Jewish agricultural workers in Eretz-Israel -- at that time, a distant province of the far-flung Ottoman empire -- decided to establish a workers' health fund (kupat holim in Hebrew). In the years 1912-15, two funds similar to the ones in Judea were also established in...

This book examines the biomedical research of Nobel Prize-winning bacteriologist Charles Nicolle during his tenure as director of the Pasteur Institute of Tunis. Using typhus as its lens, it demonstrates how the complexities of early twentieth century bacteriology, French imperial ideology, the -Pastorian mission, - and conditions in colonial Tunisia blended to inform the triumphs and disappointments of Nicolle's fascinating career. It illuminates how these diverse elements shaped Nicolle's personal identity, the identity of his institute, and his innovative conception of the -birth, life,...

Marcos Cueto, a widely published medical historian, presents an appealing and well-documented narrative that describes the origins of public health and the creation of PAHO and culminates with the Organization's response to globalization and its commitment to the Millennium Development Goals. The history of PAHO's institutional heritage, notes the author, is -a rich testimony to the depth and breadth of health's value . . . as an indispensable requirement for peace, security, tolerance, and solidarity . . . and a means of achieving equity . . . in all social spheres.- Marcos Cueto is...

In this follow-up to her 2002 book, The Workers' Health Fund in Eretz, Israel: Kupat Holim, 1911-1937, historian Shifra Shvarts investigates the political and social forces that influenced Israel's health care system and policy during the early years of state building. Among the struggles Shvarts explores in this penetrating study are the debate over immigration health policy and the Law of Return, enacted in 1950; the battles over universal health care between the Workers' Health Fund and the Israeli government led by prime minister Ben Gurion; the urgent organization of military medical...

The greatest revolutions in twentieth-century public health and preventive medicine have been the concepts of risk factors and healthy lifestyles as methods of preventing disease. A risk factor is anything that increases the risk of disease in an individual. Lifestyle refers to the individual's personal behaviors with regard to risk factors. Identifying risk factors and modifying them by changing lifestyles in order to prevent disease has become ubiquitous as a strategy in public health. The book examines the history and evolution of the concepts of risk factors and healthy lifestyles and...

This groundbreaking book argues that health and medical media, with their unique goals and production values, constitute a rich cultural and historical archive and deserve greater scholarly attention. Original essays by leading media scholars and historians of medicine demonstrate that Americans throughout the twentieth century have learned about health, disease, medicine, and the human body from movies. Heroic doctors and patients fighting dread diseases have thrilled and moved audiences everywhere; amid changing media formats, medicine's moving pictures continue to educate, entertain, and...

Originally published in Swedish in 2002, Death, Modernity, and the Body explores the impact of modernization on customs and practices of treating the dead body in Sweden in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when intense social and cultural change transformed the country from an agricultural society to a modern industrial state. The book focuses on five arenas: medical research and education, displays of the dead body for entertainment purposes, funerary preparations of the body, memorial photography, and cremation. Ahren takes an original approach to the history of death in...

Ludwik Hirszfeld (1884-1954), one of the most prominent serologists of the twentieth century, discovered the inheritance and established the nomenclature of blood groups and opened the field of human population genetics. He also carried out groundbreaking research in the genetics of disease and immunology. Following World War II, he founded Poland's first Institute of Immunology in Wroclaw, which now bears his name. His autobiographical memoir, The Story of One Life, first published in Poland in 1946, immediately became a bestseller and has been reedited several times since. It is an...

This book explores how London society responded to the dilemma of the rampant spread of the pox among the poor. Some have asserted that public authorities turned their backs on the -foul- and only began to offer care for venereal patients in the Enlightenment. An exploration of hospitals and workhouses shows a much more impressive public health response. London hospitals established -foul wards- at least as early as the mid-sixteenth century. Reconstruction of these wards shows that, far from banning paupers with the pox, hospitals made treating them one of their primary services. Not merely...

In January 1921, after a decade of bloody warfare, Mexico's new government found an unlikely partner in its struggle to fulfill the Revolution's promises to the populace. An ambitious philanthropy, born of the wealth of America's most notorious capitalist, made its way into Mexico by offering money and expertise to counter a looming public health crisis. Why did the Rockefeller Foundation and Revolutionary Mexico get together, and how did their relationship last for thirty-plus years amidst binational tensions, domestic turmoil, and institutional soul-searching? Transcending standard...