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How Cancer Crossed the Color Line

Author: Keith Wailoo

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-02-04

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0195170172

"Examining a century of twists and turns in anti-cancer campaigns, this path-breaking study shows how American cancer awareness, prevention, treatment, and survival have been refracted through the lens of race. As cancer went from being a white woman's nemesis to a "democratic disease" to a fearsome threat in communities of color, experts and the lay public interpreted these trends as lessons about women, men, and the color line. Drawing on film and fiction, on medical and epidemiological evidence, and on patients' accounts, Keith Wailoo tracks cancer's transformation--how theories of risk evolved with changes in women's roles and African-American and new immigrant migration trends, with the growth of federal cancer surveillance, economic depression and world war, and with diagnostic advances, racial protest, and contemporary health activism. A pioneering study of health communication in America, the book skillfully documents how race and gender became central motifs in the birth of cancer awareness, how patterns and perceptions changed, and how the "war on cancer" continues to be waged along the color line"--Provided by publisher.

Pushing Cool

Author: Keith Wailoo

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-11-02

Total Pages: 411

ISBN-13: 022679427X

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Spanning a century, Pushing Cool reveals how the twin deceptions of health and Black affinity for menthol were crafted—and how the industry’s disturbingly powerful narrative has endured to this day. Police put Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold for selling cigarettes on a New York City street corner. George Floyd was killed by police outside a store in Minneapolis known as “the best place to buy menthols.” Black smokers overwhelmingly prefer menthol brands such as Kool, Salem, and Newport. All of this is no coincidence. The disproportionate Black deaths and cries of “I can’t breathe” that ring out in our era—because of police violence, COVID-19, or menthol smoking—are intimately connected to a post-1960s history of race and exploitation. In Pushing Cool, Keith Wailoo tells the intricate and poignant story of menthol cigarettes for the first time. He pulls back the curtain to reveal the hidden persuaders who shaped menthol buying habits and racial markets across America: the world of tobacco marketers, consultants, psychologists, and social scientists, as well as Black lawmakers and civic groups including the NAACP. Today most Black smokers buy menthols, and calls to prohibit their circulation hinge on a history of the industry’s targeted racial marketing. In 2009, when Congress banned flavored cigarettes as criminal enticements to encourage youth smoking, menthol cigarettes were also slated to be banned. Through a detailed study of internal tobacco industry documents, Wailoo exposes why they weren’t and how they remain so popular with Black smokers.

As the World Ages

Author: Kavita Sivaramakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2018-05-01

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 0674919815

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People are living longer, creating an unexpected boom in the elderly population. Longevity is increasing not only in wealthy countries but in developing nations as well. In response, many policy makers and scholars are preparing for a global crisis of aging. But for too long, Western experts have conceived of aging as a universal predicament—one that supposedly provokes the same welfare concerns in every context. In the twenty-first century, Kavita Sivaramakrishnan writes, we must embrace a new approach to the problem, one that prioritizes local agendas and values. As the World Ages is a history of how gerontologists, doctors, social scientists, and activists came to define the issue of global aging. Sivaramakrishnan shows that transnational organizations like the United Nations, private NGOs, and philanthropic foundations embraced programs that reflected prevailing Western ideas about development and modernization. The dominant paradigm often assumed that, because large-scale growth of an aging population happened first in the West, developing societies will experience the issues of aging in the same ways and on the same terms as their Western counterparts. But regional experts are beginning to question this one-size-fits-all model and have chosen instead to recast Western expertise in response to provincial conditions. Focusing on South Asia and Africa, Sivaramakrishnan shows how regional voices have argued for an approach that responds to local needs and concerns. The research presented in As the World Ages will help scholars, policy makers, and advocates appreciate the challenges of this recent shift in global demographics and find solutions sensitive to real life in diverse communities.

Sexualizing Cancer

Author: Laura Mamo

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 0226829294

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"Starting in 2005, people in the US and Europe were inundated with media coverage announcing the between cervical cancer and the sexually transmitted virus HPV. Within a year, product ads promoted a vaccine targeting cancer's viral cause and girls and women were enrolled as early consumers of this new cancer vaccine. The knowledge of HPV's links to other cancers, notably anal and oral, soon followed, which identified new at-risk populations and ignited a variety of gendered and sexual issues related to cancer prevention. Sexualizing Cancer is the first book dedicated to the emergence and proliferation of the HPV vaccine. It shows how the late twentieth century scientific breakthrough that identified the human papilloma virus as having a causative role in the onset of human cancer ignited sexual politics, struggles for inclusion, new risk identities, and, ultimately, a new regime of cancer prevention. Mamo reveals how gender and other equity arguments from within scientific, medical, and advocate communities shaped vaccine guidelines, clinical trial funding, research practices, and clinical programs, with consequences that reverberate today. This is a must-read history of medical expansion-from a "woman's disease" to a set of cancers that affect all genders-and of lingering sexualization, with specific gendered, racialized, and other contours along the way. Selling points: Reveals how cervical cancer became a highly visible cancer, while other HPV-related cancers were downplayed Makes clear how the places and people that could most benefit from a vaccine were the one's farthest from receiving its benefits Up-to-date account drawing on interviews with scientists and clinicians, observation at professional meetings, and analysis of scientific literature and media"--

The Inevitable Hour

Author: Emily K. Abel

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2013-05-01

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1421409208

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Changes in health care have dramatically altered the experience of dying in America. At the turn of the twentieth century, medicine’s imperative to cure disease increasingly took priority over the demand to relieve pain and suffering at the end of life. Filled with heartbreaking stories, The Inevitable Hour demonstrates that professional attention and resources gradually were diverted from dying patients. Emily K. Abel challenges three myths about health care and dying in America. First, that medicine has always sought authority over death and dying; second, that medicine superseded the role of families and spirituality at the end of life; and finally, that only with the advent of the high-tech hospital did an institutional death become dehumanized. Abel shows that hospitals resisted accepting dying patients and often worked hard to move them elsewhere. Poor, terminally ill patients, for example, were shipped from Bellevue Hospital in open boats across the East River to Blackwell’s Island, where they died in hovels, mostly without medical care. Some terminal patients were not forced to leave, yet long before the advent of feeding tubes and respirators, dying in a hospital was a profoundly dehumanizing experience. With technological advances, passage of the Social Security Act, and enactment of Medicare and Medicaid, almshouses slowly disappeared and conditions for dying patients improved—though, as Abel argues, the prejudices and approaches of the past are still with us. The problems that plagued nineteenth-century almshouses can be found in many nursing homes today, where residents often receive substandard treatment. A frank portrayal of the medical care of dying people past and present, The Inevitable Hour helps to explain why a movement to restore dignity to the dying arose in the early 1970s and why its goals have been so difficult to achieve.

The Invisible Line

Author: Daniel J. Sharfstein

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2011-02-17

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 1101475803

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"The Invisible Line" shines light on one of the most important, but too often hidden, aspects of American history and culture. Sharfstein's narrative of three families negotiating America's punishing racial terrain is a must read for all who are interested in the construction of race in the United States." --Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello In America, race is a riddle. The stories we tell about our past have calcified into the fiction that we are neatly divided into black or white. It is only with the widespread availability of DNA testing and the boom in genealogical research that the frequency with which individuals and entire families crossed the color line has become clear. In this sweeping history, Daniel J. Sharfstein unravels the stories of three families who represent the complexity of race in America and force us to rethink our basic assumptions about who we are. The Gibsons were wealthy landowners in the South Carolina backcountry who became white in the 1760s, ascending to the heights of the Southern elite and ultimately to the U.S. Senate. The Spencers were hardscrabble farmers in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, joining an isolated Appalachian community in the 1840s and for the better part of a century hovering on the line between white and black. The Walls were fixtures of the rising black middle class in post-Civil War Washington, D.C., only to give up everything they had fought for to become white at the dawn of the twentieth century. Together, their interwoven and intersecting stories uncover a forgotten America in which the rules of race were something to be believed but not necessarily obeyed. Defining their identities first as people of color and later as whites, these families provide a lens for understanding how people thought about and experienced race and how these ideas and experiences evolved-how the very meaning of black and white changed-over time. Cutting through centuries of myth, amnesia, and poisonous racial politics, The Invisible Line will change the way we talk about race, racism, and civil rights.

Communities in Action

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2017-04-27

Total Pages: 583

ISBN-13: 0309452961

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In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

Toxic Exposures

Author: Susan L. Smith

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2017-01-17

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 0813586119

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Mustard gas is typically associated with the horrors of World War I battlefields and trenches, where chemical weapons were responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. Few realize, however, that mustard gas had a resurgence during the Second World War, when its uses and effects were widespread and insidious. Toxic Exposures tells the shocking story of how the United States and its allies intentionally subjected thousands of their own servicemen to poison gas as part of their preparation for chemical warfare. In addition, it reveals the racialized dimension of these mustard gas experiments, as scientists tested whether the effects of toxic exposure might vary between Asian, Hispanic, black, and white Americans. Drawing from once-classified American and Canadian government records, military reports, scientists’ papers, and veterans’ testimony, historian Susan L. Smith explores not only the human cost of this research, but also the environmental degradation caused by ocean dumping of unwanted mustard gas. As she assesses the poisonous legacy of these chemical warfare experiments, Smith also considers their surprising impact on the origins of chemotherapy as cancer treatment and the development of veterans’ rights movements. Toxic Exposures thus traces the scars left when the interests of national security and scientific curiosity battled with medical ethics and human rights.

Dying in the City of the Blues

Author: Keith Wailoo

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2014-06-30

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1469617412

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This groundbreaking book chronicles the history of sickle cell anemia in the United States, tracing its transformation from an "invisible" malady to a powerful, yet contested, cultural symbol of African American pain and suffering. Set in Memphis, home of one of the nation's first sickle cell clinics, Dying in the City of the Blues reveals how the recognition, treatment, social understanding, and symbolism of the disease evolved in the twentieth century, shaped by the politics of race, region, health care, and biomedicine. Using medical journals, patients' accounts, black newspapers, blues lyrics, and many other sources, Keith Wailoo follows the disease and its sufferers from the early days of obscurity before sickle cell's "discovery" by Western medicine; through its rise to clinical, scientific, and social prominence in the 1950s; to its politicization in the 1970s and 1980s. Looking forward, he considers the consequences of managed care on the politics of disease in the twenty-first century. A rich and multilayered narrative, Dying in the City of the Blues offers valuable new insight into the African American experience, the impact of race relations and ideologies on health care, and the politics of science, medicine, and disease.

The Cancer Problem

Author: Agnes Arnold-Forster

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-01-19

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0192635751

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The Cancer Problem offers the first medical, cultural, and social history of cancer in nineteenth-century Britain. It begins by looking at a community of doctors and patients who lived and worked in the streets surrounding the Middlesex Hospital in London. It follows in their footsteps as they walked the labyrinthine lanes and passages that branched off Tottenham Court Road; then, through seven chapters, its focus expands to successively include the rivers, lakes, and forests of England, the mountains, poverty, and hunger of the four nations of the British Isles, the reluctant and resistant inhabitants of the British Empire, and the networks of scientists and doctors spread across Europe and North America. The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteenth-Century Britain argues that it was in the nineteenth century that cancer acquired the unique emotional, symbolic, and politicized status it maintains today. Through an interrogation of the construction, deployment, and emotional consequences of the disease's incurability, this book reframes our conceptualization of the relationship between medicine and modern life and reshapes our understanding of chronic and incurable maladies, both past and present.