Search Result List

Undoing Slavery excavates medical and legal history to understand the abolitionist focus on the body on its own terms. Facing many challenges to their goal of restoring embodied self-sovereignty to the enslaved, abolitionists learned that legal rights alone, while necessary, were not sufficient either to protect or heal the bodies of African-descended people from the consequences of slavery and racism.

Negotiating Mistrust examines a wide diversity of patients and healers—and interactions between them—in Niamey, Niger through the analytical prism of mistrust. Author Scott M. Youngstedt offers a holistic study of the medical landscape in Niamey by focusing on the intersections between three medical sectors: traditional, Islamic, and biomedical.

Speaking, Stammering, Singing, Shouting traces the history of what was considered a good, normal, or healthy voice in the nineteenth century. From parrots and preachers to stammerers and singers, the book delves not only into changing medical norms and musical ideals but also into the sometimes painful and awkward daily work of having a voice.

By analyzing ethnographic interviews with the youth of Aotearoa/New Zealand, Susanna Trnka reveals the emotional, financial, and deeply personal ideas at stake as understandings of health shift in the minds of young people, who are often at the vanguard of new trends in mental health, physical fitness, and digital health technologies.

Anatomical Forms excavates the shared material practices of women’s poetic work and anatomical study in early modern England. Whitney Sperrazza demonstrates how women writers such as Margaret Cavendish and Hester Pulter wielded poetics as a tool for scientific work in order to explore and challenge rapid developments in anatomy and physiology.

Waiting at the Mountain Pass offers an intimate meditation on aging and dying among elderly exiled Tibetans living in Dharamsala, India. Through closely drawn portraits of these elders, readers walk with them through the heartaches and hopes of facing death alone and on a foreign soil.

After Work is a compelling account of Japanese retirees who move to Malaysia as “silver backpackers,” where they seek to achieve a “good” retirement. Set against contemporary inter-Asian migration, After Work offers a feminist perspective on what makes a good retirement when the boundaries between work and life are blurred.

Surgeons and Something More presents biographical sketches of the nineteen chairmen who have guided the evolution of the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school and surgery department, America’s first, begun in 1765. The book reveals how Penn surgeons played prominent roles in major events and medical advancements over the past 250 years.

Poisoned Relations illuminates the competing understandings of poison and power in the Atlantic world. Examining more than five hundred investigations and trials in British Virginia, French Martinique, Portuguese Bahia, and the Dutch Guianas, she brings historical linguistics to bear on the study of the African diaspora in the Americas.

Through searing firsthand accounts by students at Brooklyn College and California State University Los Angeles, Until We’re Seen chronicles COVID-19’s devastating effects on working-class communities of color and the resilient ways those communities banded together.