Public Health Book List ·

Epidemics

The Story of South Africa’s Five Most Lethal Human Diseases

This is the first history of epidemics in South Africa, lethal episodes that significantly shaped this society over three centuries. Focusing on five devastating diseases between 1713 and today—smallpox, bubonic plague, “Spanish influenza,” polio, and HIV/AIDS—the book probes their origins, their catastrophic courses, and their consequences in both the short and long terms.…

Available September 2012 (est.)

Healing Traditions

African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820–1948

In August 2004, South Africa officially sought to legally recognize the practice of traditional healers. Largely in response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and limited both by the number of practitioners and by patients’ access to treatment, biomedical practitioners looked toward the country’s traditional healers as important agents in the development of medical education and treatment.…

Heterosexual Africa?

The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS

Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS builds from Marc Epprecht’s previous book, Hungochani (which focuses explicitly on same-sex desire in southern Africa), to explore the historical processes by which a singular, heterosexual identity for Africa was constructed—by anthropologists, ethnopsychologists, colonial officials, African elites, and most recently, health care workers seeking to address the HIV/AIDS pandemic.…

The Radiology Handbook

A Pocket Guide to Medical Imaging

Designed for busy medical students, The Radiology Handbook is a quick and easy reference for any practitioner who needs information on ordering or interpreting images. The book is divided into three parts: - Part I presents a table, organized from head to toe, with recommended imaging tests for common clinical conditions.…

The African AIDS Epidemic

A History

This history of the African AIDS epidemic is a much-needed, accessibly written historical account of the most serious epidemiological catastrophe of modern times. The African AIDS Epidemic: A History answers President Thabo Mbeki’s provocative question as to why Africa has suffered this terrible epidemic.…

A Second Voice

A Century of Osteopathic Medicine in Ohio

Doctors of osteopathy today practice side by side with medical doctors, employing the same diagnostic and curative tools of scientific—with a difference. A Second Voice: A Century of Osteopathic Medicine in Ohio is the story of that difference.…

The Children of Africa Confront AIDS

From Vulnerability to Possibility

AIDS is now the leading cause of death in Africa, where twenty-eight million people are HIV-positive, and where some twelve million children have lost one or both parents to AIDS. In Zimbabwe, 45 percent of children under the age of five are HIV-positive, and the epidemic has shortened life expectancy by twenty-two years.…

Aquamarine Blue 5

Personal Stories of College Students with Autism

This is the first book to be written by autistic college students about the challenges they face. Aquamarine Blue 5 details the struggle of these highly sensitive students and shows that there are gifts specific to autistic students that enrich the university system, scholarship, and the world as a whole.…

The Guide to EKG Interpretation

Revised Edition

Practical guide for primary care physicians, students, nurses, physician’s assistants, and anyone else who interprets electrocardiograms as part of his or her practice.

Kampala Women Getting By

Wellbeing in the Time of AIDS

What do ordinary women in an African city do in the face of “serious enough” infections in themselves and signs of acute illness in their young children? How do they manage? What does it take to get by? How do they maintain the wellbeing of the household in a setting without what would be considered as basic health provision in an American or European city?Professor Wallman focuses on women in a densely-populated part of Kampala called Kamwokya.…

A User’s Guide to Bypass Surgery

If you are on the 400,000 people who will undergo coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery this year, I hope you will find this personal account helpful. I have always believed that knowledge and understanding give us more control over what happens to us.…

Traditional Healers and Childhood in Zimbabwe

Based on the author’s fieldwork among the people of Zezuru, this study focuses on children as clients and as healers in training. In Reynolds’s ethnographic investigation of possession and healing, she pays particular attention to the way healers are identified and authenticated in communities, and how they are socialized in the use of medicinal plants, dreams, and ritual healing practices.…

The Political Economy of Health in Africa

This book examines the major phases in the history of health services in Africa and treats health as an integral aspect of the deepening crisis in Africa’s underdevelopment. One important thesis is that Western delivery systems have made health care less accessible for most people.…

Cannabis, Alcohol, and the South African Student

Adolescent Drug Use, 1974-1985

Du Toit examines the results of two surveys which he made a decade apart among high school students of Black, Indian, White, and Colored backgrounds. The initial survey showed some acceptance of the use of these substances among a small proportion of high school students but a high degree of intolerance of such use by the majority.…