Healers Abroad:Americans Responding to the Human Resource Crisis in HIV/AIDS calls for the federal government to create and fund the United States Global Health Service (GHS) to mobilize the nation�s best health care professionals and other highly skilled experts to help combat HIV/AIDS in hard-hit African, Caribbean, and Southeast Asian countries. The dearth of qualified health care workers in many lowincome nations is often the biggest roadblock to mounting effective responses to public health needs. The proposal�s goal is to build the capacity of targeted countries to fight the HIV/AIDS pandemic over the long run. The GHS would be comprised of six multifaceted components. Full-time, salaried professionals would make up the organization�s pivotal �service corps,� working side-by-side with other colleagues already on the ground to provide medical care and drug therapy to affected populations while offering local counterparts training and assistance in clinical, technical, and managerial areas.

What role can churches and religious organizations play in health care today? Abigail Rian Evans answers this question and others in this valuable guide to practical programs for health ministries. Beginning with a survey of the history of health ministry in the church, Evans demonstrates that what is needed is not to invent health ministries, but to recapture the spirit of the church as a health institution, both spiritual and physical. She then goes on to show what practical programs exist in the world today, and why these programs are important for the church to embrace and develop. Comprehensive in scope, this is an important resource for any individual or institution looking to develop or enhance a health ministry program.

This book explores cross-cultural medical encounters involving non-Western healers in a variety of imperial contexts from the Arctic, Asia, Africa, Americas and the Caribbean. It highlights contests over healing, knowledge and medicines through the frameworks of hybridisation and pluralism. The intertwined histories of medicine, empire and early globalisation influenced the ways in which millions of people encountered and experienced suffering, healing and death. In an increasingly global search for therapeutics and localised definition of acceptable healing, networks and mobilities played key roles. Healers’ engagements with politics, law and religion underline the close connections between healing, power and authority. They also reveal the agency of healers, sufferers and local societies, in encounters with modernising imperial states, medical science and commercialisation. The book questions and complements the traditional narratives of triumphant biomedicine, reminding readers that ‘traditional’ medical cultures and practitioners did not often disappear, but rather underwent major changes in the increasingly interconnected world.

A Vietnam Trilogy is about a side of war that for decades pro-military and pro-defense advocates have systematically suppressed, minimized and denigrated as being falsely exaggerated the indelible human cost of war on its participants that can and does persist for decades. The 3.14 million Vietnam war-zone veterans and 800,000 Vietnam-theater veterans suffering full or partial post-traumatic stress syndrome, and their families will find it invaluable. Volume Two, Healing Journeys, focuses on three Vietnam Vets making a return trip accompanying 16 students on a Study Abroad history course. Especially in the post 9/11, post-Iraq world, this trilogy is important reading for academics and mental health professionals including graduate and undergrad students in history, psychology, social work and religion, and professionals in psychiatry, clinical nursing, counseling, and religion, and academic specialists interested in study abroad programs. Through the wrenching stories of veterans and the authors own understanding as a mental health professional, Scurfield describes his and his comrades experiences during the war; then he describes the healing process fostered by innovative return trips he has led to peace-time Vietnam in 1989 and, in conjunction with a university history program, in 2000, described in this volume. A Vietnam Trilogy offers veterans and their families a vicarious "healing journey" by relating the experiences of those who participated in these therapeutic efforts, and offers recommendations to veterans and those who wish to help them. The therapy breakthroughs for veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder are now the model for innovative programs across America; and they will be the foundation for programs to help today's veterans of the Iraq War.

How has Cuba, a small, developing country, achieved its stunning medical breakthroughs? Hampered by scarce resources and a long-standing U.S. embargo, Cuba nevertheless has managed to provide universal access to health care, comprehensive health education, and advanced technology, even amid desperate economic conditions. Moreover, Cuba has sent disaster relief, donations of medical supplies and technology, and cadres of volunteer doctors throughout the world, emerging, in Castro's phrase, as a "world medical power." In her significant and timely study, Julie Feinsilver explores the Cuban medical phenomenon, examining how a governmental obsession with health has reaped medical and political benefits at home and abroad. As a result of Cuba's forward strides in health care, infant mortality rates are low even by First World standards. Cuba has successfully dealt with the AIDS epidemic in a manner that has aroused controversy and that some claim has infringed on individual liberties—issues that Feinsilver succinctly evaluates. Feinsilver's research and travel in Cuba over many years give her a unique perspective on the challenges Cuba faces in this time of unprecedented economic and political uncertainty. Her book is a must-read for everyone concerned with health policy, international relations, and Third World societies. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994. How has Cuba, a small, developing country, achieved its stunning medical breakthroughs? Hampered by scarce resources and a long-standing U.S. embargo, Cuba nevertheless has managed to provide universal access to health care, comprehensive health education

This volume on medical tourism includes contributions by anthropologists and historians on a variety of health-seeking modes of travel and leisure. It brings together analyses of recent trends of "medical tourism", such as underinsured middle-class Americans traveling to India for surgery, pious Middle Eastern couples seeking assisted reproduction outside their borders, or consumers of the exotic in search of alternative healing, with analyses of the centuries-old Euro-American tradition of traveling to spas. Rather than seeing these two forms of medical travel as being disparate, the book demonstrates that, as noted in the introduction ‘what makes patients itinerant in both the old and new kind of medical travel is either a perceived shortage or constraint at ‘home’, or the sense of having reached a particular kind of therapeutic impasse, with the two often so intertwined that it is difficult to tell them apart. The constraint may stem from things as diverse as religious injunctions, legal hurdles, social approbation, or seasonal affliction; and the shortage can range from a lack of privacy, of insurance, technology, competence, or enough therapeutic resources that can address issues and conditions that patients have. If these two intertwined strands are responsible for most medical tourism, then which locales seem to have therapeutic resources are those that are either ‘natural,’ in the form of water or climate; legal, in the form of a culture that does not stigmatise patients; or technological and professional, in the form of tests, equipment, or expertise, unavailable or affordable at home; or in the form of novel therapeutic possibilities that promise to resolve irresolvable issues’. This book was originally published as a special issue of Anthropology & Medicine.

This important book contributes to understandings of the ways in which healing practices in southeast Africa mediate divides between the wealthy and the impoverished, the traditional and the modern, the local and the global.