From as early as classical antiquity there has been an interplay between literature and medicine. The first book of Homer's Ilias recounts the plague that swept the camp of the Achaeans. While this instance concerns a full-length book, it is the aphorism that is of greater importance as a literary technique for the dissemination of medical knowledge, from the "Corpus Hippocraticum" of antiquity until the "Aphorismi de cognoscendis et curandis morbis" (1715) by Herman Boerhaave. In addition, the subject of illness and its impact on mankind was explored by great numbers of poetic scholars and scholarly poets.This collection offers fourteen articles which all highlight the relation between disease and literature. It entails a first-ever overview of Dutch-language research in this field, whereby the literary and cultural functions of medical knowledge and the poetics of medical and literary writing are in the focus.

In 2015, building on the advances of the Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations adopted Sustainable Development Goals that include an explicit commitment to achieve universal health coverage by 2030. However, enormous gaps remain between what is achievable in human health and where global health stands today, and progress has been both incomplete and unevenly distributed. In order to meet this goal, a deliberate and comprehensive effort is needed to improve the quality of health care services globally. Crossing the Global Quality Chasm: Improving Health Care Worldwide focuses on one particular shortfall in health care affecting global populations: defects in the quality of care. This study reviews the available evidence on the quality of care worldwide and makes recommendations to improve health care quality globally while expanding access to preventive and therapeutic services, with a focus in low-resource areas. Crossing the Global Quality Chasm emphasizes the organization and delivery of safe and effective care at the patient/provider interface. This study explores issues of access to services and commodities, effectiveness, safety, efficiency, and equity. Focusing on front line service delivery that can directly impact health outcomes for individuals and populations, this book will be an essential guide for key stakeholders, governments, donors, health systems, and others involved in health care.

There are many migraine sufferers worldwide. However, the lack of confirmatory scan or blood test poses a major barrier to their diagnosis, which must be based on their account of the pain. As a consequence, language is of utmost importance in the diagnosis of migraine. This book deals with this relation between words and migraine, and considers how persons with migraine make their pain ‘readable’ and how fictional texts ‘perform’ migraine. Its analysis utilises the theories of Wittgenstein (‘beetle in the box’), Foucault, de Saussure and Scarry, as well as works of fiction including Hustvedt’s The Blindfold, Lasdun’s The Horned Man and Yalom’s When Nietzsche Wept.

An accessible introduction to the political, economic, literary, and artistic heritage of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century.

This book explores women’s experiences of pilgrimage in Latin Christendom between 1300 and 1500 C.E. Later medieval authors harbored grave doubts about women’s mobility; literary images of mobile women commonly accused them of lust, pride, greed, and deceit. Yet real women commonly engaged in pilgrimage in a variety of forms, both physical and spiritual, voluntary and compulsory, and to locations nearby and distant. Acting within both practical and social constraints, such women helped to construct more positive interpretations of their desire to travel and of their experiences as pilgrims. Regardless of how their travel was interpreted, those women who succeeded in becoming pilgrims offer us a rare glimpse of ordinary women taking on extraordinary religious and social authority.

Despite effective approaches to prevention, STD and HIV infection rates remain fairly constant. Targeting, implementation, and monitoring of interventions have posed widespread problems, and the recent spate of cuts to prevention budgets has made these roadblocks even more challenging. It is clear that working in sexual health requires both a deeper understanding of STI/HIV epidemiology and an ongoing quest for up-to-date, realistic prevention strategies. The New Public Health and STD/HIV Prevention offers readers leading-edge access to both. Focusing on social determinants of sexual health, at-risk populations, critical factors in approaches to prevention, and reviews of new research, this authoritative volume explores areas as varied as HPV prevention, technology-based interventions, migration as a factor in disease transmission, and competencies key to effective leadership in the field. Dispatches from the frontlines of theory, research, and practice in the U.S. and abroad include: Personal risk, public impact: balancing individual rights and STD/HIV prevention. Distribution of prevention resources and its impact on sexual health. Prevention measures in diverse populations of women. Toward a better approach to preventive interventions with men who have sex with men. Adolescent sexual health and STIs. Reducing disparities in sexual health: lessons from the campaign to eliminate infectious syphilis. Public health professionals of all backgrounds interested in or working in improving sexual health will find The New Public Health and STD/HIV Prevention an indispensable guide to conceptualizing the problems and clarifying possible solutions.

The United States is among the wealthiest nations in the world, but it is far from the healthiest. Although life expectancy and survival rates in the United States have improved dramatically over the past century, Americans live shorter lives and experience more injuries and illnesses than people in other high-income countries. The U.S. health disadvantage cannot be attributed solely to the adverse health status of racial or ethnic minorities or poor people: even highly advantaged Americans are in worse health than their counterparts in other, "peer" countries. In light of the new and growing evidence about the U.S. health disadvantage, the National Institutes of Health asked the National Research Council (NRC) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to convene a panel of experts to study the issue. The Panel on Understanding Cross-National Health Differences Among High-Income Countries examined whether the U.S. health disadvantage exists across the life span, considered potential explanations, and assessed the larger implications of the findings. U.S. Health in International Perspective presents detailed evidence on the issue, explores the possible explanations for the shorter and less healthy lives of Americans than those of people in comparable countries, and recommends actions by both government and nongovernment agencies and organizations to address the U.S. health disadvantage.

Visual anatomy books have been a staple of medical practice and study since the mid-sixteenth century. But the visual representation of diseased states followed a very different pattern from anatomy, one we are only now beginning to investigate and understand. With Visualizing Disease, Domenico Bertoloni Meli explores key questions in this domain, opening a new field of inquiry based on the analysis of a rich body of arresting and intellectually challenging images reproduced here both in black and white and in color. Starting in the Renaissance, Bertoloni Meli delves into the wide range of figures involved in the early study and representation of disease, including not just men of medicine, like anatomists, physicians, surgeons, and pathologists, but also draftsmen and engravers. Pathological preparations proved difficult to preserve and represent, and as Bertoloni Meli takes us through a number of different cases from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century, we gain a new understanding of how knowledge of disease, interactions among medical men and artists, and changes in the technologies of preservation and representation of specimens interacted to slowly bring illustration into the medical world.