An analysis of Barbados and Grenada during the 1979-1983 Period

State of Health takes readers inside one of the most controversial regimes of the twenty-first century—Venezuela under Hugo Chávez—for a revealing description of how people’s lives changed for the better as the state began reorganizing society. With lively and accessible storytelling, Amy Cooper chronicles the pleasure people experienced accessing government health care and improving their quality of life. From personalized doctor’s visits to therapeutic dance classes, new health care programs provided more than medical services. State of Health offers a unique perspective on the significance of the Bolivarian Revolution for ordinary people, demonstrating how the transformed health system succeeded in exciting people and recognizing historically marginalized Venezuelans as bodies who mattered.

Health and medicine in colonial environments is one of the newest areas in the history of medicine, but one in which the Caribbean is conspicuously absent. Yet the complex and fascinating history of the Caribbean, borne of the ways European colonialism combined with slavery, indentureship, migrant labour and plantation agriculture, led to the emergence of new social and cultural forms which are especially evident the area of health and medicine. The history of medical care in the Caribbean is also a history of the transfer of cultural practices from Africa and Asia, the process of creolization in the African and Asian diasporas, the perseverance of indigenous and popular medicine, and the emergence of distinct forms of western medical professionalism, science, and practice. This collection, which covers the French, Hispanic, Dutch, and British Caribbean, explores the cultural and social domains of medical experience and considers the dynamics and tensions of power. The chapters emphasize contestations over forms of medicalization and the controls of public health and address the politics of professionalization, not simply as an expression of colonial power but also of the power of a local elite against colonial or neo-colonial control. They pay particular attention to the significance of race and gender, focusing on such topics as conflicts over medical professionalization, control of women’s bodies and childbirth, and competition between ‘European’ and ‘Indigenous’ healers and healing practices. Employing a broad range of subjects and methodological approaches, this collection constitutes the first edited volume on the history of health and medicine in the circum-Caribbean region and is therefore required reading for anyone interested in the history of colonial and post-colonial medicine.

It is often thought that slaveholders only began to show an interest in female slaves' reproductive health after the British government banned the importation of Africans into its West Indian colonies in 1807. However, as Sasha Turner shows in this illuminating study, for almost thirty years before the slave trade ended, Jamaican slaveholders and doctors adjusted slave women's labor, discipline, and health care to increase birth rates and ensure that infants lived to become adult workers. Although slaves' interests in healthy pregnancies and babies aligned with those of their masters, enslaved mothers, healers, family, and community members distrusted their owners' medicine and benevolence. Turner contends that the social bonds and cultural practices created around reproductive health care and childbirth challenged the economic purposes slaveholders gave to birthing and raising children. Through powerful stories that place the reader on the ground in plantation-era Jamaica, Contested Bodies reveals enslaved women's contrasting ideas about maternity and raising children, which put them at odds not only with their owners but sometimes with abolitionists and enslaved men. Turner argues that, as the source of new labor, these women created rituals, customs, and relationships around pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing that enabled them at times to dictate the nature and pace of their work as well as their value. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including plantation records, abolitionist treatises, legislative documents, slave narratives, runaway advertisements, proslavery literature, and planter correspondence—Contested Bodies yields a fresh account of how the end of the slave trade changed the bodily experiences of those still enslaved in Jamaica.

This edited book includes new policy-relevant research on women’s health issues in Africa. Scholars explore critical topics from different disciplinary traditions using a variety of research methodologies and data sources. The contributors include African scholars with in-depth knowledge of their home contexts, who can furnish nuanced interpretations of local health issues and trends; international researchers who bring vigorous comparative viewpoints; emerging scholars adding to scientific knowledge; and more established researchers with a deep global knowledge of women’s health issues. The range of women’s health issues is vast, including the HIV epidemic and its impacts; domestic violence; the persistence of homebirths; and abortion. In addition, the book investigates emerging health concerns such as CVDs and cancers. Readers will learn that, while old health issues have persisted and assumed new dimensions, newer concerns have materialized and are gaining momentum. The inability of health systems to tackle these issues complicates matters in Africa, creating a sense of desperation that can only be successfully confronted through strong political will and strategic planning, grounded in further research. This book was originally published as several special issues of Health Care for Women International.

Healthcare decision makers in search of reliable information that compares health interventions increasingly turn to systematic reviews for the best summary of the evidence. Systematic reviews identify, select, assess, and synthesize the findings of similar but separate studies, and can help clarify what is known and not known about the potential benefits and harms of drugs, devices, and other healthcare services. Systematic reviews can be helpful for clinicians who want to integrate research findings into their daily practices, for patients to make well-informed choices about their own care, for professional medical societies and other organizations that develop clinical practice guidelines. Too often systematic reviews are of uncertain or poor quality. There are no universally accepted standards for developing systematic reviews leading to variability in how conflicts of interest and biases are handled, how evidence is appraised, and the overall scientific rigor of the process. In Finding What Works in Health Care the Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommends 21 standards for developing high-quality systematic reviews of comparative effectiveness research. The standards address the entire systematic review process from the initial steps of formulating the topic and building the review team to producing a detailed final report that synthesizes what the evidence shows and where knowledge gaps remain. Finding What Works in Health Care also proposes a framework for improving the quality of the science underpinning systematic reviews. This book will serve as a vital resource for both sponsors and producers of systematic reviews of comparative effectiveness research.

A pioneer work in the field of health, Nutricide gives bold insights into holistic health and clearly is a brillant fire for African nutritional liberation. Book jacket.

Reproducing Race, an ethnography of pregnancy and birth at a large New York City public hospital, explores the role of race in the medical setting. Khiara M. Bridges investigates how race—commonly seen as biological in the medical world—is socially constructed among women dependent on the public healthcare system for prenatal care and childbirth. Bridges argues that race carries powerful material consequences for these women even when it is not explicitly named, showing how they are marginalized by the practices and assumptions of the clinic staff. Deftly weaving ethnographic evidence into broader discussions of Medicaid and racial disparities in infant and maternal mortality, Bridges shines new light on the politics of healthcare for the poor, demonstrating how the "medicalization" of social problems reproduces racial stereotypes and governs the bodies of poor women of color.

Gender, Health, and Society in Contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean takes a multilayered approach to the contemporary peoples of Latin America, the Caribbean, and Latinx peoples in the greater diaspora. Central to this edited collection, and critical to its creative significance and contribution, is the conceptual unification of gendered health, the embodiment of identity, societal structures, and social inequality, and the ways in which gender, health, and society intersect daily. By emphasizing the complex ways in which gender and health intersect in Latin America, the contributors to this collection offer a more detailed look at how gender embodies health inequities in these populations and how societal woes impact and constrain gendered bodies in public spheres.

A collection of essays by a number of outstanding women of the Caribbean on the situation of women in the region, in the period since the Beijing Conference of 1995. Examining a range of issues including education, poverty, decision-making, and violence, the authors expose continuing burdens and disadvantages faced by women.