Tag Archives: new books

New books and a new member of staff in the library

Natalie in Library Room 1

This week we have news books and a lovely new member of staff. Natalie is working here for the summer, while our regular staff member Bethan is away. Natalie is currently a graduate trainee and works at the Oxford University History Faculty Library. She is an expert at using our online library catalogue SOLO and accessing e-resources through OxLIP+.

We also have some more new books.

Physick and the family: health, medicine and care in Wales, 1600-1750 by Alun Withey (Manchester University Press, 2011) RC498.2 WIT 2011

One of the Wellcome Unit Library’s favourite bloggers (dralun.wordpress.com/), Dr Withey’s book uses primary sources to examine how medical knowledge was disseminated in early modern Britain orally and in print and how the sick were cared for in their homes and communities. Reviewed in Social History of Medicine 25(3).

Desperate Housewives, Neuroses and the Domestic Environment 1945-1970 by Ali Haggett (Pickering and Chatto, 2012) HQ1075 HAG 2012

This book is part of the Studies for the Society for the Social History of Medicine series. Haggett’s aims to ‘explore the various aspects of the dometic role in more depth, in order to provide a more nuanced appraisal of women’s experience’ (p.12). Chapters examine mid-twentieth century medical understandings of affective disorders, personal accounts of anxiety and depression and representations of anxiety and depression in the medical and popular press.

Pickering and Chatto offer some sample pages for free on their website.

Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Low Country by Peter McCandless (CUP, 2011) RA418.3.U6 MCC 2011

McCandless explores diseases in the region of Carolina, the ‘wealthiest and unhealthiest’ region in North America. An excerpt is available online on the CUP website. Reviewed in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 67(2).

An Introduction to the Social History of Medicine: Europe Since 1500 by Keir Waddington (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) R484 WAD 2011

This is a comprehensive single volume work covering a wide variety of topics including nursing, surgery, medicine and religion and medicine and empire.

The Moses of Malaria by Jan Peter Verhave (Erasmus, 2011) QL757 VER 2011

This books examines the work of Nicholaas H. Swellengrebel (1885-1970), who was a biologist that specialised in the study of malaria. Verhave highlights how Swellengrebel’s approach bridge the debates between those who wanted to control mosquitoes and those who wanted to eradicate them. Reviewed in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine 86(1).

Related links: Wellcome Unit Library’s Library Thing | SOLO

More new books in the library Vietnamese medicine, plague and tuberculosis

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We have another bunch of exciting new books in the library this week.

You can subscribe to our LibraryThing list to get alerts when new books arrive in the Wellcome Unit Library.

New titles include:

Southern Medicine for Southern People: Vietnamese Medicine in the making by Laurence Monnais (Cambridge Scholars, 2012) R644.V52 SOU 2012

This is an edited volume that developed from the 2006 conference on the History of Medicine in Southeast Asia. Chapters include Ayo Wahlberg’s discussion of ‘Family Secrets and the Industrialisation of Herbal Medicine in Postcolonial Vietnam’ and editor Laurence Monnais’ ‘Traditional, Complementary and Perhaps Scientific? Professional Views of Vietnamese Medicine in the Age of French Colonialism.

The publishers have made a sample PDF available online.

Plague, Fear and Politics in San Francisco’s Chinatown by Guenter Risse (Johns Hopkins University, 2012) RC176.C2 RIS 2012

Risse’s examines the social aspects of bubonic plague outbreak in the early 1900s San Francisco. It considers the social conflicts between public health officials and the inhabitants of the city’s Chinatown area. Risse’s other books, Hospital Life in Enlightenment Scotland and Mending Bodies Saving Souls: a history of hospitals are also available in the library.

Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination by Katherine Byrne (CUP, 2011) PR149.T83 B97 BYR 2011

Dr Byrne uses examples from Victorian literature, including Dickens’ Dombey and Sons and Bram Stoker’s Dracula to conside the cultural associations made with tuberculosis in the 19th century.

A comprehensive review of the book is available on the British Society for Literature and Science website and a PDF excerpt is available online from CUP.

New books in the library – war surgery, Spanish flu and more

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This week we have some new books in the library and a varity of history of medicine topics:

American Pandemic: the lost world of the 1918 influenza epidemic by Nancy K Bristow (OUP, 2012) RA640.I6 BRI 2012

OUP describe the book as a

…much-needed corrective to the silence surrounding the influenza outbreak. It sheds light on the social and cultural history of Americans during the pandemic, uncovering both the causes of the nation’s public amnesia and the depth of the quiet remembering that endured. Focused on the primary players in this drama–patients and their families, friends, and community, public health experts, and health care professionals–historian Nancy K. Bristow draws on multiple perspectives to highlight the complex interplay between social identity, cultural norms, memory, and the epidemic.

If you like this, you might also like to read Phillips and Killingray’s edited volume The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918-19: news perspectives (RD150.4 SPA 2003)

War Surgery 1914-1918 by Thomas Scotland and Steven Hey (eds) (Helion, 2012) RD WAR 2012

History blogger James Daly describes the edited volume enthusiastically:

This is a brilliant book. Considering that the editors and contributors are medical professionals, it reads incredibly well as a history book – much more readable than many a military history text!

As well as a number of detailed tables, the books includes a variety of photos, include some particularly gory ones of post-surgery intestines.

For the Health of the Enslaved: slaves, medicine and power in the Danish West Indies, 1803-1848 by Niklas Thode Jensen (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2012) RA456.V57 JEN 2012

Danish publishers Museum Tusculanum Press summarise the text:

Through a series of case studies the author demonstrates how the Danish West Indian government implemented policies of medical control concerning the enslaved, but also that this did not take place without resistance. Opposing perceptions of health and interests of economy and security clashed in the colonial situation. The investigations reveal that in a comparative Caribbean perspective, Danish West Indian health policies were often quite unique and successful, but also that the health of the enslaved was a contested field staging an ongoing power struggle between the planters, the colonial administration and the slaves themselves in the waning years of human bondage in the New World.

The four page table of contents is available to view online – it gives a good overview of the areas covered in the book.

Infectious Disease in India, 1892-1940 : policy-making and the perception of risk by Sandhya L. Polu (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) RA643.7.I4 POL 2012

The contents, introduction and index to this book are available to read online for free, via the publisher’s website. Polu examines various diseases, including malaria, cholera and yellow fever and uses them to

analyze how factors such as health diplomacy, epidemiology, trade, imperial governance, medical technologies, and cultural norms, operated within global and colonial conceptions of risk to shape infectious disease policies in colonial India. (More on Palgrave Macmillan’s site)

New books in the library

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Today we added two new books to the Wellcome Unit Library’s shelves:

Foucault’s History of Madness RC 438 FOU 2009

Weisz’s The Medical Mandarins: the French Academy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries R504 WEI 1995

Both the books are on reading lists for advanced papers in the MSc History of Science, Medicine and Technology at the University of Oxford.

New book in the library on trench diseases

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Today we received a new book for the library on trench diseases entitled The Medical Response to the Trench Diseases in World War One by Robert Atenstaedt (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011).

Dr Atenstaedt, a honorary lecturer at the School of Medical Sciences at Bangor University, studies for a PhD at the University of Oxford and wrote his thesis on trench diseases.

The Medical Response to the Trench Diseases in World War One examines how doctors dealt with trench fever, trench foot and trench nephritis. According to Professor Mark Harrison, Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine:

“This book fills a large historiographical gap. Dr Atenstaedt shows why the trench diseases were considered important at the time and provides a lively account of the work done to elucidate them . . . it will become an important source for all those interested in the war on the Western Front.” (further info on CSP’s website)

Another recent piece on trench warfare has been written by Dr Santanu Das for the World War One Centenary project. This free online post discusses the horrors of mud in the trenches and related references in literature.

New book in Wellcome Unit Library by former students

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We have a new acquisition in the library edited by two of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine Oxford’s previous DPhil students:

Ryan Johnson and Amna Khalid, Public health in the British empire : intermediaries, subordinates, and the practice of public health, 1850-1960, (New York: Routledge, 2012).

About the book

The edited volume is part of Routledge’s ‘studies in modern British history’ series. It contains chapters by WUHMO Research Associate Dr Margaret Jones on Jamaican hospitals in the mid-nineteenth century and Oxford Brookes’ Professor Anne Digby on South African health workers.

About the editors

Dr Johnson is now a lecturer at the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare, Glasgow (jointly run by Glasgow Caledonian University and Strathclyde University). Prof Khalid is now based in the Department of History at Carleton College in the United Stated.