Building a retrospective collection in pharmacy: a brief history of the literature with some considerations for U.S. health sciences library professionals.
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This paper argues that historical works in pharmacy are important tools for the clinician as well as the historian. With this as its operative premise, delineating the tripartite aspects of pharmacy as a business enterprise, a science, and a profession provides a conceptual framework for primary and secondary resource collecting. A brief history and guide to those materials most essential to a historical collection in pharmacy follows. Issues such as availability and cost are discussed and summarized in checklist form. In addition, a glossary of important terms is provided as well as a list of all the major U.S. dispensatories and their various editions. This paper is intended to serve as a resource for those interested in collecting historical materials in pharmacy and pharmaco-therapeutics as well as provide a history that gives context to these classics in the field. This should provide a rationale for selective retrospective collection development in pharmacy. (+info)
Journals of the plague years: documenting the history of the AIDS epidemic in the United States.
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This commentary discusses several journalistic, literary, and historical accounts of the AIDS epidemic as it has unfolded in the United States over the past 2 decades. By examining the different ways that different types of storytellers chronicle the political, social, public health, medical, and economic aspects of epidemic disease, this essay will demonstrate why the AIDS epidemic has been of such intense interest not only to physicians and public health experts but also to journalists, novelists, playwrights, memoirists, and historians. AIDS is a particularly fascinating example of society's broad concern with epidemics because it both is a global pandemic and, in recent years, has become a chronic disease. (+info)
History of health, a valuable tool in public health.
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The aim of this article is to highlight the importance of the history of public health for public health research and practice itself. After summarily reviewing the current great vitality of the history of collective health oriented initiatives, we explain three particular features of the historical vantage point in public health, namely the importance of the context, the relevance of a diachronic attitude and the critical perspective. In order to illustrate those three topics, we bring up examples taken from three centuries of fight against malaria, the so called "re-emerging diseases" and the 1918 influenza epidemic. The historical approach enriches our critical perception of the social effects of initiatives undertaken in the name of public health, shows the shortcomings of public health interventions based on single factors and asks for a wider time scope in the assessment of current problems. The use of a historical perspective to examine the plurality of determinants in any particular health condition will help to solve the longlasting debate on the primacy of individual versus population factors, which has been particularly intense in recent times. (+info)
The professions of public health.
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Law has been an essential tool of public health practice for centuries. From the 19th century until recent decades, however, most histories of public health described, approvingly, the progression of the field from marginally useful policy, made by persons learned in law, to effective policy, made by persons employing the methods of biomedical and behavioral science. Historians have recently begun to change this standard account by documenting the centrality of law in the development of public health practice. The revised history of public health offers additional justification for the program of public health law reform proposed in this issue of the Journal by Gostin and by Moulton and Matthews, who describe the new program in public health law of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (+info)
National Museum of Dentistry exhibition: the future is now! African Americans in dentistry.
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Inspired by recently published NDA II: The Story of America's Second National Dental Association and sponsored jointly by the National Dental Association Foundation and the Colgate-Palmolive Company, an historical exhibit on dentistry in the African-American community was one of the celebrations for the Golden Anniversary of the American Academy of the History of Dentistry. This exhibit premiered on Sept. 27, 2002 in the National Museum of Dentistry located on the medical/dental campus of the University of Maryland in Baltimore. The Museum recently became an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution. Contents of the exhibit were photographs, charts, artifacts, memorabilia, etc. These materials presented an overview of African-American activities in dental education, research, patient care, general practice, dental specialities, military service, and public health. Also included were inter-racial relationships, socioeconomic developments, and participation in civil rights endeavors that played a major role in changing out-dated accepted customs. The exhibit's purpose was to celebrate dentistry's ministrations as a health professional among African Americans in particular and the nation at large over the past two centuries. Respect for and progress of black dentists paralleled that of black physicians who were instrumental in including dentist and pharmacists as equal members in the National Medical Association since the latter's inception in 1895. (+info)
The slavery hypothesis for hypertension among African Americans: the historical evidence.
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The slavery hypothesis for hypertension has stated that the high blood pressures sometimes measured in African Americans are caused by one or more of these conditions: first, salt deficiency in the parts of Africa that supplied slaves for the Americas; second, the trauma of the slave trade itself; third, conditions of slavery in the United States. A review of the historical evidence shows that there was no salt deficiency in those parts of Africa, nor do present-day West Africans have a high incidence of hypertension. Historical evidence does not support the hypothesis that deaths aboard slave ships were caused mainly by conditions that might be conductive to hypertension, such as salt-depleting diseases. Finally, the hypothesis has depended heavily on evidence from the West Indies, which is not relevant for the United States. There is no evidence that diet or the resulting patterns of disease and demography among slaves in the American South were significantly different from those of other poor southerners. (+info)
Profile of a leader: unearthing Ethel Johns's "buried" commitment to racial equality, 1925.
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In 1925, Canadian nurse leader Ethel Johns was hired by the Rockefeller Foundation to study the status of black women in nursing in the United States. Despite the acknowledged excellence of her report, the study was shelved. It remained "buried" in the basement of the Rockefeller headquarters for almost 60 years until American historian Darlene Clark Hine discovered it there in the 1980s. The aim of this article is to extend current understandings of Johns based on this and other evidence not accessible to her biographer in 1973. The discussion will illuminate her commitment to social equality by highlighting the 1925 report that perceived and articulated the racist character of relations between white institutions and black nurses in an era when few others would do so. It seems vital that this study be recognized as a focal point in Johns's outstanding nursing career, and that her success in leadership be acknowledged as inextricably linked with her passion for justice and equality. (+info)
Facts, interpretations, and explanations: a review of Evelyn Fox Keller's Making sense of life.
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The job of a researcher is to explain the phenomenon that he or she is seeking to understand. To do this requires the accumulation of facts. These facts are then interpreted to arrive at explanations. However, individual researchers often interpret facts in different ways and arrive at disparate explanations. In her book, Making Sense of Life, Evelyn Fox Keller (2002) outlines various approaches used by developmental biologists to understand the animate systems we call life. In this review, I note several parallels between biology and behavior analysis in how facts are discovered, what is an acceptable interpretation of data, and how explanations are arrived at. (+info)