A useful primer for policy wonks and medical practitioners.
Despite manifest shortcomings, the American health-care system has come a long way over the past 250 years.
Retired surgeon and public-health professional Rutkow (James A. Garfield, 2006, etc.) provides an anecdotal overview of the theory and practice of medicine in the United States from the colonial period to the present. “The evolution of American medicine has often closely mirrored the nation’s history,” he writes, from the early days when the “bleed, blister, puke, and purge” therapies were advocated by America’s leading doctor, Benjamin Rush, to the nation’s superpower status after World War II. By the mid-1800s, prevailing wisdom recommended avoiding doctors, but the invention of the stethoscope in 1816 by a Parisian physician was an important step toward modern diagnostics, especially when coupled by the French practice of measuring pulse rate. Infection remained the major cause of death during the Civil War and even in 1881—after the role of germs had been established—when President Garfield died from an infection in the aftermath of a gunshot wound. The passage of New York City’s Metropolitan Health Bill in 1866, which established an effective sanitation code controlling raw sewage and other harmful materials, was “a major triumph in the history of public health and American medicine,” allowing contagious diseases such as cholera and typhus to be brought under control. Major advances continued during WWII—the development of blood plasma storage, orthopedic procedures, operating techniques—and in the postwar period with open-heart surgery and organ transplants. Rutkow is optimistic about the future role of new biotechnologies (“cellular scanners, gene therapies, robotic surgeries, wireless monitoring”—but he recognizes the difficulty of navigating the tradeoffs between private service and public good.
A useful primer for policy wonks and medical practitioners.Pub Date: April 13, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-3828-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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