A lively medical, scientific, and economic history.
The profit in healing.
Scholar of literature, gender studies, and medical humanities, Gevirtz brings a breadth of knowledge to her witty, deeply researched history of the commodification of health care and medicine. Drawing on abundant archival sources, including letters, diaries, herbals, sermons, advertisements, medical tracts, and a prolific number of recipe books, Gevirtz reveals that until the mid-17th century, ill people were treated at home with medications made in kitchens by a family member or friend. Recipes for elixirs, poultices, salves, and libations appeared in the same books as recipes for soups and stews and were handed down from woman to woman. The advent of the scientific revolution, however, wrested the production and administration of medicine from women. Physicians and apothecaries, which became “defined professions with guild status,” competed for control of diagnosing illness and prescribing, making, and selling medications, united only in their determination to exclude women. What was once free was transformed into a product with monetary value; what was once freely shared was produced in secret factories. Even recipe books changed to contain apothecaries’ or physicians’ recipes, for which women sometimes had to pay. By the mid-18th century, women’s housekeeping, gardening, and cookery books “had little or nothing to say about women’s role as medicine makers.” In recounting a century of tumultuous change, Gevirtz introduces a host of idiosyncratic characters: a man who concocted and fed viper wine to his wife; a naturalist eager to dissect a dead elephant delivered to his front lawn; a bold, self-promoting “medicatrix” trained by her physician father. All participated in the “shift in values [that] compromised medication’s identity as a fundamental right of all human beings.” As Gevirtz’s well-populated narrative amply shows, seeking profits from treating ailing patients did not begin with big pharma.
A lively medical, scientific, and economic history.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9780520409910
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
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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