Reviews
Cogently written and well documented, the book will benefit medical practitioners, and will be especially useful to those who make medical policy. Highly recommended.
This collection of essays, drawing on Rosenberg's half-century career as one of our preeminent historians of medicine, will be well appreciated by fellow historians and their students, but it ought to be required reading for health care providers, payers, policy makers, and patients.
Our Present Complaint... is a timely book. It examines important concepts and history that people need to be aware of and think through if they seek to understand and address the many problems with the American medical system.
[Rosenberg] reminds us that the problems addressed by disciplines such as bioethics and interdisiplinary communities such as that of health policy are inevitably situated and configured by a broader context to which ethicists and policy makers would do well to pay attention.
Strikingly original. Rosenberg gains fresh insights by placing important, timely problems in a larger cultural and social context. A major contribution to the field of medical history.
Rosenberg brilliantly elucidates the continuing dialectic between biomedical reductionism and medicine as a caring, applied science. Beautifully nuanced and illuminating the complexities of science, marketplace, and social policy, Our Present Complaint reaffirms the essential social role of medicine as it responds to changes in science and technology, values and expectations, business endeavors, and ethical concerns.
With penetrating intelligence and insight, Charles Rosenberg examines in these thematically interwoven essays the tenacious social and moral ideas and values that underlie biomedicine; the variety of contexts in which they have been historically expressed in American society; and their vital relationship to the scientific, technological, and structural changes that medicine and the delivery of care have undergone during the past two centuries.
Exploring such topics as the history of diagnostic reasoning, the role of genetics, and the place of bioethics, Charles Rosenberg offers a historian's perspective on how society came to be in its current medical predicament. Deeply informed and informative, this work illustrates why Rosenberg is rightly regarded as the dean of American medical historians.
Book Details
1. Introduction: The History of Our Present Complaint
2. The Tyranny of Diagnosis: Specific Entities and Individual Experience
3. Contested Boundaries: Psychiatry, Disease, and Diagnosis
4. Banishing
1. Introduction: The History of Our Present Complaint
2. The Tyranny of Diagnosis: Specific Entities and Individual Experience
3. Contested Boundaries: Psychiatry, Disease, and Diagnosis
4. Banishing Risk: Or, the More Things Change, the More They Remain the Same
5. Pathologies of Progress: The Idea of Civilization as Risk
6. The New Enchantment: Genetics, Medicine, and Society
7. Alternative to What? Complementary to Whom? On the Scientific Project in Medicine
8. Holism in Twentieth-Century Medicine: Always in Opposition
9. Mechanism and Morality: On Bioethics in Context
10. Anticipated Consequences: Historians, History, and Health Policy
Acknowledgments
Index