Sociological Theory and the Environment is a comprehensive survey and assessment of sociological theories of the relations between societies and their 'natural' biophysical environment. This book touches on and addresses virtually all of the major perspectives, focal points, and debates in environmental sociology today-classical and twentieth century social theories, macro-micro linkage issues, globalization and development, reflexive modernization, ecological modernization vs. 'limits' vi...

Patient organizations and social health movements offer one of the most important and illuminating examples of civil society engagement and participation in scientific research and research politics. Influencing the research agenda, and initiating, funding and accelerating the development of diagnostic tools, effective therapies and appropriate health-care for their area of interest, they may champion alternative, sometimes controversial, programs or critique dominant medical paradigms. So...

"An enlightening and deeply disturbing account" of the dangerous chemicals that have infiltrated our food, by the Rachel Carson Prize–winning journalist (Booklist).Our Daily Poison is "a gripping and urgent book" for anyone concerned about democracy, corporate power, or public health (Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved). In it, award-winning journalist and filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin travels across North America, Europe, and Asia ...

Is “The Origin of Feces” a Darwinian concern? Perhaps not, but it is the title to the preface of this tongue-in-cheek and unexpectedly revealing exploration of human behavior by the webmaster behind the popular PoopReport.com.This book is not a history of poop, but a study of today. Its goal is to understand how poop affects us, how we view it, and why; to appreciate its impact from the moment it slides out of our anal sphincters to the moment it enters the sewage treatment plant; ...

In 2006, the Wall Street pioneer and philanthropist Ray Chambers flicked through some holiday snapshots taken by his friend, development economist Jeff Sachs, and remarked on the placid beauty of a group of sleeping Malawian children. "They're not sleeping," Sachs told him. "They're in malarial comas. A few days later, they were all dead." Chambers had long avoided the public eye, but this moment sparked his determination to coordinate an unprecedented, worldwide effort to eradicate a dise...

First Published in 1988. The Meaning of Illness offers new ways of understanding the nature of disease and explores the idea that health and illness have a special interdependence. Experiences which illness brings to our attention -limitation, vulnerability and dependence - are explored here as inescapable and valuable dimensions to human existence which we ignore at our peril. The contributors include medical practitioners and consultants, psychotherapists, Jungian analysts, a homoeopath,...

Winner of the British Sociological Association Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize, 2012. This book traces the changes in healthcare implicated in telecare technologies: information and communication technologies that enable care at a distance. What happens when healthcare moves from physical to virtual encounters between healthcare professionals and patients? What are the consequences for patients when they are expected to do things that used to be done by health...

Claiming 1.5 million lives in 2015, tuberculosis is the world’s most deadly infectious disease. Because of the population it overwhelmingly affects, however, pharmaceutical companies are uninterested in developing better drugs for the disease. Compound Solutions examines Product Development Partnerships (PDPs), which arose early in the twenty-first century to develop new drugs and vaccines for infectious diseases in low-income countries. Here, for the first time, is a sustained ex...

The International Society for the Advancement of Kinanthropometry held its 8th International Conference in Manchester in July 2002. This volume contains a selection of papers presented to the Conference, where the meeting was held in conjunction with the 12th Commonwealth International Sport Conference, immediately prior to the XVII Commonwealth Games. The Content is structured into five parts: · methodological issues in kinanthropometry · paediatric science · applications of kinanthropome...

Regenerative medicine, encompassing stem cells and tissue engineering, has attracted huge interest within commercial, clinical and government circles, and promises to change medicine itself. This book provides the first detailed examination and critical assessment of the field to be made by social science.

Thousands of people from more than eighty countries have traveled to China since 2001 to undergo fetal cell transplantation. Galvanized by the potential of stem and fetal cells to regenerate damaged neurons and restore lost bodily functions, people grappling with paralysis and neurodegenerative disorders have ignored the warnings of doctors and scientists back home in order to stake their futures on a Chinese experiment. Biomedical Odysseys looks at why and how these individuals h...

Taking as its focus a highly emotive area of study, The Dying Process draws on the experiences of daycare and hospice patients to provide a forceful new analysis of the period of decline prior to death.Placing the bodily realities of dying very firmly centre stage and questioning the ideology central to the modern hospice movement of enabling patients to 'live until they die', Julia Lawton shows how our concept of a 'good death' is open to interpretation. Her study examine...