An examination of three research infrastructures over three decades as they sought to support studies of HIV/AIDS across dramatic changes to the disease, the science, and its politics.In Machineries of Similarity and Difference, David Ribes theorizes interoperability, or how to make different things work together. For the last 30 years, standardization has been the dominant social scientific motif for understanding coordination and collaboration across tim...

How should we understand the experience of encountering and interpreting images? What are their roles in science and medicine? How do they shape everyday life? Postphenomenology and Imaging: How to Read Technology brings together scholars from multiple disciplines to investigate these questions. The contributors make use of the “postphenomenological” philosophical perspective, applying its distinctive ideas to the study of how images are experienced. These essays offer both philosophical a...

New perspectives on digital scholarship that speak to today's computational realitiesScholars across the humanities, social sciences, and information sciences are grappling with how best to study virtual environments, use computational tools in their research, and engage audiences with their results. Classic work in science and technology studies (STS) has played a central role in how these fields analyze digital technologies, but many of its key examples do not sp...

Nursing and midwifery students are required to communicate in writing in a variety of forms, for a variety of potential audiences including their colleagues, allied health professionals, administrators and, most importantly, their patients and the public.Dena Bain Taylor is an experienced teacher of writing and critical skills across the range of allied health professions, and understands the types of writing nursing and midwifery students do and the writing issues they face. Her a...

Few things make people react more strongly to the changes going on in health care than the word standardization. Critics shudder at the mindless sameness of standards, while supporters dream of a world in which standardized "best practices" open up a world of efficient health care delivery. The Gold Standard takes up this debate to investigate the real meaning of standardization and how it affects patients, doctors, and the institution of medicine. Showing that standards are not a...

**Finalist, PROSE Award in Clinical Medicine**A rich examination of the history of trans medicine and current day practiceSurfacing in the mid-twentieth century, yet shrouded in social stigma, transgender medicine is now a rapidly growing medical field. In Trans Medicine, stef shuster makes an important intervention in how we understand the development of this field and how it is being used to “treat” gender identity today...

Why healthcare cannot—and should not—become data-driven, despite the many promises of intensified data sourcing.In contemporary healthcare, everybody seems to want more data, of higher quality, on more people, and to use this data for a wider range of purposes. In theory, such pervasive data collection should lead to a healthcare system in which data can quickly, efficiently, and unambiguously be interpreted and provide better care for patients, more efficient admi...

This book is the first textbook dedicated to critically examining gender and sex in study designs, methods, and analysis in health research. In order to produce ethical, accurate, and effective research findings it is vital to integrate both sex (biological characteristics) and gender (socially constructed factors) into any health study. This book draws attention to some of the methodological complexities in this enterprise and offers ways to thoughtfully address these by drawing on empiri...

Pressing ethical issues are at the foreground of newfound knowledge of how the brain works, how the brain fails, and how information about its functions and failures are addressed, recorded and shared. In Neuroethics: Anticipating the Future, a distinguished group of contributors tackle current critical questions and anticipate the issues on the horizon. What new balances should be struck between diagnosis and prediction, or invasive and non-invasive interventions, given the rapid advances...

The main focus of this monograph is synthesizing the importance of geographic approaches to public health and patient care. The chapters are organized into four themed sections: the role of geography in health care reform; the geographies of human health; geospatial data and technologies; and geography in medicine. It is a highly informative book, providing scientific insight for geographers with an interest in advanced geospatial applications and health research.The author is an i...

Inside today's data-driven personalized medicine, and the time, effort, and information required from patients to make it a realityMedicine has been personal long before the concept of “personalized medicine” became popular. Health professionals have always taken into consideration the individual characteristics of their patients when diagnosing, and treating them. Patients have cared for themselves and for each other, contributed to medical research, and advocated...

Designated a Doody's Core Title!At the intersection of health care delivery and practice there lies a large area of patient care with no manual: how to provide the best care to patients who have a critically low level of comprehension and literacy. Because all patients play a central role in the outcome of their own health care, competent health care becomes almost impossible for caregivers when the boundary of low literary skills is present.