Sex has no history, but sexual science does. Starting in the late nineteenth century, people all over the world suddenly began to insist that understandings of sex be based on science. As Japanese and Indian sexologists influenced their German and American counterparts, and vice versa, sexuality, modernity, and imaginings of exotified "Others" became intimately linked. The first anthology to provide a worldwide perspective on the birth and development of the field, A Global History of Sexual Science contends that actors outside of Europe-in Asia, Latin America, and Africa-became important interlocutors in debates on prostitution, birth control, and transvestism. Ideas circulated through intellectual exchange, travel, and internationally produced and disseminated publications. Twenty scholars tackle specific issues, including the female orgasm and the criminalization of male homosexuality, to demonstrate how concepts and ideas introduced by sexual scientists gained currency throughout the modern world.

Anthropometry is the measurement of human morphology. In this volume, distinguished contributors including anthropologists, human biologists, physiologists, nutritionists, and clinical scientists describe many of the ways in which anthropometry is used, and discuss problems associated with different methods of assessment. Topics include the measurement of growth asymmetry and variability in adult body size, measurement error and statistical issues in anthropometry and the construction and use of growth charts in growth monitoring. The use of anthropometry in assessments of body composition, physical performance and fitness is also discussed. The book will be of interest to graduates and researchers in human biology, anthropology and nutrition. It will also be useful to workers in sports medicine, ergonomics, orthopedics, and pediatrics.

This introductory textbook covers the biochemical, behavioural and social factors which influence the mind. It discusses all major groups of drugs which are commonly misused, including drugs normally available only on prescription, hallucinogenic drugs, narcotics, and socially acceptable drugs such as caffeine and nicotine. Alcohol, as the most widely used drug of abuse in most developed countries, is considered in detail: the biological effects of alcohol, the problems resulting from alcohol use, and the means by which alcohol abuse can be controlled, are all discussed. The final chapters deal with mental health and mental illness. An excellent introduction to the topic for advanced school and beginning undergraduate biology students.

Growth, Maturation and Body Composition documents one of the most remarkable and significant studies in the field of human biology. The Fels Longitudinal Study is the longest, largest and most productive serial study of human growth, maturation and body composition. This book shows how data collected from more than 1000 participants during the past 60 years have been analysed to test a wide range of hypotheses, and describes how the findings have led to the development of improved research methods. Topics covered include the management and analysis of data, prenatal, familial and genetic studies, physical growth, development and maturation, bones and teeth, body composition, and risk factors for cardiovascular disease. With more than 1000 specialized publications of Fels data, the present book provides a unique overview of this fascinating research programme, which will be of interest to a wide range of researchers, including those in the fields of physical anthropology, nutrition science, pediatrics, gerontology, epidemiology, endocrinology, human genetics, as well as statistics.

'Informative, powerful' VOGUE 'A fascinating and friendly guide for you to understand you better' MELISSA HEMSLEY 'Amy's book is everything I should have learned at school' EMMA GANNON Hormones were something Amy Thomson, founder and CEO of leading women's health app and tech service Moody, never paid attention to, until one day her periods stopped. When she discovered that her hormonal burnout was driven by stress, she quit her job and focused on trying to understand how our hormones can work for twenty-first-century survival. In this eye-opening guide, Thomson draws upon leading research from nutritionists, gynaecologists, endocrinologists, personal trainers and others to explain how understanding our systems and cycles can help you avoid burnouts, build better and healthier routines and optimise your life.

This book examines the sense of smell in humans, comparing it with the known functions of the same sense in other animals. Odorous cues play a role in sexual physiology and behavior in animals and there are claims that odor can play the same role in humans. The place of odors and scents in aesthetics and in psychoanalysis serves to illustrate the link between the emotional centers and the brain. The book presents arguments to explain the way in which our ancestral past has given rise to our modern day olfactory enigmas. Containing a glossary and chapter summaries the book will be accessible to a wide audience.

The first major account of the somatotyping field in over thirty years, this volume presents a comprehensive history of somatotyping, beginning with W.H. Sheldon's introduction to the method in 1940. The controversies regarding the validity of Sheldon's method are described, as are the various attempts to modify the technique, particularly the Heath-Carter method, which has come into widespread use. Somatotyping is a method of description and assessment of the body on three shape and composition scales: endomorphy (relative fatness), mesomorphy (relative musculoskeletal robustness), and ectomorphy (relative linearity). The book reviews present knowledge of somatotypes around the world, how they change with growth, aging and exercise, and the contributions of genetics and environment to the rating. Also reviewed are the relationships among somatotypes and sport, physical performance, health and behavior.

Women's bodies and the study of anatomy in Italy between the late thirteenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, medical writers and philosophers began to devote increasing attention to what they called "women's secrets," by which they meant female sexuality and generation. At the same time, Italian physicians and surgeons began to open human bodies in order to study their functions and the illnesses that afflicted them, culminating in the great illustrated anatomical treatise of Andreas Vesalius in 1543. Katharine Park traces these two closely related developments through a series of case studies of women whose bodies were dissected after their deaths: an abbess, a lactating virgin, several patrician wives and mothers, and an executed criminal. Drawing on a variety of texts and images, she explores the history of women's bodies in Italy between the late thirteenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries in the context of family identity, religious observance, and women's health care. Secrets Of Women explodes the myth that medieval religious prohibitions hindered the practice of human dissection in medieval and Renaissance Italy, arguing that female bodies, real and imagined, played a central role in the history of anatomy during that time. The opened corpses of holy women revealed sacred objects, while the opened corpses of wives and mothers yielded crucial information about where babies came from and about the forces that shaped their vulnerable flesh. In the process, what male writers knew as the "secrets of women" came to symbolize the most difficult challenges posed by human bodies-challenges that dissection promised to overcome. Park's study of women's bodies and men's attempts to know them-and through these efforts to know their own-demonstrates the centrality of gender to the development of early modern anatomy.

This series in intended for those students following advanced level social biology and related syllabuses. Each text deals with a specific topic area and the series as a whole provides a stimulating introduction to a subject of growing importance. The control of disease and the active encouragement of good health is a major priority of nations worldwide. This book gives a detailed study of a number of diseases and health problems from which common themes and underlying principles emerge. Details of transmission, treatment and control are covered as well as epidemiology and sociooeconomic factors - particularly the implications of AIDS. Topics range from infectious diseases, pulmonary disease and malaria to immunology, transplantation and physical fitness.

How do plants, animals, and humans manage to survive and adapt to the urban environment? This book provides a comprehensive coverage of biological matters related to urban environments presenting both the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings, and practical examples required to understand and address the challenges presented by this novel environment. The Biology of Urban Environments focusses on urban denizens: species (both domesticated and non-domesticated) that live for all or part of their life cycle in towns and cities. The biology of household plants and companion animals is discussed alongside that of species that have become feral or have not been domesticated. Temporal and spatial distribution patterns are set out and generalizations are made while exceptions are also discussed. The various strategies used and the genotypic, phenotypic, and behavioural adaptions of plants and animals in the face of the challenges presented by urban environments are explained. The final two chapters contain a discussion of the impacts of urban environments on human biology and suggestions on how this understanding might be used to address the increasing human health burden associated with illnesses that are characteristic of urbanites in the early twenty-first century.

Unreliable bodies and shifting symptoms are all in a day's work for a GP. In his years of practising, Gavin Francis has seen it all: the promising law student trapped under the spell of anorexia; the bodybuilder whose use of illegal steroids threatens his fertility; the teenager agonising over the perplexing physical dramas of puberty; and the surprisingly upbeat woman growing a horn in the centre of her forehead. In Shapeshifters he draws on his patients' bodily transformations, both welcome and unwelcome, bringing together case histories and accounts from the history of medicine, art, literature, myth and magic to show how the very essence of being human is change.

What is the principle purpose of a brain? A simple question, but the answer has taken millennia for us to begin to understand. So critical for our everyday existence, the brain still remains somewhat a mystery. Gary L. Wenk takes us on a tour of what we do know about this enigmatic organ, showing us how the workings of the human brain produce our thoughts, feelings, and fears, and answering questions such as: How did humans evolve such a big brain? What is an emotion and why do we have them? What is a memory and why do we forget so easily? How does your diet affect how you think and feel? What happens when your brain gets old? Throughout human history, ignorance about the brain has caused numerous non-scientific, sometimes harmful, interventions to be devised based on interpretations of scientific facts that were misguided. Wenk discusses why these neuroscientific myths are so popular, and why some of the interventions based on them are a waste of time and money. With illuminating insights, gentle humor, and welcome simplicity, The Brain: What Everyone Needs to Know makes the complex biology of our brains accessible to the general reader.

It's time for a story of human evolution that goes beyond describing "ape-men" and talks about what women and children were doing. In a few decades, a torrent of new evidence and ideas about human evolution has allowed scientists to piece together a more detailed understanding of what went on thousands and even millions of years ago. We now know much more about the problems our ancestors faced, the solutions they found, and the trade-offs they made. The drama of their experiences led to the humans we are today: an animal that relies on a complex culture. We are a species that can - and does - rapidly evolve cultural solutions as we face new problems, but the intricacies of our cultures mean that this often creates new challenges. Our species' unique capacity for culture began to evolve millions of years ago, but it only really took off in the last few hundred thousand years. This capacity allowed our ancestors to survive and raise their difficult children during times of extreme climate chaos. Understanding how this has evolved can help us understand the cultural change and diversity that we experience today. Lesley Newson and Peter Richerson, a husband-and-wife team based at the University of California, Davis, began their careers with training in biology. The two have spent years - together and individually - researching and collaborating with scholars from a wide range of disciplines to produce a deep history of humankind. In A Story of Us, they present this rich narrative and explain how the evolution of our genes relates to the evolution of our cultures. Newson and Richerson take readers through seven stages of human evolution, beginning seven million years ago with the apes that were the ancestors of humans and today's chimps and bonobos. The story ends in the present day and offers a glimpse into the future.

In anaesthetist Dr Kevin Fong's television programmes he has often demonstrated the impact of extremes on the human body by using his own body as a 'guinea pig'. So Dr Fong is well placed to share his experience of the sheer audacity of medical practice at extreme physiological limits, where human life is balanced on a knife edge. Through gripping accounts of extraordinary events and pioneering medicine, Dr Fong explores how our body responds when tested by the extremes of heat and cold, vacuum and altitude, age and disease. He shows how science, technology and medicine have taken what was once lethal in the world and made it survivable. This is not only a book about medicine, but also about exploration in its broadest sense - and about how, by probing the very limits of our biology, we may ultimately return with a better appreciation of how our bodies work, of what life is, and what it means to be human.

Pain seems like a fairly straightforward experience - you get hurt and it, well, hurts. But how would you describe it? By the number of broken bones or stitches? By the cause - the crowning baby, the sharp knife, the straying lover? What does a 7 on a pain scale of 1 to 10 really mean? Pain is complicated. But most of the time, the way we treat pain is superficial - we seek out states of perfect painlessness by avoiding it at all costs, or suppressing it, usually with drugs. This has left us hurting all the more. Through in-depth interviews, investigation into the history of pain and original research, Ouch! paints a new picture of pain as a complex and multi-layered phenomenon. Authors Margee Kerr and Linda McRobbie Rodriguez tell the stories of sufferers and survivors, courageous kids and their brave parents, athletes and artists, people who find healing and pleasure in pain, and scientists pushing the boundaries of pain research, to challenge the notion that all pain is bad and harmful. They reveal why who defines pain matters and how history, science, and culture shape how we experience pain. Ouch! dismantles prevailing assumptions about pain and that not all pain is bad, not all pain should be avoided, and, in the right context, pain can even feel good. To build a healthier relationship with pain, we must understand how it works, how it is expressed and how we communicate and think about it. Once we understand how pain is made, we can remake it.

Evolutionary science is critical to an understanding of integrated human biology and is increasingly recognised as a core discipline by medical and public health professionals. Advances in the field of genomics, epigenetics, developmental biology, and epidemiology have led to the growing realisation that incorporating evolutionary thinking is essential for medicine to achieve its full potential. This revised and updated second edition of the first comprehensive textbook of evolutionary medicine explains the principles of evolutionary biology from a medical perspective and focuses on how medicine and public health might utilise evolutionary thinking. It is written to be accessible to a broad range of readers, whether or not they have had formal exposure to evolutionary science. The general structure of the second edition remains unchanged, with the initial six chapters providing a summary of the evolutionary theory relevant to understanding human health and disease, using examples specifically relevant to medicine. The second part of the book describes the application of evolutionary principles to understanding particular aspects of human medicine: in addition to updated chapters on reproduction, metabolism, and behaviour, there is an expanded chapter on our coexistence with micro-organisms and an entirely new chapter on cancer. The two parts are bridged by a chapter that details pathways by which evolutionary processes affect disease risk and symptoms, and how hypotheses in evolutionary medicine can be tested. The final two chapters of the volume are considerably expanded; they illustrate the application of evolutionary biology to medicine and public health, and consider the ethical and societal issues of an evolutionary perspective. A number of new clinical examples and historical illustrations are included. This second edition of a novel and popular textbook provides an updated resource for doctors and other health professionals, medical students and biomedical scientists, as well as anthropologists interested in human health, to gain a better understanding of the evolutionary processes underlying human health and disease.

Based on the latest scientific discoveries, this "unauthorized biography" of the Humans recounts the story of our distant ancestors during the past 6 million years, since the line of our extended family separated from that leading to modern chimpanzees. The book explains how different species evolved, both anatomically and cognitively, and describes the impacts of climatic and environmental change on this process. It also explores the nature of relationships within and between species, describes their everyday lives, and discusses how isolated individuals became members of larger social groups. The concluding chapters highlight the paramount importance of the emergence of symbolic thought and discuss its contribution to the formation of institutions, societies, and economies. The multifaceted picture that emerges will help the reader to make sense not only of "what we were", but also of "what we are", here and now. The book is both entertaining and rigorous in integrating results from a wide selection of disciplines. It will be particularly suitable for people with a curious and open mind, keen to overcome long-standing prejudices on man's place in nature.

In this landmark book of popular science, Daniel E. Lieberman gives us a lucid and engaging account of how the human body evolved over millions of years. He illuminates the major transformations that contributed to key adaptations to the body: the rise of bipedalism; the shift to a non-fruit-based diet; the advent of hunting and gathering; and how cultural changes like the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions have impacted us physically. He shows how the increasing disparity between the jumble of adaptations in our Stone Age bodies and advancements in the modern world is occasioning a paradox: greater longevity but increased chronic disease. And finally--provocatively--he advocates the use of evolutionary information to help nudge, push, and sometimes even compel us to create a more salubrious environment and pursue better lifestyles.

With charts and line drawings throughout.]

The newly revised and thoroughly updated standard source for mastering the human fossil record. This new edition of The Human Lineage is the best and most current guide to the morphological, geological, paleontological, and archeological evidence for the story of human evolution. This comprehensive textbook presents the history, methods, and issues of paleoanthropology through detailed analyses of the major fossils of interest to practicing scientists in the field. It will help both advanced students and practicing professionals to become involved with the lively scholarly debates that mark the field of human-origins research. Its clear and engaging chapters contain concise explanatory text and hundreds of high-quality illustrations. This thoroughly revised second edition reflects the most recent fossil discoveries and scientific analyses, offering new sections on the locomotor adaptations of Miocene hominoids, the taxonomic distinctiveness of Homo heidelbergensis, the Burtele foot, Ardipithecus, and Neandertal genomics. Updated and expanded chapters offer fresh insights on topics such as the origins of bipedality and the anatomy and evolution of early mammals and primates. Written and illustrated by established leaders in the field, The Human Lineage Provides the background needed to study human evolution, including dating techniques, mechanics of evolution, and primate adaptations Covers the major stages in human evolution with emphasis on important fossils and their implications Offers a balanced critical assessment of conflicting ideas about key events in human evolution Includes an extensive bibliography and appendices on biological nomenclature and craniometrics Covering the entire story of human evolution from its Precambrian beginnings to the emergence of modern humanity, The Human Lineage is indispensable reading for all advanced students of biological anthropology.

This book summarizes the work of several decades, culminating in a revolutionary model of recent human evolution. It challenges current consensus views fundamentally, presenting in its support a mass of evidence, much of which has never been assembled before. This evidence derives primarily from archaeology, paleoanthropology, genetics, clinical psychology, neurosciences, linguistics and cognitive sciences. No even remotely similar thesis of recent human origins has ever been published, but some of the key elements of this book have been published by the author in major refereed journals in the last two years. Its implications are far-reaching and profoundly affect the way we perceive ourselves as a species. This book about what it means to be human is heavily referenced, with a bibliography of many hundreds of scientific entries.