By chronicling the transformations of hospitals from houses of mercy to tools for confinement, from dwellings of rehabilitation to spaces for clinical teaching and research, from rooms for birthing and dying to institutions of science and technology, this book provides a historical approach to understanding of today's hospitals. The story is told in a dozen episodes which illustrate hospitals in particular times and places, covering important themes and developments in the history of medicine and therapeutics, from ancient Greece to the era of AIDS. This book furnishes a unique insight into the world of meanings and emotions associated with hospital life and patienthood by including narratives by both patients and care givers. By conceiving of hospitals as houses of order capable of taming the chaos associated with suffering, illness, and death, we can better understand the significance of their ritualized routines and rules. From their beginnings, hospitals were places of spiritual and physical recovery. They should continue to respond to all human needs. As traditional testimonials to human empathy and benevolence, hospitals must endure as spaces of healing.

When health officials in San Francisco discovered bubonic plague in their city's Chinatown in 1900, they responded with intrusive, controlling, and arbitrary measures that touched off a sociocultural conflict still relevant today. Guenter B. Risse's history of an epidemic is the first to incorporate the voices of those living in Chinatown at the time, including the desperately ill Wong Chut King, believed to be the first person infected.

Lasting until 1904, the plague in San Francisco's Chinatown reignited racial prejudices, renewed efforts to remove the Chinese from their district, and created new tensions among local, state, and federal public health officials quarreling over the presence of the deadly disease. Risse's rich, nuanced narrative of the event draws from a variety of sources, including Chinese-language reports and accounts. He addresses the ecology of Chinatown, the approaches taken by Chinese and Western medical practitioners, and the effects of quarantine plans on Chinatown and its residents. Risse explains how plague threatened California's agricultural economy and San Francisco's leading commercial role with Asia, discusses why it brought on a wave of fear mongering that drove perceptions and intervention efforts, and describes how Chinese residents organized and successfully opposed government quarantines and evacuation plans in federal court.

By probing public health interventions in the setting of one of the most visible ethnic communities in United States history, "Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco's Chinatown" offers insight into the clash of Eastern and Western cultures in a time of medical emergency.

New Medical Challenges explores a wide range of social and medical practices, exposing the contradictions and ambiguities found in eighteenth-century Scottish health, science and medicine. The overall picture casts further light on the nature of the Enlightenment as a cultural phenomenon. Commercial society created new jobs, wealth and desires, that threatened contemporary values and physical health. Both luxury and poverty took their toll, spawning disease among the affluent and the poor. A number of key issues are examined, including the role of charity, medical debates and competition, vivisection, and diseases of the time - such as 'pulmonary consumption', 'mill reek' and 'ague'. Special chapters are devoted to 'female troubles', 'hysteria' and 'hypochondriasis', showing the evolving relationships across gender and class lines between poor patients and their physicians. To place medical ideas and practices into proper context, the essays offer extensive background information and rediscover the lost voices of prominent physicians involved in promoting health and battling illness. Thanks to the richness of seldom-tapped archival sources - book manuscripts, consultation letters, hospital registration and management records, together with student essays, lecture notes and notebooks - the selected episodes expose a world of uncertainty, confusion and paradox. New Medical Challenges tells a wide range of stories that will be of great interest to a broad readership concerned with past health issues.