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The Gale Encyclopedia of Science is written at a level somewhere between the introductory sources and the highly technical texts currently available. This six-volume set covers all major areas of science and engineering, as well as mathematics and the medical and health sciences, while providing a comprehensive overview of current scientific knowledge and technology. Alphabetically arranged entries provide a user-friendly format that makes the broad scope of information easy to access and decipher. Entries typically describe scientific concepts, provide overviews of scientific areas and, in some cases, define terms.

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This is a 3-in-1 reference book. It gives a complete medical dictionary covering hundreds of terms and expressions relating to leprosy. It also gives extensive lists of bibliographic citations. Finally, it provides information to users on how to update their knowledge using various Internet resources. The book is designed for physicians, medical students preparing for Board examinations, medical researchers, and patients who want to become familiar with research dedicated to leprosy.If your time is valuable, this book is for you. First, you will not waste time searching the Internet while missing a lot of relevant information. Second, the book also saves you time indexing and defining entries. Finally, you will not waste time and money printing hundreds of web pages.Download Description
This is a 3-in-1 reference book. It gives a complete medical dictionary covering hundreds of terms and expressions relating to leprosy. It also gives extensive lists of bibliographic citations. Finally, it provides information to users on how to update their knowledge using various Internet resources. The book is designed for physicians, medical students preparing for Board examinations, medical researchers, and patients who want to become familiar with research dedicated to leprosy. If your time is valuable, this book is for you. First, you will not waste time searching the Internet while missing a lot of relevant information. Second, the book also saves you time indexing and defining entries. Finally, you will not waste time and money printing hundreds of web pages. ... Read more

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Eric Silla adds a new dimension to the Social History of Africa Series through a compelling account of leprosy (Hansen's Disease) in colonial and post-colonial Mali. Unlike many studies of health and disease, People Are Not the Same draws on an extensive collection of life histories to elaborate the perspectives of patients themselves. It thereby weaves the transformation of "leper" identities with changes in medical and social responses to the disease. by situating seemingly local experiences of patients within the larger context of national and global change, Silla deepens our historical understanding of a wide range of issues including stigma, marginality, begging, and migration. He explains how the debilitating nature of leprosy interfered with one's ability to marry, farm, and participate in other facets of "normal" life. Leprosy sufferers became outcasts in their villages and often migrated to treatment centers in Bamako and other towns. At these centers, patients constructed sel ... Read more

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Social history as it ought to be done
Eric Silla's social history of leprosy (a.k.a. Hansen's disease) in Mali draws the reader into a penetrating exploration not just of a disease but of the regimes of stigma, treatment, and solidarity that have been constructed around it.The author makes use of his own interviews with dozens of subjects--those afflicted with Hansen's disease, as well as healers from both African and European medical traditions--to sketch a detailed picture of the effects this illness has had on a society at large.

These firsthand accounts are frank and often gripping, helping the reader to understand (insofar as it is possible) the depth of suffering caused not so much by the disease itself as by the manifold, and almost entirely unnecessary, social stigma that accompany it.By reinforcing his interviews with documentary evidence from French colonial clinics, leprosariums, and other sources, the author puts his subjects' stories in wider perspective.He even taps into centuries-old Arabic manuscripts for insight into the status and conditions of lepers in pre-colonial Mali.

Silla's obvious familiarity with many aspects of Malian society shows through his writing, his references to local language, proverbs, and history.This is the way social histories ought to be done, putting their primary subjects and their own words first whenever possible, making judicious use of historical documents, and keeping theory in the background where it belongs."People Are Not the Same" is one of those rare studies which manages to enlighten without indulging either in obscurantist analysis or oversimplification. ... Read more

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Although the topic of habitual narcotic use first surfaced in the United States during the 1820s, it was not until after the Civil War that it became a subject of widespread public attention. Beginning in the 1870s, an increasingly urgent discussion of what some described as a national epidemic of "drug addiction" could be found in both medical journals and the popular press. Today, nearly a century and a half later, the term is so commonplace we speak of people being "addicted" to just about anything. Yet as Timothy A. Hickman argues in this revealing interdisciplinary study, the meaning of addiction has always been as much cultural as scientific and never fixed.

In The Secret Leprosy of Modern Days, Hickman resituates the idea of addiction within its original late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century context. Through close readings of a broad range of literary, medical, and legal texts, he shows how Americans of that era conceptualized the dangers of drug addiction in terms of other preoccupations and fears. Anxieties about the accelerating pace of technological change, the loss of personal autonomy, and the degeneration of society attributed to both foreign influences and a decline of manliness all fed into a widespread sense of cultural crisis-a crisis of which the spiraling "drug problem" was seen as both contributing cause and consequence.Not surprisingly, Hickman points out, deeply held assumptions of class, race, and gender also figured into the popular understanding of addiction. While white middle-class addicts were often depicted as helpless victims of the social and economic pressures of modern life, their less privileged and nonwhite counterparts were regarded as morally weak.

Over time the distinction between "addict as patient" and "addict as criminal" came to be accepted by the emerging medical establishment and codified into law, eventually finding expression in the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, the first national anti-narcotic legislation in the history of the United States-and the basis for much thinking about addiction and drug policy ever since. ... Read more