A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Savage begins with detailed discussions of the natural and cultural history of Costa Rica, setting the stage for a detailed treatment of each of the 396 species of amphibians and reptiles that may be found there. Each species account synthesizes and analyzes everything that is known about the animal's anatomy, behavior, geographic distribution, systematics, and evolutionary history and provides keys for identifying amphibians and reptiles in the field. In addition to distribution maps and systematic and morphological illustrations, the book includes color photographs of almost every known species, many taken by the distinguished nature photographers Michael and Patricia Fogden.
Because Costa Rica has played, and continues to play, a pivotal role in the study of tropical biology as well as in the development of ecotourism and ecoprospecting, and because more than half of the amphibians and reptiles in Costa Rica are also found elsewhere in Central America, The Amphibians and Reptiles of Costa Rica will be an essential book for a wide audience of nature lovers, naturalists, ecotourists, field biologists, conservationists, and government planners.
The lizard genus Anolis contains more species than any other genus of reptile, bird, or mammal. Caribbean members of this group have been intensively studied and have become a model system for the study of ecology, evolution, and biogeography, but knowledge of the anoles of Central and South America has lagged behind. In this landmark volume, veteran herpetologists James R. McCranie and Gunther Köhler take a step toward rectifying this shortcoming by providing a detailed account of the rich anole fauna of Honduras.
Generously illustrated with 157 photos and drawings, The Anoles of Honduras includes information on the evolutionary relationships, natural history, distribution, and conservation of all 39 Honduran anole species. The work is the result of decades of study both in the field and in museums and is the first synthetic discussion of the complete anole fauna of any Central or South American country. Each species is described in great detail with locality maps. Bilingual (English and Spanish), extensively illustrated identification keys are also included.
Yet most of us have never seen a timber rattler. Though they’re found in thirty-one states, and near many major cities, in contemporary America timber rattlesnakes are creatures mostly of imagination and innate fear.
Ted Levin aims to change that with America’s Snake, a portrait of the timber rattlesnake, its place in America’s pantheon of creatures and in our own frontier history—and of the heroic efforts to protect it against habitat loss, climate change, and the human tendency to kill what we fear. Taking us from labs where the secrets of the snake’s evolutionary history are being unlocked to far-flung habitats whose locations are fiercely protected by biologists and dedicated amateur herpetologists alike, Levin paints a picture of a fascinating creature: peaceable, social, long-lived, and, despite our phobias, not inclined to bite. The timber rattler emerges here as emblematic of America and also, unfortunately, of the complicated, painful struggles involved in protecting and preserving the natural world.
A wonderful mix of natural history, travel writing, and exemplary journalism, America’s Snake is loaded with remarkable characters—none more so than the snake at its heart: frightening, perhaps; endangered, certainly; and unquestionably unforgettable.
In 1805, Jean Jacques Audubon was a twenty-year-old itinerant Frenchman of ignoble birth and indifferent education who had fled revolutionary violence in Haiti and then France to take refuge in frontier America. Ten years later, John James Audubon was an American citizen, entrepreneur, and family man whose fervent desire to “become acquainted with nature” had led him to reinvent himself as a naturalist and artist whose study of birds would soon earn him international acclaim. The drawings he made during this crucial decade—sold to Audubon’s friend and patron Edward Harris to help fund his masterwork The Birds of America, and now held by Harvard’s Houghton Library and Museum of Comparative Zoology—are published together here for the first time in large format and full color. In these 116 portraits of species collected in America and in Europe we see Audubon inventing his ingenious methods of posing and depicting his subjects, and we trace his development into a scientist and an artist who could proudly sign his artworks “drawn from Nature.” The drawings also serve as a record of the birds found in Europe and the Eastern United States in the early nineteenth century, some now rare or extinct.
The drawings are enhanced by an essay on the sources of Audubon’s art by his biographer, Richard Rhodes; transcription of Audubon’s own annotations to the drawings, including information on when and where the specimens were collected; ornithological commentary by Scott V. Edwards, along with reflections on Audubon as scientist; and an account of the history of the Harris collection by Leslie A. Morris.
Splendid in their own right, these drawings also illuminate the self-invention of one of the most important figures in American natural history. They will delight all those interested in American art, nature, birds, and the life and times of John James Audubon.
As the only artist in residence at the Field Museum, Peggy Macnamara has a unique vantage point for studying these patterns and capturing their distinctive traits. Her magnificent watercolor illustrations capture flocks, movement, and species-specific details. The illustrations are accompanied by text from museum staff and include details such as natural histories, notable features for identification, behavior, and how species have adapted to environmental changes. The book follows a gentle seasonal sequence and includes chapters on studying migration, artist’s notes on illustrating wildlife, and tips on the best ways to watch for birds and insects in the Chicago area.
A perfect balance of science and art, The Art of Migration will prompt us to marvel anew at the remarkable spectacle going on around us.
A visual celebration of these natural feats of engineering and ingenuity, Architecture by Birds and Insects allows readers a peek inside a wide range of nests, offering a rare opportunity to get a sense of the materials and methods used to build them. Here, we see the kinds of places where nests are built—for instance, the house wren has been known to occupy cow skulls, flower pots, tin cans, and the pockets of hanging laundry, while the uglynest caterpillar prefers rose bushes and cherry trees. Inspired by the vast nest collection at the Field Museum, which features specimens gathered throughout North and South America, Peggy Macnamara’s paintings are enhanced by text written by museum curators. This narrative provides a foundation in natural history for each painting, as well as fascinating anecdotes about the nests and their builders.
Like so many natural treasures, nests are easy to ignore. But Macnamara’s gorgeous paintings will undoubtedly change that. Architecture by Birds and Insects at last gives the tiniest engineers their rightful moment in the spotlight, and in so doing increases awareness and encourages the protection of birds, insects, and their habitats. Readers will never look at a Frank Gehry design, or a treetop nest, the same way again.
Whether we live in cities, in the suburbs, or in the country, birds are ubiquitous features of daily life, so much so that we often take them for granted. But even the casual observer is aware that birds don’t fill our skies in the number they once did. That awareness has spawned conservation action that has led to notable successes, including the recovery of some of the nation’s most emblematic species, such as the Bald Eagle, Brown Pelican, Whooping Crane, and Peregrine Falcon. Despite this, a third of all American bird species are in trouble—in many cases, they’re in imminent danger of extinction. The most authoritative account ever published of the threats these species face, The American Bird Conservancy Guide to Bird Conservation will be the definitive book on the subject.
The Guide presents for the first time anywhere a classification system and threat analysis for bird habitats in the United States, the most thorough and scientifically credible assessment of threats to birds published to date, as well as a new list of birds of conservation concern. Filled with beautiful color illustrations and original range maps, the Guide is a timely, important, and inspiring reference for birders and anyone else interested in conserving North America’s avian fauna. But this book is far more than another shout of crisis. The Guide also lays out a concrete and achievable plan of long-term action to safeguard our country’s rich bird life. Ultimately, it is an argument for hope. Whether you spend your early weekend mornings crouched in silence with binoculars in hand, hoping to check another species off your list, or you’ve never given much thought to bird conservation, you’ll appreciate the visual power and intellectual scope of these pages.
Terry Root has used the data from the 1963-72 counts to provide the first large-scale biogeographical account of birds wintering in North America. Using sophisticated computer techniques, Root has translated the data into both traditional contour maps and innovative new maps that stimulate three dimensions. The maps show at a glance that, for example, the Baltimore Oriole winters primarily along the eastern seaboard, with the densest populations in Florida between Tallahassee and Gainesville and in North Carolina from Rocky Mount to the Croatan National Forest.
The essays collected in As the Condor Soars focus on the role that ornithologists have played in research, management, and conservation debates across the state over the past century. Contributors to this volume discuss new developments in the study of birds, from sophisticated tracking devices to the evolving connections between ornithologists and artists. Readers also learn about the important role of citizen scientists in saving our treasured birds. These essays provide hope for species recovery, despite environmental threats, when scientists and the public work together. They also offer to other regions examples of adaptive management learned through these efforts.
This full-color book is beautifully illustrated by noted Oregon Coast artist Ram Papish and includes over eighty stunning photographs donated by some of the state’s finest nature photographers. Fifty capsule biographies of noted Oregon avian scientists round out the inspirational stories about the monumental efforts that have taken shape in recent decades. Accessibly written for scientists and laypeople alike, As the Condor Soars is a gift to everyone who cares about the conservation and restoration of Oregon’s birds.
Adaptive Strategies and Population Ecology of Northern Grouse was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
This book is at once a major reference to the species of grouse that inhabit North America and the Holarctic and a synthesis of all the available data on their ecology, sociobiology, population dynamics, and management. The book undertakes to answer two long-standing questions in population ecology: what actually regulates the numbers within a population, and what are the breeding and survival strategies evolved in this northern environment? For Volume I, editors Arthur T. Bergerud and Michael W. Gratson have drawn together their own work and that of colleagues in North America, Iceland, and Norway—in all, eleven research studies, averaging six years' duration, on eight species of grouse. These studies deal with the blue and ruffed grouse of the forest habitat; the sharp-tailed grouse, prairie chicken, and sage grouse of the prairie or steppe; and the white-tailed, rick, and willow ptarmigan found in alpine and arctic tundras. The authors describe the rich repertoire of behavior patterns developed by the hen and the cock to achieve their two primary objectives—first, to stay alive, and then to breed. Volume II, primarily the work of Bergerud, synthesizes the evidence in Volume I and in the grouse research literature from a theoretical perspective. Several potentially controversial sociobiological hypotheses are advanced to account for flocking behavior, migration, dispersal, roosting and feeding behavior, mate choice and mating systems. The demographic analysis provides new insights into cycles of abundance, the limitation of numbers, and the demographic factors that determine densities. The contributors, besides Bergerud and Gratson: R.C. Davies, A. Gardarson, J.E. Hartzler, R.A. Huempfner, D.A. Jenni, D.H. Mossop, S. Myrberget, R.E. Page, R.K. Schmidt, W.D. Svedarsky, and J.R. Tester.
Adaptive Strategies and Population of Northern Grouse was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
The first volume contains eleven studies of eight grouse species; the second contains primarily the work of Bergerud, which utilizes the evidence in the first volume to advance theories of behavior and offer new demographic insights.
This second volume contains primarily the work of Bergerud, which utilizes the evidence in the first volume to advance theories of behavior and offer new demographic insights.
Western Books Exhibition, Rounce and Coffin Club
Antbirds and ovenbirds, two of the five largest families of birds found only in the Western Hemisphere, have been among Alexander Skutch's favorites for more than six decades. In this book, he draws on years of observations to describe the life cycle of these fascinating birds, which inhabit Latin America from tropical Mexico to Tierra del Fuego.
Skutch covers all aspects of the birds' lives, including the various species in each family, food and foraging, daily life, voice, displays and courtship, nests and incubation, and parental care. He also recounts anecdotes from his own experiences, creating vivid pictures of antbirds foraging for the insects Skutch stirs up on walks through the rainforest and of ovenbirds repairing the observation holes that he opens in their elaborate nests.
As some of tropical America's least studied birds, antbirds and ovenbirds surely merit the extensive treatment given them here by one of our most distinguished senior ornithologists. Over fifty line drawings by noted bird artist Dana Gardner make this book a delight for both armchair and field naturalists.
Warblers inevitably make an appearance on every naturalist's list of favorite birds. Called by Roger Tory Peterson the “butterflies of the bird world,” these active, colorful birds have long enchanted amateur and professional ornithologists alike. Yet despite this widespread appeal, no comprehensive book on this richly varied family of birds has been published in over thirty years.
Douglass Morse, a prominent avian ecologist, brings together in this book an up to date account of three decades of research and debate on the ecological and behavioral aspects of the Parulinae—the “New World” or “American” warblers. Beginning with a brief overview of their evolutionary history and their dispersal through North and South America, he documents the life cycle of the birds on both their breeding grounds and their migration routes, which extend from Central America to Canada. Foraging, habitat selection, mating, reproduction, plumage, rare and tropical species, and diversity are just a few of the many subjects covered in this broad synthesis.
More than a comprehensive look at the natural history of the warbler, American Warblers illustrates how this abundant subfamily of birds may be used to make and test conceptual advances in ecology. For example, in parts of eastern North America, the warblers' density exceeds that of all other birds combined. Yet despite this, they manage to coexist harmoniously with several similar species, a fact that appears to contradict basic ecological principles. Morse argues that warbler populations are excellent candidates for the experiments needed to resolve issues of this sort.
Amply illustrated with more than 60 drawings and charts, American Warblers will be an invaluable addition to the personal libraries of ornithologists and bird fanciers at all levels of expertise. Ecologists, ethologists, and evolutionists will likewise find much here to enrich and challenge their perspectives on competition and speciation.
The American Robin is North America's most widespread songbird, with a range extending from Alaska, Canada, and Newfoundland to the highlands of Mexico and Guatemala. Its ruddy red breast and cheerful song have also made it one of our most beloved birds—as American as apple pie, as familiar a harbinger of spring as the first daffodil. Connecticut, Michigan, and Wisconsin have chosen the American Robin as their state bird, while a pair of robins grace the Canadian two dollar bill.
In this book, Roland Wauer offers a complete natural history of the American Robin for a popular audience. Combining his own observations as a field naturalist with data gleaned from the scientific literature, he describes the American Robin from every angle—appearance and biology, distribution, behavior, life cycle, and enemies and threats. In addition, he explores the legends and lore surrounding robins and offers suggestions for attracting them to your yard.
Breeding on remote ocean islands and spending much of its life foraging for food across vast stretches of seemingly empty seas, the albatross remains a legend for most people. And yet, humans are threatening the albatross family to such an extent that it is currently the most threatened bird group in the world. In this extensively researched, highly readable book, Robin W. Doughty and Virginia Carmichael tell the story of a potentially catastrophic extinction that has been interrupted by an unlikely alliance of governments, conservation groups, and fishermen.
Doughty and Carmichael authoritatively establish that the albatross's fate is linked to the fate of two of the highest-value table fish, Bluefin Tuna and Patagonian Toothfish, which are threatened by unregulated commercial harvesting. The authors tell us that commercial fishing techniques are annually killing tens of thousands of albatrosses. And the authors explain how the breeding biology of albatrosses makes them unable to replenish their numbers at the rate they are being depleted. Doughty and Carmichael set the albatross's fate in the larger context of threats facing the ocean commons, ranging from industrial overfishing to our habit of dumping chemicals, solid waste, and plastic trash into the open seas. They also highlight the efforts of dedicated individuals, environmental groups, fishery management bodies, and governments who are working for seabird and fish conservation and demonstrate that these efforts can lead to sustainable solutions for the iconic seabirds and the entire ocean ecosystem.
Can a parrot understand complex concepts and mean what it says? Since the early 1900s, most studies on animal-human communication have focused on great apes and a few cetacean species. Birds were rarely used in similar studies on the grounds that they were merely talented mimics--that they were, after all, "birdbrains." Experiments performed primarily on pigeons in Skinner boxes demonstrated capacities inferior to those of mammals; these results were thought to reflect the capacities of all birds, despite evidence suggesting that species such as jays, crows, and parrots might be capable of more impressive cognitive feats.
Twenty years ago Irene Pepperberg set out to discover whether the results of the pigeon studies necessarily meant that other birds--particularly the large-brained, highly social parrots--were incapable of mastering complex cognitive concepts and the rudiments of referential speech. Her investigation and the bird at its center--a male Grey parrot named Alex--have since become almost as well known as their primate equivalents and no less a subject of fierce debate in the field of animal cognition. This book represents the long-awaited synthesis of the studies constituting one of the landmark experiments in modern comparative psychology.
The year he graduated from college, 22-year-old Noah Strycker was dropped by helicopter in a remote Antarctic field camp with two bird scientists and a three months’ supply of frozen food. His subjects: more than a quarter million penguins.
Compact, industrious, and approachable, the Adélie Penguins who call Antarctica home visit their breeding grounds each Antarctic summer to nest and rear their young before returning to sea. Because of long-term studies, scientists may know more about how these penguins will adjust to climate change than about any other creature in the world.
Bird scientists like Noah are less well known. Like the intrepid early explorers of Antarctica, modern scientists drawn to the frozen continent face an utterly inhospitable landscape, one that inspires, isolates, and punishes.
With wit, curiosity, and a deep knowledge of his subject, Strycker recounts the reality of life at the end of the Earth—thousand-year-old penguin mummies, hurricane-force blizzards, and day-to-day existence in below freezing temperatures—and delves deep into a world of science, obsession, and birds.
Among Penguins weaves a captivating tale of penguins and their researchers on the coldest, driest, highest, and windiest continent on Earth. Birders, lovers of the Antarctic, and fans of first-person adventure narratives will be fascinated by Strycker’s book.
In Antipredator Defenses in Birds and Mammals, Tim Caro ambitiously synthesizes predator defenses in birds and mammals and integrates all functional and evolutionary perspectives on antipredator defenses that have developed over the last century. Structured chronologically along a hypothetical sequence of predation—Caro evokes a gazelle fawn desperate to survive a cheetah attack to illustrate the continuum of the evolution of antipredator defenses—Antipredator Defenses in Birds and Mammals considers the defenses that prey use to avoid detection by predators; the benefits of living in groups; morphological and behavioral defenses in individuals and groups; and, finally, flight and adaptations of last resort.
Antipredator Defenses in Birds and Mammals will be of interest to both specialists and general readers interested in ecological issues.
Heavily illustrated with color photographs, Arkansas Mammals is the comprehensive guide to the state’s mammal population. Endangered or threatened species of mammals and missing species known to have been present in recent times are discussed, along with non-native species that have become an important part of the mammal fauna in Arkansas and adjacent states.
He weathered brutal temperatures in the wild to document the wolves and provided exceptional insights into wolf behavior. Haber’s writings and photographs reveal an astonishing degree of cooperation between wolf family members as they hunt, raise pups, and play, social behaviors and traditions previously unknown. With the wolves at risk of being destroyed by hunting and trapping, his studies advocated for a balanced approach to wolf management. His fieldwork registered as one of the longest studies in wildlife science and had a lasting impact on wolf policies.
Haber’s field notes, his extensive journals, and stories from friends all come together in Among Wolves to reveal much about both the wolves he studied and the researcher himself. Wolves continue to fascinate and polarize people, and Haber’s work continues to resonate.
It all started in 1965 with a guy riding a whale. The guy was Flip Nicklin’s father, Chuck, and the whale was an unlucky Bryde’s Whale that had gotten caught up in some anchor line. Hoping to free the whale, Chuck and some friends took their boat as near as they could, and, just before they cut it loose, Chuck posed astride it for a photo.
That image, carried on wire services nationwide, became a sensation and ultimately changed the life of Chuck’s young son, Flip. In the decades since that day, Flip Nicklin has made himself into the world’s premier cetacean photographer. It’s no exaggeration to say that his photos, published in such venues as National Geographic and distributed worldwide, have virtually defined these graceful, powerful creatures in the mind of the general public—even as they helped open new ground in the field of marine mammalogy.
Among Giants tells the story of Nicklin’s life and career on the high seas, from his first ill-equipped shoots in the mid-1970s through his long association with the National Geographic Society to the present, when he is one of the founders of Whale Trust, a nonprofit conservation and research group. Nicklin is equal parts photographer, adventurer, self-trained scientist, and raconteur, and Among Giants reflects all those sides, matching breathtaking images to firsthand accounts of their making, and highlighting throughout the importance of conservation and new advances in our understanding of whale behavior. With Nicklin as our guide, we see not just whales but also our slowly growing understanding of their hidden lives, as well as the evolution of underwater photography—and the stunning clarity and drama that can be captured when a determined, daring diver is behind the lens.
Humpbacks, narwhals, sperm whales, orcas—these and countless other giants of the ocean parade through these pages, spouting, breaching, singing, and raising their young. Nicklin’s photographs bring us so completely into the underwater world of whales that we can’t help but feel awe, while winning, personal accounts of his adventures remind us of what it’s like to be a lone diver sharing their sea.
For anyone who has marveled at the majesty of whales in the wild, Among Giants is guaranteed to be inspiring, even moving—its unmatched images of these glorious beings an inescapable reminder of our responsibility as stewards of the ocean.
Since its first publication in 1988, America's Neighborhood Bats has changed the way we look at bats by underscoring their harmless and beneficial nature. In this second revised edition, Merlin Tuttle offers bat aficionados the most up-to-date bat facts, including a wealth of new information on bat house design and current threats to bat survival.
Perhaps no creature has so fired the imagination of a populace as the armadillo—that most ungainly, awkward, and timid little animal. Its detractors call it a varmint and wish it good speed from the Lone Star State and its other natural territories. But its supporters claim that it is the animal kingdom's representative of all that's truly Texan: tough, pioneering, adaptable, and generous in sharing its habitation with others. What is it that sets this quizzical little creature apart from the rest of the animal kingdom?
Larry L. Smith and Robin W. Doughty ably answer this question in The Amazing Armadillo: Geography of a Folk Critter. This informative book traces the spread of the nine-banded armadillo from its first notice in South Texas late in the 1840s to its current range east to Florida and north to Missouri. The authors look at the armadillo's natural history and habitat as well as the role of humans in promoting its spread, projecting that the animal is increasing in both range and number, continuing its ecological success in areas where habitat and climate are favorable.
The book also contributes to a long-standing research theme in geography—the relationship between humans and wildlife. It explores the armadillo's value to the medical community in current research in Hansen's Disease (leprosy) as well as commercial uses, and abuses, of the armadillo in recent times. Of particular note is the author's engaging look at the armadillo as a symbol of popular culture, the efforts now underway to make it a "totem animal" symbolizing the easy-going lifestyles of some Sunbelt cities, and the spread of the craze for armadilliana to other urban centers.
In this masterwork, Russell H. Tuttle synthesizes a vast research literature in primate evolution and behavior to explain how apes and humans evolved in relation to one another, and why humans became a bipedal, tool-making, culture-inventing species distinct from other hominoids. Along the way, he refutes the influential theory that men are essentially killer apes—sophisticated but instinctively aggressive and destructive beings.
Situating humans in a broad context, Tuttle musters convincing evidence from morphology and recent fossil discoveries to reveal what early primates ate, where they slept, how they learned to walk upright, how brain and hand anatomy evolved simultaneously, and what else happened evolutionarily to cause humans to diverge from their closest relatives. Despite our genomic similarities with bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas, humans are unique among primates in occupying a symbolic niche of values and beliefs based on symbolically mediated cognitive processes. Although apes exhibit behaviors that strongly suggest they can think, salient elements of human culture—speech, mating proscriptions, kinship structures, and moral codes—are symbolic systems that are not manifest in ape niches.
This encyclopedic volume is both a milestone in primatological research and a critique of what is known and yet to be discovered about human and ape potential.
Vividly written and filled with fascinating insights, Almost Human chronicles the first fifteen years of Strum's fieldwork with the Pumphouse Gang. From the first paragraph, the reader is drawn along with Strum into the world of the baboons, learning about the tragedies and triumphs of their daily lives—and the lives of the scientists studying them. This edition includes a new introduction and epilogue that place Strum's research in the context of the current global conservation crisis and tell us what has happened to the Pumphouse Gang since the book was first published.
The local people know him as the "Man of the Forest," who refused to speak for fear of being put to work. And indeed the bear-like Sumatran orangutan, with his moon face, lanky arms, and shaggy red hair, does seem uncannily human; one of our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, the orangutan may have much to tell us about the origins of human intelligence, technology, and culture. In this book one of the world's leading experts on Sumatran orangutans, working in collaboration with nature photographer Perry van Duijnhoven, takes us deep into the disappearing world of these captivating primates.
In a narrative that is part adventure, part field journal, part call to conscience, Carel van Schaik introduces us to the colorful characters and complex lives of the orangutans who inhabit the vanishing forests of Sumatra. In compelling words and pictures, we come to know the personalities and temperaments of our primate cousins as they go about their days: building double-decker tree nests; using leaves as napkins, gloves, rain hats, and blankets, and sticks as backscratchers and probes; nurturing their infants longer and more intensely than any other nonhuman mammal. Here are the births and deaths, the first use of a tool, the defeat of a rival, the gradual loss of influence that, while fascinating to observe, may also help us to reconstruct human evolution.
Elephants have fascinated humans for millennia. Aristotle wrote of them with awe; Hannibal used them in warfare; and John Donne called the elephant “Nature’s greatest masterpiece. . . . The only harmless great thing.” Their ivory has been sought after and treasured in most cultures, and they have delighted zoo and circus audiences worldwide for centuries. But it wasn’t until the second half of the twentieth century that people started to take an interest in elephants in the wild, and some of the most important studies of these intelligent giants have been conducted at Amboseli National Park in Kenya.
The Amboseli Elephants is the long-awaited summation of what’s been learned from the Amboseli Elephant Research Project (AERP)—the longest continuously running elephant research project in the world. Cynthia J. Moss and Harvey Croze, the founders of the AERP, and Phyllis C. Lee, who has been closely involved with the project since 1982, compile more than three decades of uninterrupted study of over 2,500 individual elephants, from newborn calves to adult bulls to old matriarchs in their 60s. Chapters explore such topics as elephant ecosystems, genetics, communication, social behavior, and reproduction, as well as exciting new developments from the study of elephant minds and cognition. The book closes with a view to the future, making important arguments for the ethical treatment of elephants and suggestions to aid in their conservation.
The most comprehensive account of elephants in their natural environment to date, The Amboseli Elephants will be an invaluable resource for scientists, conservationists, and anyone interested in the lives and loves of these extraordinary creatures.
The guinea pig is so widely used in laboratories that it has become synonymous in common speech with "experimental animal." But until now there has been no complete and accurate anatomy of this otherwise familiar creature. Cavia has remained uncharted territory for experimenters who come to it without previous experience. Gale Cooper and Alan L. Schiller here provide a thorough description of guinea pig anatomy in a text illustrated with about four hundred separate drawings. It is a detailed, complete, and practical guide to the gross morphology of the animal. Nomenclature has been standardized according to the Nomina Anatomica Veterinaria.
The authors' dissections have been carefully correlated with the published literature on guinea pig anatomy, and numerous references are given. This book sets a new standard of beauty and clarity in anatomical illustration. Dr. Cooper's drawings not only provide anatomical information with the utmost in accuracy and fidelity, they are in themselves an aesthetic triumph. Her pencil drawings have been made by a technique that requires specially made paper and demands unusual skill from the artist; closely identified with the famous illustrator Max Brodl, this method is now rarely employed. Researchers in immunology, hematology, physiology, biochemistry, pharmacology, reproductive biology, comparative anatomy, and taxonomy, among other fields, will turn to this anatomy as a reliable guide to a favored experimental species.
In this elegantly written book, John A. Byers argues that these mystifying behaviors evolved in response to the dangerous predators with whom pronghorn shared their grassland home for nearly four million years: among them fleet hyenas, lions, and cheetahs. Although these predators died out ten thousand years ago, pronghorn still behave as if they were present—as if they were living with the ghosts of predators past.
Byers's provocative hypothesis will stimulate behavioral ecologists and mammalogists to consider whether other species' adaptations are also haunted by selective pressures from predators past. The book will also find a ready audience among evolutionary biologists and paleontologists.
For over 25 years, primatologists have speculated that intelligence, at least in monkeys and apes, evolved as an adaptation to the complicated social milieu of hard-won friendships and bitterly contested rivalries. Yet the Balkanization of animal research has prevented us from studying the same problem in other large-brained, long-lived animals, such as hyenas and elephants, bats and sperm whales. Social complexity turns out to be widespread indeed. For example, in many animal societies one individual's innovation, such as tool use or a hunting technique, may spread within the group, thus creating a distinct culture. As this collection of studies on a wide range of species shows, animals develop a great variety of traditions, which in turn affect fitness and survival.
The editors argue that future research into complex animal societies and intelligence will change the perception of animals as gene machines, programmed to act in particular ways and perhaps elevate them to a status much closer to our own. At a time when humans are perceived more biologically than ever before, and animals as more cultural, are we about to witness the dawn of a truly unified social science, one with a distinctly cross-specific perspective?
Efforts to conserve wildlife populations and preserve biological diversity are often hampered by an inadequate understanding of animal behavior. How do animals react to gaps in forested lands, or to sport hunters? Do individual differences—in age, sex, size, past experience—affect how an animal reacts to a given situation? Differences in individual behavior may determine the success or failure of a conservation initiative, yet they are rarely considered when strategies and policies are developed.
Animal Behavior and Wildlife Conservation explores how knowledge of animal behavior may help increase the effectiveness of conservation programs. The book brings together conservation biologists, wildlife managers, and academics from around the world to examine the importance of general principles, the role played by specific characteristics of different species, and the importance of considering the behavior of individuals and the strategies they adopt to maximize fitness.
Each chapter begins by looking at the theoretical foundations of a topic, and follows with an exploration of its practical implications. A concluding chapter considers possible future contributions of research in animal behavior to wildlife conservation.
Together with Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen is generally acknowledged as the founder of the young science of ethology. Professor Tinbergen has spent a lifetime of research exploring the behavior of many types of animals in their natural environments, and has founded centers of worldwide renown for research and teaching in the behavioral sciences, first in his native Holland and later at Oxford. His influence extends far beyond the borders of Europe and of zoology proper, and he has contributed substantially to international and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Tinbergen’s work has been characterized by many as a “breath of fresh air” in fields that were in danger of losing touch with nature and of becoming bogged down in theory. He has tirelessly worked for the use of scientific methods in the study of human behavior, both normal and abnormal. Without shying away from quantification and measurement, he has made his main contribution in what Sir Peter Medawar calls “creative observation” and in the design of meaningful experiments, even in the seemingly chaotic and continuously varying conditions of the natural habitat.
In following him in what Tinbergen likes to call his seemingly aimless wanderings, the reader will catch a unique glimpse into the workshop of ethology. Even when reporting on sophisticated experiments, or when developing new theoretical concepts and arguments, Tinbergen writes simply, lucidly, and precisely. The present volume spans forty years of pioneer investigation and includes selections on the behavior of gulls; on the homing, landmark preference, and prey findings of the digger wasp; on the food hoarding of foxes; and on creatures living scattered as a defense against predators.
These classic original studies will fascinate the increasing number of readers interested in the topical problems of animals and human behavior.
Analyzing AnimalSocieties presents a conceptual framework for analyzing social behavior and demonstrates how to put this framework into practice by collecting suitable data on the interactions and associations of individuals so that relationships can be described, and, from these, models can be derived. In addition to presenting the tools, Hal Whitehead illustrates their applicability using a wide range of real data on a variety of animal species—from bats and chimps to dolphins and birds. The techniques that Whitehead describes will be profitably adopted by scientists working with primates, cetaceans, birds, and ungulates, but the tools can be used to study societies of invertebrates, amphibians, and even humans. Analyzing AnimalSocieties will become a standard reference for those studying vertebrate social behavior and will give to these studies the kind of quality standard already in use in other areas of the life sciences.
The Art of Being a Parasite is an extensive collection of these and other wonderful and weird stories that illuminate the ecology and evolution of interactions between species. Claude Combes illustrates what it means to be a parasite by considering every stage of its interactions, from invading to reproducing and leaving the host. An accessible and engaging follow-up to Combes's Parasitism, this book will be of interest to both scholars and nonspecialists in the fields of biodiversity, natural history, ecology, public health, and evolution.
What can we learn from watching animals play? Dogs chase each other and wrestle. Cats pounce and bite. These animals may look like they are fighting, but if you pay close attention— as world-renowned biologist Marc Bekoff does—you can see they are playing and learning the rules of their games. In Animals at Play, Bekoff shows us how animals behave when they play, with full-color illustrations showing animals in action and having fun—from squirrels climbing up a tree to polar bears somersaulting in the snow.
Bekoff emphasizes how animals communicate, cooperate and learn to play fair and what happens when they break the rules. He uses lively illustrations and simple explanations of what it means when a sea lion swims with kelp in its mouth or when two dogs bow to each other. Bekoff also describes what happens when animals become too aggressive and how they apologize, forgive and learn to trust one another. This entertaining and informative book will delight every child and show readers how animals—and humans—interact when they are having fun.
With this new edition of his classic book, which he has completely revised and updated, Griffin moves beyond considerations of animal cognition to argue that scientists can and should investigate questions of animal consciousness. Using examples from studies of species ranging from chimpanzees and dolphins to birds and honeybees, he demonstrates how communication among animals can serve as a "window" into what animals think and feel, just as human speech and nonverbal communication tell us most of what we know about the thoughts and feelings of other people. Even when they don't communicate about it, animals respond with sometimes surprising versatility to new situations for which neither their genes nor their previous experiences have prepared them, and Griffin discusses what these behaviors can tell us about animal minds. He also reviews the latest research in cognitive neuroscience, which has revealed startling similarities in the neural mechanisms underlying brain functioning in both humans and other animals. Finally, in four chapters greatly expanded for this edition, Griffin considers the latest scientific research on animal consciousness, pro and con, and explores its profound philosophical and ethical implications.
Animal Cognition presents a clear, concise, and comprehensive overview of what we know about cognitive processes in animals. Focusing mainly on what has been learned from experimental research, Vauclair presents a wide-ranging review of studies of many kinds of animals--bees and wasps, cats and dogs, dolphins and sea otters, pigeons and titmice, baboons, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys, and Japanese macaques. He also offers a novel discussion of the ways Piaget's theory of cognitive development and Piagetian concepts may be used to develop models for the study of animal cognition.
Individual chapters review the current state of our knowledge about specific kinds of cognition in animals: tool use and spatial and temporal representations; social cognition--how animals manage their relational life and the cognitive organization that sustains social behaviors; representation, communication, and language; and imitation, self-recognition, and the theory of mind--what animals know about themselves. The book closes with Vauclair's "agenda for comparative cognition." Here he examines the relationship of the experimental approach to other fields and methods of inquiry, such as cognitive ethology and the ecological approach to species comparisons. It is here, too, that Vauclair addresses the key issue of continuity, or its absence, between animal and human cognition.
Given our still limited knowledge of cognitive systems in animals, Vauclair argues, researchers should be less concerned with the "why" question--the evolutionary or ecological explanations for differences in cognition between the species--and more concerned with the "what"--the careful work that is needed to increase our understanding of similarities and differences in cognitive processes. This thoughtful and lively book will be of great value to students of animal behavior and to anyone who desires a better understanding of humankind's relations to other living creatures.
Once upon a time, neuroscience was born. A dazzling array of neurotechnologies emerged that, according to popular belief, have finally begun to unlock the secrets of the brain. But as the brain sciences now extend into all corners of cultural, social, political, and economic life, a yet newer world has taken shape: “neuroculture,” which goes further than ever before to tackle the profound ethical implications we face in consequence.
The Assemblage Brain unveils a major new concept of sense making, one that challenges conventional scientific and philosophical understandings of the brain. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Tony D. Sampson calls for a radical critical theory that operates in the interferences between philosophy, science, art, and politics. From this novel perspective the book is structured around two questions: “What can be done to a brain?” and “What can a brain do?” Sampson examines the rise of neuroeconomics in informing significant developments in computer work, marketing, and the neuropharmaceutical control of inattentiveness in the classroom. Moving beyond the neurocapitalist framework, he then reestablishes a place for proto-subjectivity in which biological and cultural distinctions are reintegrated in an understanding of the brain as an assemblage.
The Assemblage Brain unravels the conventional image of thought that underpins many scientific and philosophical accounts of how sense is produced, providing a new view of our current time in which capitalism and the neurosciences endeavor to colonize the brain.
This new edition of Horace W. Davenport's standard text takes into account different ways of looking at the problems of acid-base derived from new instrumentation. The exposition has been modified to allow the student to apply his understanding to other systems of description of the acid-base status. Although the pH system has been retained, there is increasing emphasis on the use of hydrogen ion concentration.
Topics discussed include: partial pressure of gases, composition of alveolar gas, transport of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood, buffer action of hemoglobin and seperated plasma, oxygenated whole blood and reduced blood, concepts of base excess and base deficit, and chemical regulation of respiration.
"Any reader who clearly understands the subject matter of this book will have a firm grounding in the principles of the subject; I find it the clearest text of this type that I have read."—British Journal of Hospital Medicine
"This little book is of great value to chemically trained physicians and medical students who want to get a clearer idea of the physiology of acid base chemistry in the blood."—The Journal of Gastroenterology
Williams charts the history of inquiry into appetite between 1750 and 1950, as scientific and medical concepts of appetite shifted alongside developments in physiology, natural history, psychology, and ethology. She shows how, in the eighteenth century, trust in appetite was undermined when researchers who investigated ingestion and digestion began claiming that science alone could say which ways of eating were healthy and which were not. She goes on to trace nineteenth- and twentieth-century conflicts over the nature of appetite between mechanists and vitalists, experimentalists and bedside physicians, and localists and holists, illuminating struggles that have never been resolved. By exploring the core disciplines in investigations in appetite and eating, Williams reframes the way we think about food, nutrition, and the nature of health itself..
Like all cellular organisms, humans run on electricity. Slight imbalances of electric charge across cell membranes result in sensation, movement, awareness, and thinking—nearly everything we associate with being alive. Robert Campenot offers a comprehensive overview of animal electricity, examining its physiological mechanisms as well as the experimental discoveries that form the basis for our modern understanding of nervous systems across the animal kingdom.
Cells work much like batteries. Concentration gradients of sodium and potassium cause these ions to flow in and out of cells by way of protein channels, creating tiny voltages across the cell membrane. The cellular mechanisms that switch these ion currents on and off drive all the functions associated with animal nervous systems, from nerve impulses and heartbeats to the 600-volt shocks produced by electric eels.
Campenot’s examination of the nervous system is presented in the context of ideas as they evolved in the past, as well as today’s research and its future implications. The discussion ranges from the pre-Renaissance notion of animal spirits and Galvani’s eighteenth-century discovery of animal electricity, to modern insights into how electrical activity produces learning and how electrical signals in the cortex can be used to connect the brains of paralyzed individuals to limbs or prosthetic devices. Campenot provides the necessary scientific background to make the book highly accessible for general readers while conveying much about the process of scientific discovery.
You've probably seen it before: a human brain dramatically lit from the side, the camera circling it like a helicopter shot of Stonehenge, and a modulated baritone voice exalting the brain's elegant design in reverent tones.
To which this book says: Pure nonsense. In a work at once deeply learned and wonderfully accessible, the neuroscientist David Linden counters the widespread assumption that the brain is a paragon of design--and in its place gives us a compelling explanation of how the brain's serendipitous evolution has resulted in nothing short of our humanity. A guide to the strange and often illogical world of neural function, The Accidental Mind shows how the brain is not an optimized, general-purpose problem-solving machine, but rather a weird agglomeration of ad-hoc solutions that have been piled on through millions of years of evolutionary history. Moreover, Linden tells us how the constraints of evolved brain design have ultimately led to almost every transcendent human foible: our long childhoods, our extensive memory capacity, our search for love and long-term relationships, our need to create compelling narrative, and, ultimately, the universal cultural impulse to create both religious and scientific explanations. With forays into evolutionary biology, this analysis of mental function answers some of our most common questions about how we've come to be who we are.
In the past two decades, the familiar experience of attention--the emphasis on a particular mental activity so that it "fills the mind"--has been subjected to much scientific inquiry. David LaBerge now provides a systematic view of the attention process as it occurs in everyday perception, thinking, and action. Drawing from a variety of research methods and findings from cognitive psychology, neurobiology, and computer science, he presents a masterful synthesis of what is understood about attentional processing.
LaBerge explores how we are able to restrict the input of extraneous and confusing information, or prepare to process a future stimulus, in order to take effective action. As well as describing the pathways in the cortex presumed to be involved in attentional processing, he examines the hypothesis that two subcortical structures, the superior colliculus and the thalamus, contain circuit mechanisms that embody an algorithm of attention. In addition, he takes us through various ways of posing the problem, from an information-processing description of how attention works to a consideration of some of the cognitive and behavioral consequences of the brain's computations, such as desiring, judging, imaging, and remembering.
Attentional Processing is a highly sophisticated integration of contributions from several fields of neuroscience. It brings together the latest efforts to solve the puzzle of attention: how it works, how it is modulated, what its benefits are, and how it is expressed in the brain.
This immensely readable introduction to animal acoustics explains not only how animals hear but why they listen. It is a unique blend of audition, auditory anatomy, physics of sound, and methods of psychophysics, combined with behavior, natural history, and evolution. The Acoustic Sense of Animals is ideal for graduate and undergraduate courses, and for professionals in fields such as sensory physiology and animal behavior.
In his broadly comparative approach, Stebbins explores the function of hearing for each animal in its particular ecological setting and the significance of communication for members of a species. He renders the evolution of hearing with special emphasis on the peripheral auditory system and basic auditory function. Although ample evidence is brought to bear, both from the laboratory and from field studies, the book is not burdened with excessive detail. The writing is crisp, and the references are tailored to those most useful for nonspecialists.
The Acoustic Sense of Animals covers a complex field with balance and clarity within a solid evolutionary framework. Equally important, it conveys the controversy and excitement that will motivate students.
Inducing highs of excitement, anger, and terror, adrenaline fuels the extremes of human experience. A rush empowers superhuman feats in emergencies. Risk-taking junkies seek to replicate this feeling in dangerous recreations. And a surge may literally scare us to death. Adrenaline brings us up to speed on the fascinating molecule that drives some of our most potent experiences.
Adrenaline was discovered in 1894 and quickly made its way out of the lab into clinics around the world. In this engrossing account, Brian Hoffman examines adrenaline in all its capacities, from a vital regulator of physiological functions to the subject of Nobel Prize–winning breakthroughs. Because its biochemical pathways are prototypical, adrenaline has had widespread application in hormone research leading to the development of powerful new drugs. Hoffman introduces the scientists to whom we owe our understanding, tracing the paths of their discoveries and aspirations and allowing us to appreciate the crucial role adrenaline has played in pushing modern medicine forward.
Hoffman also investigates the vivid, at times lurid, place adrenaline occupies in the popular imagination, where accounts of its life-giving and lethal properties often leave the realm of fact. Famous as the catalyst of the “fight or flight” response, adrenaline has also received forensic attention as a perfect poison, untraceable in the bloodstream—and rumors persist of its power to revive the dead. True to the spirit of its topic, Adrenaline is a stimulating journey that reveals the truth behind adrenaline’s scientific importance and enduring popular appeal.
The Arts of the Microbial World explores the significance of fermentation phenomena, both as life processes and as technologies, in Japanese scientific culture. Victoria Lee’s careful study documents how Japanese scientists and skilled workers sought to use the microbe’s natural processes to create new products, from soy-sauce mold starters to MSG, vitamins to statins. In traditional brewing houses as well as in the food, fine chemical, and pharmaceutical industries across Japan, they showcased their ability to deal with the enormous sensitivity and variety of the microbial world.
Charting developments in fermentation science from the turn of the twentieth century, when Japan was an industrializing country on the periphery of the world economy, to 1980 when it had emerged as a global technological and economic power, Lee highlights the role of indigenous techniques in modern science as it took shape in Japan. In doing so, she reveals how knowledge of microbes lay at the heart of some of Japan’s most prominent technological breakthroughs in the global economy.
At a moment when twenty-first-century developments in the fields of antibiotic resistance, the microbiome, and green chemistry suggest that the traditional eradication-based approach to the microbial world is unsustainable, twentieth-century Japanese microbiology provides a new, broader vantage for understanding and managing microbial interactions with society.
Examining the racial underpinnings of food, microbial medicine, and disgust in America
American Disgust shows how perceptions of disgust and fears of contamination are rooted in the country’s history of colonialism and racism. Drawing on colonial, corporate, and medical archives, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer argues that microbial medicine is closely entwined with changing cultural experiences of digestion, excrement, and disgust that are inextricably tied to the creation of whiteness.
Ranging from nineteenth-century colonial encounters with Native people to John Harvey Kellogg’s ideas around civilization and bowel movements to mid-twentieth-century diet and parenting advice books, Wolf-Meyer analyzes how embedded racist histories of digestion and disgust permeate contemporary debates around fecal microbial transplants and other bacteriotherapeutic treatments for gastrointestinal disease.
At its core, American Disgust wrestles with how changing cultural notions of digestion—what goes into the body and what comes out of it—create and impose racial categories motivated by feelings of disgust rooted in American settler-colonial racism. It shows how disgust is a changing, yet fundamental, aspect of American subjectivity and that engaging with it—personally, politically, and theoretically—opens up possibilities for conceptualizing health at the individual, societal, and planetary levels.
A major new reading of a U.S. public health system shaped by fraught perceptions of culture, race, and criminality
At the heart of Archiving Medical Violence is an interrogation of the notions of national and scientific progress, marking an advance in scholarship that shows how such violence is both an engine of medical progress and, more broadly, the production of empire. It reads the medical archive through a lens that centers how it is produced, remembered, and contested within cultural production and critical memory.
In this innovative and interdisciplinary book, Christopher Perreira argues that it is in the contradictions of settler colonialism and racial capitalism that we find how medical violence is narrated as a public good. He presents case studies from across a range of locations—Hawai‘i, California, Louisiana, Guatemala—and historical periods from the nineteenth century on. Examining national and scientific conceptions of progress through the lens of medicine and public health, he places official archives in dialogue with visual and literary works, patient writing, and more.
Archiving Medical Violence explores the contested public terrains for narrating value and vulnerabilities, bodies and geographical locations. Ultimately, Perreira reveals for us a medical imaginary built on racialized criminality driving contemporary politics of citizenship, memory, and identity.
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She was first considered "subversive" during World War I, yet she lived to protest our involvement in Vietnam. She was America's foremost industrial toxicologist, a pioneer in medicine and in social reform, long-time resident of Hull House, pacifist and civil libertarian. She was Edith Hamilton's sister, and the first woman on the faculty of Harvard, though she retired--an assistant professor in the school of public health--ten years before women medical students were admitted.
This legendary figure now comes to life in an integrated work of biography and letters. A keen observer and an extraordinarily complex woman, Alice Hamilton left a rich correspondence, spanning the period from 1888 to 1965, that forms a journal of her times as well as of her life. The letters document the range of her involvement, from the battle against lead poisoning to debates with Felix Frankfurter over civil liberties. But as Alice Hamilton describes a woman's medical education in the late nineteenth century, her unlikely adventures in city slums, mine shafts, and factories, her work with Jane Addams and the women's peace movement, we also witness the stages of one woman's evolution from self-deprecating girl to leading social advocate. The charming details of her girlhood help us to understand her conflicted need to escape Victorian constraints without violating her own notion of femininity, a dilemma resolved only by a career combining science with service.
Beautifully realized works themselves, these letters have been woven by Barbara Sicherman into an exemplary biography that opens a window on the Progressive era.
This legendary figure now comes to life in an integrated work of biography and letters that reveals the personal as well as the professional woman. In documenting Hamilton's evolution from a childhood of privilege to a life of social advocacy, the volume opens a window on women reformers and their role in Progressive Era politics and reform. Because Hamilton was a keen observer and vivid writer, her letters--more than 100 are included here--bring an unmatched freshness and immediacy to a range of subjects, such as medical education; personal relationships and daily life at Hull House; the women's peace movement; struggles for the protection of workers' health; academic life at Harvard; politics and civil liberties during the cold war; and the process of growing old. Her story takes the reader from the Gilded Age to the Vietnam War.
Much like the Information Age of the twenty-first century, the Industrial Age was a period of great social changes brought about by rapid industrialization and urbanization, speed of travel, and global communications. The literature, medicine, science, and popular journalism of the nineteenth century attempted to diagnose problems of the mind and body that such drastic transformations were thought to generate: a range of conditions or “diseases of modernity” resulting from specific changes in the social and physical environment. The alarmist rhetoric of newspapers and popular periodicals, advertising various “neurotic remedies,” in turn inspired a new class of physicians and quack medical practices devoted to the treatment and perpetuation of such conditions.
Anxious Times examines perceptions of the pressures of modern life and their impact on bodily and mental health in nineteenth-century Britain. The authors explore anxieties stemming from the potentially harmful impact of new technologies, changing work and leisure practices, and evolving cultural pressures and expectations within rapidly changing external environments. Their work reveals how an earlier age confronted the challenges of seemingly unprecedented change, and diagnosed transformations in both the culture of the era and the life of the mind.
By analyzing the amalgam of Greek philosophy, Jewish and Christian teachings, and secular humanism that composes our dominant ethical system, the authors of this volume explore the question of whether or not Western and non-Western moral values can be commingled without bilateral loss of cultural integrity. They take as their philosophical point of departure the observation that both ethical relativism and ethical absolutism have become morally indefensible in the context of the multicultural American life, and they variously consider the need for an ethical middle ground.
Do people of differing ethnicities, cultures, and races view medicine and bioethics differently? And, if they do, should they? Are doctors and researchers taking environmental perspectives into account when dealing with patients? If so, is it done effectively and properly?
In African American Bioethics, Lawrence J. Prograis Jr. and Edmund D. Pellegrino bring together medical practitioners, researchers, and theorists to assess one fundamental question: Is there a distinctive African American bioethics?
The book's contributors resoundingly answer yes—yet their responses vary. They discuss the continuing African American experience with bioethics in the context of religion and tradition, work, health, and U.S. society at large—finding enough commonality to craft a deep and compelling case for locating a black bioethical framework within the broader practice, yet recognizing profound nuances within that framework.
As a more recent addition to the study of bioethics, cultural considerations have been playing catch-up for nearly two decades. African American Bioethics does much to advance the field by exploring how medicine and ethics accommodate differing cultural and racial norms, suggesting profound implications for growing minority groups in the United States.
An unflinching examination of the moral and professional dilemmas faced by physicians who took part in the Manhattan Project.
After his father died, James L. Nolan, Jr., took possession of a box of private family materials. To his surprise, the small secret archive contained a treasure trove of information about his grandfather’s role as a doctor in the Manhattan Project. Dr. Nolan, it turned out, had been a significant figure. A talented ob-gyn radiologist, he cared for the scientists on the project, organized safety and evacuation plans for the Trinity test at Alamogordo, escorted the “Little Boy” bomb from Los Alamos to the Pacific Islands, and was one of the first Americans to enter the irradiated ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Participation on the project challenged Dr. Nolan’s instincts as a healer. He and his medical colleagues were often conflicted, torn between their duty and desire to win the war and their oaths to protect life. Atomic Doctors follows these physicians as they sought to maximize the health and safety of those exposed to nuclear radiation, all the while serving leaders determined to minimize delays and maintain secrecy. Called upon both to guard against the harmful effects of radiation and to downplay its hazards, doctors struggled with the ethics of ending the deadliest of all wars using the most lethal of all weapons. Their work became a very human drama of ideals, co-optation, and complicity.
A vital and vivid account of a largely unknown chapter in atomic history, Atomic Doctors is a profound meditation on the moral dilemmas that ordinary people face in extraordinary times.
Roman Catholic moral theology is the point of departure for this multifaceted exploration of the challenge of allocating scarce medical resources.
The volume begins its exploration of discerning moral limits to modern high-technology medicine with a consensus statement born of the conversations among its contributors. The seventeen essays use the example of critical care, because it offers one of the few areas in medicine where there are good clinical predictive measures regarding the likelihood of survival. As a result, the health care industry can with increasing accuracy predict the probability of saving lives—and at what cost.
Because critical care involves hard choices in the face of finitude, it invites profound questions about the meaning of life, the nature of a good death, and distributive justice. For those who identify the prize of human life as immortality, the question arises as to how much effort should be invested in marginally postponing death. In a secular culture that presumes that individuals live only once, and briefly, there is an often-unacknowledged moral imperative to employ any means necessary to postpone death. The conflict between the free choice of individuals and various aspirations to equality compounds the challenge of controlling medical costs while also offering high-tech care to those who want its possible benefits. It forces society to confront anew notions of ordinary versus extraordinary, and proportionate versus disproportionate, treatment in a highly technologically structured social context.
This cluster of discussions is enriched by five essays from Jewish, Orthodox Christian, and Protestant perspectives. Written by premier scholars from the United States and abroad, these essays will be valuable reading for students and scholars of bioethics and Christian moral theology.
According to a recent Institute of Medicine report, as many as 98,000 Americans die each year as a result of medical error—a figure higher than deaths from automobile accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS. That astounding number of fatalities does not include the number of those serious mistakes that are grievous and damaging but not fatal. Who can forget the tragic case of 17-year-old Jésica Santillán, who died after receiving a heart-lung transplant with an incompatible blood type? What can be done about this? What should be done? How can patients and their families regain a sense of trust in the hospitals and clinicians that care for them? Where do we even begin the discussion?
Accountability brings the issue to the table in response to the demand for patient safety and increased accountability regarding medical errors. In an interdisciplinary approach, Virginia Sharpe draws together the insights of patients and families who have suffered harm, institutional leaders galvanized to reform by tragic events in their own hospitals, philosophers, historians, and legal theorists. Many errors can be traced to flaws in complex systems of health care delivery, not flaws in individual performance. How then should we structure responsibility for medical mistakes so that justice for the injured can be achieved alongside the collection of information that can improve systems and prevent future error? Bringing together authoritative voices of family members, health care providers, and scholars—from such disciplines as medical history, economics, health policy, law, philosophy, and theology—this book examines how conventional structures of accountability in law and medical structure (structures paradoxically at odds with justice and safety) should be replaced by more ethically informed federal, state, and institutional policies. Accountability calls for public policy that creates not only systems capable of openness concerning safety and error—but policy that also delivers just compensation and honest and humane treatment to those patients and families who have suffered from harmful medical error.
Michael S. Goldstein's Alternative Health Care is the first comprehensive account of the growing presence of alternative medicine in American society. Beginning with the basic premises of alternative medicine, Goldstein's book examines the clinical, economic, and political realities of the broad range of alternative care options and practices in the United States and explains why alternative medicine has become a viable choice for so many people who are ill or who seek to remain healthy.
Bringing history, policy, practice, personal experience, and in-depth sociological analysis together into one comprehensive volume, Goldstein -- one of the first recipients of funding from the National Institute of Health for research on alternative medicine -- also studies the complexities of the relationship between spirituality and alternative medicine and the changing role of alternative medicine in the larger context of American health care. Probing such issues as the corporatization of medicine, the role of alternative medicine in health care, and the dynamic relationship between conventional and alternative treatments, Goldstein's Alternative Health Care is more than the long-awaited introduction to the many forms of alternative medicine. It is also the measure of the implications of such care for practitioners, businesses, policymakers, and patients alike.
Alternative Health Care is the definitive guide for the millions of Americans interested in alternative medicine and treatment, American health care, the sociology of medicine, and American social issues.
Combining literary studies, the history of science, and visual culture studies, Heinrich analyzes the rhetoric and iconography through which medical missionaries transmitted to the West an image of China as “sick” or “diseased.” He also examines the absorption of that image back into China through missionary activity, through the earliest translations of Western medical texts into Chinese, and even through the literature of Chinese nationalism. Heinrich argues that over time “scientific” Western representations of the Chinese body and culture accumulated a host of secondary meanings, taking on an afterlife with lasting consequences for conceptions of Chinese identity in China and beyond its borders.
“If you want to understand how the latest advances in genomics and AI can completely transform your health, and to translate this promise into practical tools that you can apply today, read this book!”—Mark Hyman, author of Young Forever
Taking us to the cutting edge of the new frontier of medicine, a visionary biotechnologist and a pathbreaking researcher show how we can optimize our health in ways that were previously unimaginable.
We are on the cusp of a major transformation in healthcare—yet few people know it. At top hospitals and a few innovative health-tech startups, scientists are working closely with patients to dramatically extend their “healthspan”—the number of healthy years before disease sets in. In The Age of Scientific Wellness, two visionary leaders of this revolution in health take us on a thrilling journey to this new frontier of medicine.
Today, most doctors wait for clinical symptoms to appear before they act, and the ten most commonly prescribed medications confer little or no benefit to most people taking them. Leroy Hood and Nathan Price argue that we must move beyond this reactive, hit-or-miss approach to usher in real precision health—a form of highly personalized care they call “scientific wellness.” Using information gleaned from our blood and genes and tapping into the data revolution made possible by AI, doctors can catch the onset of disease years before symptoms arise, revolutionizing prevention. Current applications have shown startling results: diabetes reversed, cancers eliminated, Alzheimer’s avoided, autoimmune conditions kept at bay.
This is not a future fantasy: it is already happening, but only for a few patients and at high cost. It’s time to make this gold standard of care more widely available. Inspiring in its possibilities, radical in its conclusions, The Age of Scientific Wellness shares actionable insights to help you chart a course to a longer, healthier, and more fulfilling life.
Many people in developing countries lack access to health technologies, even basic ones. Why do these problems in access persist? What can be done to improve access to good health technologies, especially for poor people in poor countries?
This book answers those questions by developing a comprehensive analytical framework for access and examining six case studies to explain why some health technologies achieved more access than others. The technologies include praziquantel (for the treatment of schistosomiasis), hepatitis B vaccine, malaria rapid diagnostic tests, vaccine vial monitors for temperature exposure, the Norplant implant contraceptive, and female condoms.
Based on research studies commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to better understand the development, adoption, and uptake of health technologies in poor countries, the book concludes with specific lessons on strategies to improve access. These lessons will be of keen interest to students of health and development, public health professionals, and health technology developers—all who seek to improve access to health technologies in poor countries.
The essays in this volume form the cutting edge of biohistorical research that promises to rewrite the story of humankind's past in significant ways.
In this short, easy-to-read book designed as a concise but effective healthcare guide, Dr. Harold Kennedy, with more than 60 years of experience practicing medicine, guides readers through the healthcare maze faced by many seniors. While the information in this book is not intended to diagnose or treat ailments, it will give readers a valuable foundation of health literacy, crucial in making good decisions regarding their health and medical care services, and that of their loved ones.
Written expressly to help persons aged 60 years and older, Aging and Health for the US Elderly: A Health Primer for Ages 60 to 90 is essential reading for all older Americans. Chapter topics include health risk factors; social determinants of disease; best practices; and up-to-date prevention, surveillance, and wellness, with special chapters tailored specifically for women and for men. Coverage also includes an overview of the U.S. health care system, both its history and the current state of affairs. Scientific validity of the evidence is provided by more than 180 references.
In Ailing in Place, Michele Morrone explores the relationship between environmental conditions in Appalachia and health outcomes that are too often ascribed to individual choices only. She applies quantitative data to observations from environmental health professionals to frame the ways in which the environment, as a social determinant of health, leads to health disparities in Appalachian communities. These examples—these stories of place—trace the impacts of water quality, waste disposal, and natural resource extraction on the health and quality of life of Appalachian people.
Public health is inextricably linked to place. Environmental conditions such as contaminated water, unsafe food, and polluted air are as important as culture, community, and landscape in characterizing a place and determining the health outcomes of the people who live there. In some places, the state of the environment is a consequence of historical activities related to natural resources and cultural practices. In others, political decisions to achieve short-term economic objectives are made with little consideration of long-term public health consequences.
These conditions prompted civic activism in the form of “anti-smoke” campaigns to attack the unsightly physical manifestations of coal burning. This early period witnessed significant cooperation between industrialists, government, and citizens to combat the smoke problem. It was not until the 1960s, when attention shifted from dust and grime to hazardous invisible gases, that cooperation dissipated, and protests took an antagonistic turn.
The Age of Smoke presents an original, comparative history of environmental policy and protest in the United States and Germany. Dividing this history into distinct eras (1880 to World War I, interwar, post-World War II to 1970), Frank Uekoetter compares and contrasts the influence of political, class, and social structures, scientific communities, engineers, industrial lobbies, and environmental groups in each nation. He concludes with a discussion of the environmental revolution, arguing that there were indeed two environmental revolutions in both countries: one societal, where changing values gave urgency to air pollution control, the other institutional, where changes in policies tried to catch up with shifting sentiments.
Focusing on a critical period in environmental history, The Age of Smoke provides a valuable study of policy development in two modern industrial nations, and the rise of civic activism to combat air pollution. As Uekoetter's work reveals, the cooperative approaches developed in an earlier era offer valuable lessons and perhaps the best hope for future progress.
Contributors. Cecilia Aldarondo, Pablo Alvarez, Marlon M. Bailey, Emily Bass, Darius Bost, Ian Bradley-Perrin, Jih-Fei Cheng, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Roger Hallas, Pato Hebert, Jim Hubbard, Andrew J. Jolivette, Julia S. Jordan-Zachery, Alexandra Juhasz, Dredge Byung'chu Kang-Nguyễn, Theodore (Ted) Kerr, Catherine Yuk-ping Lo, Cait McKinney, Viviane Namaste, Elton Naswood, Cindy Patton, Margaret Rhee, Juana María Rodríguez, Sarah Schulman, Nishant Shahani, C. Riley Snorton, Eric A. Stanley, Jessica Whitbread, Quito Ziegler
Lucid and compellingly written, Patricia Siplon has immersed herself in the history and ongoing firestorms of how AIDS policies are influenced, fought over, and enacted in the United States. AIDS and the Policy Struggle in the United States is equally as engrossing and as revealing in its own way as And the Band Played On. With an initial chapter that clearly follows the tangled historical string from the first realizations of a medical emergency to today's overwhelming worldwide epidemical crisis, she goes on to look at how medical treatments have changed and grown; how blood policies were formed; how value-based debates raged and continue to rage over prevention; how communities developed to first respond to the crisis, and later organized to fight for health care; and finally-now that AIDS is recognized for the global crisis it is-how foreign policy is being shaped.
Invaluable for activists and anyone involved in fighting for the humane treatment of people with HIV/AIDS around the world, this is also an important and insightful guide to the how and what of public policy as it is fashioned out of the clay of U.S. democratic institutions.
A Choice Significant University Press Titles for Undergraduates, 2005–2006
This history of the African AIDS epidemic is a much-needed, accessibly written historical account of the most serious epidemiological catastrophe of modern times. The African AIDS Epidemic: A History answers President Thabo Mbeki’s provocative question as to why Africa has suffered this terrible epidemic.
While Mbeki attributed the causes to poverty and exploitation, others have looked to distinctive sexual systems practiced in African cultures and communities. John Iliffe stresses historical sequence. He argues that Africa has had the worst epidemic because the disease was established in the general population before anyone knew the disease existed. HIV evolved with extraordinary speed and complexity, and because that evolution took place under the eyes of modern medical research scientists, Iliffe has been able to write a history of the virus itself that is probably unique among accounts of human epidemic diseases. In giving the African experience a historical shape, Iliffe has written one of the most important books of our time.
The African experience of AIDS has taught the world much of what it knows about HIV/AIDS, and this fascinating book brings into focus many aspects of the epidemic in the longer context of massive demographic growth, urbanization, and social change in Africa during the latter half of the twentieth century. The African AIDS Epidemic: A History is a brilliant introduction to the many aspects of the epidemic and the distinctive character of the virus.
Act Up-Paris became one of the most notable protest groups in France in the mid-1990s. Founded in 1989, and following the New York model, it became a confrontational voice representing the interests of those affected by HIV through openly political activism. Action=Vie, the English-language translation of Christophe Broqua’s study of the grassroots activist branch, explains the reasons for the group’s success and sheds light on Act Up's defining features—such as its unique articulation between AIDS and gay activism.
Featuring numerous accounts by witnesses and participants, Broqua traces the history of Act Up-Paris and shows how thousands of gay men and women confronted the AIDS epidemic by mobilizing with public actions. Act Up-Paris helped shape the social definition not only of HIV-positive persons but also of sexual minorities. Broqua analyzes the changes brought about by the group, from the emergence of new treatments for HIV infection to normalizing homosexuality and a controversy involving HIV-positive writers’ remarks about unprotected sex. This rousing history ends in the mid-2000s before marriage equality and antiretroviral treatments caused Act Up-Paris to decline.
The deluge of metaphors triggered in 1981 in France by the first public reports of what would turn out to be the AIDS epidemic spread with far greater speed and efficiency than the virus itself. To understand why it took France so long to react to the AIDS crisis, AIDS in French Culture analyzes the intersections of three discourses—the literary, the medical, and the political—and traces the origin of French attitudes about AIDS back to nineteenth-century anxieties about nationhood, masculinity, and sexuality.
In Ancestors and Antiretrovirals, Claire Laurier Decoteau backs up Tutu’s assertion with powerful arguments about how this came to pass. Decoteau traces the historical shifts in health policy after apartheid and describes their effects, detailing, in particular, the changing relationship between biomedical and indigenous health care, both at the national and the local level. Decoteau tells this story from the perspective of those living with and dying from AIDS in Johannesburg’s squatter camps. At the same time, she exposes the complex and often contradictory ways that the South African government has failed to balance the demands of neoliberal capital with the considerable health needs of its population.
Drawing on twenty years of fieldwork in Nigeria, Smith tells a story of dramatic social changes, ones implicated in the same inequalities that also factor into local perceptions about AIDS—inequalities of gender, generation, and social class. Nigerians, he shows, view both social inequality and the presence of AIDS in moral terms, as kinds of ethical failure. Mixing ethnographies that describe everyday life with pointed analyses of public health interventions, he demonstrates just how powerful these paired anxieties—medical and social—are, and how the world might better alleviate them through a more sensitive understanding of their relationship.
In the ten years since the first cases of AIDS were reported, the disease has spread around the world. Every country has had to come up with policies suited to its own conditions, economy, culture, and institutions. The differences among their approaches are striking. This volume, the first international comprehensive comparison of responses to AIDS, is a unique guide to the world's most urgent public health crisis.
Sixteen leading experts in public health, social science, government, and public policy from USA, Canada, Germany, Australia, Spain, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Japan candidly recount and analyze the responses of their own nations and comment on the lessons that can be drawn from each country's experience. For each country, they look critically at the tragic statistics of AIDS incidence; the circumstances of AIDS's first appearance; public health traditions of mandatory screening, contact tracing, and quarantine; attitudes toward drug abuse, homosexuality, sex education; publicity about AIDS; legal and customary protections of civil rights, minority groups, medical confidentiality; access to health care and insurance; and the interplay of formal and informal interest groups in shaping policy. The spectrum of AIDS policy ranges from severe "contain-and-control" programs to much more liberal plans based on education, cooperation, and inclusion.
No matter what policy a nation has constructed to deal with AIDS, the coming decade will test how well that policy conforms to democratic ideals. By scrutinizing the responses to AIDS so far, this book aims to give countries around the world a chance to learn from each others' mistakes and triumphs. It will be essential reading for all students and professionals in public health and public policy.
The impact of the AIDS pandemic on health systems and entire societies in the 1990s will be much more severe than it was in the last decade; up-to-date information about the disease is now crucial. Yet even though readers are deluged by technical publications and popularizations, no single book tracks, on an annual basis, the evolution of the pandemic, its effects, and the worldwide response.
To fill this gap, Jonathan Mann, founding director of the World Health Organization's Global Progam on AIDS and currently director of the International AIDS Center at Harvard University, has assembled a team of experts to produce an unprecedented document for our time. AIDS in the World will synthesize the best possible information, data, and thinking about AIDS into a volume that is destined to become a landmark publication. AIDS in the World will provide a vital guide to rekindling the worldwide assault on AIDS. To ensure that AIDS in the World 1992 is both timely and authoritative, the editors have enlisted the support of an extensive team of researchers, specialists, scientists, writers, and experts to provide a solid basis for new and original thinking on a wide range of topics.
This book reviews the status of the disease, including numbers of AIDS cases and deaths; AIDS and HIV prevalence; mortality rates; links between other infections and HlV breakthroughs in biomedical, clinical, and behavioral areas; prevention and care; legislation and human rights issues; and economic and demographic aspects. AIDS in the World 1992 provides a global assessment for where we are now and where we are headed; it spotlights critical issues and highlights communities and countries that may be especially vulnerable to the dissemination of HIV. With publication scheduled before the VIIIth International Conference on AIDS in July 1992, this work will be indispensable for governments, policymakers, scientists, health care workers, and journalists around the world who will rely on this book to make the crucial decisions of this decade and the next.
The stories reveal the dynamics that determine how the policy decisions of white-collar health care professionals actually play out in real life. By focusing on life-changing social problems, the narratives highlight the contradictions between public health and criminal law. Look at how HIV has transformed our social consciousness, from intimate touch to institutional outreach. But, Kane argues, these changes are dwarfed by the United States's refusal to stop the war on drugs, in effect misdirecting resources and awareness.
AIDS Alibis combines empirical and interpretive methods in a path-breaking attempt to recognize the extent to which coercive institutional practices are implicated in HIV transmission patterns. Kane shows how th e virus feeds on the politics of inequality and indifference, even as it exploits the human need for intimacy and release.
AIDS is unquestionably the most serious threat to public health in this century--yet how effective has the United States been in coping with this deadly disease? This sobering analysis of the first five years of the AIDS epidemic reveals the failure of traditional approaches in recognizing and managing this health emergency; it is an extremely unsettling probe into what makes the nation ill equipped to handle a crisis of the magnitude of the one that now confronts us.
Sandra Panem pays particular attention to the Public Health Service, within which the vast majority of biomedical research and public health services are organized, including the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. We learn in dismaying detail how shortcomings in communication within and among the many layers of the health establishment delayed management of the crisis.
She also investigates other problems that surface during a health emergency, involving issues such as federal budgeting, partisan politics, bureaucratic bungles, educating the public, the complications of policymaking, and the vexing role of the press. Panem makes specific recommendations for a centrally coordinated federal response to health emergencies, including the creation of a national health emergency plan.
Contemplating the contradictions of individual identity from within a human body adapting to and living within a collective national culture, Yingling delves into such issues as canon formation, poetic theory, and the rhetoric of the body in American popular culture. In addition to Wiegman’s illuminating introduction, the conversation is joined by four other scholars—Michael Awkward, Robert L. Caserio, Stephen Melville, and David Román—whose critical and personal responses to Yingling’s writing weigh in throughout the volume. What emerges is a collection that embodies the particular difficulties of living with AIDS, of outliving someone who has died of AIDS, and of losing prematurely an important thinker.
In American Catholic Hospitals, Barbra Mann Wall chronicles changes in Catholic hospitals during the twentieth century, many of which are emblematic of trends in the American healthcare system.
Wall explores the Church's struggle to safeguard its religious values. As hospital leaders reacted to increased political, economic, and societal secularization, they extended their religious principles in the areas of universal health care and adherence to the Ethical and Religious Values in Catholic Hospitals, leading to tensions between the Church, government, and society. The book also examines the power of women--as administrators, Catholic sisters wielded significant authority--as well as the gender disparity in these institutions which came to be run, for the most part, by men. Wall also situates these critical transformations within the context of the changing Church policy during the 1960s. She undertakes unprecedented analyses of the gendered politics of post-Second Vatican Council Catholic hospitals, as well as the effect of social movements on the practice of medicine.
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