Believed to affect around 7 of every 1,000 individuals in the United States, the neurological disease multiple sclerosis can damage nerve tissue, destroy muscles, cause blindness, and take away the ability to walk. As the awareness of MS has increased, the desire to find a cure has become an organized cause. Funds for research have increased significantly. This work provides an historical overview of MS and those who have lived with and died from it, as well as medical treatments prescribed throughout the known history of the disease. It includes a listing of autobiographies, biographies, novels, videos, studies and films that concern multiple sclerosis, as well as a list of attempted treatments.

Multiple Sclerosis Through History and Human Life

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Swiderski, Richard M.

Diseases & Physical Ailments

McFarland Publishing

Bacillus anthracis—anthrax—had largely faded from public consciousness until it resurfaced as a terrorist weapon in 2001. It was always with us, lurking in the soil and hosted by our livestock. Long before it was identified as a specific bacterium in the late 1800s, “anthrax” was a catchphrase for a variety of diseases and symptoms, from ancient biblical plagues to a painful carbuncle on George Washington’s leg. Only when industrialization turned anthrax into a widespread disease that threatened economies did a true understanding of Bacillus anthracis begin to emerge. This history of anthrax follows the development of our understanding of the disease, beginning in the 18th century, when science began breaking ground on the subject, until the present, when anthrax is feared more as an agent of biowarfare than as a health hazard harbored by the environment. There are three appendices: the first outlines the reaction of Manchester, New Hampshire, to the 2001 anthrax attacks; the second documents workplace warnings to anthrax-prone workers; and the third lists novels that involve anthrax. Bibliographical references are also provided.

Anthrax: A History

History

Americas

McFarland

Though modern scientists recognize mercury as a harmful environmental pollutant and one of the world's most dangerous elemental toxins, mercury was once considered a wondrous substance capable of eradicating internal disease, revolutionizing the paint and cosmetics industries and even entertaining the masses as part of amateur magic tricks and witch doctor scams. This work traces the history of mercury in popular culture, beginning in the early eighteenth century when Dr. Thomas Dover, nicknamed "Dr. Quicksilver," began prescribing doses of raw mercury to clear out intestinal blockages and rid the body of syphilis and other diseases. The author then details the role of mercury in several medical, industrial, and cultural applications. In the fields of dentistry and vaccination, mercury continues to be used as a preservative and amalgamative agent. In the cosmetics industry, mercury was once used as a popular "skin lightener" in soaps and skin creams. In the early development of obstetrics and gynecology, mercury was once used to stimulate conception and fetal abortion. These uses of mercury, along with many more, are outlined in the work, while several appendices provide translations of rare works which reference mercury.

Quicksilver: A History of the Use, Lore and Effects of Mercury

"This book began," says the author, "as a chronicle of a direct encounter with familiar technology in different hands, and gradually became an act of support for those uses and the people responsible. Its writing was part of having the same needs as everyone else in this African town, but having in addition a special ability to record and transmit the record of the needs' fulfillment. The book brings the reader into the world of getting through the week, every week, while routines suddenly turn and become history." Eldoret: An African Poetics of Technology is both a history and an anthropology of technology. As author Swiderski explains in the introduction, "Poetics', derived from the Greek verb poem meaning 'to make or do,' has as much to do with technology (material making) as with poetry (verbal making), and refers to the ongoing act of assembly that can look like the passage of time or the eternity of culture, and is actually both. It is an African poetics because the act of assembly is motivated by African conditions, and executed through the genius and strength of the African people." The resulting ethnography, illustrated with 32 of the author's delightful line drawings, is unconventional in design and brilliantly executed. It will be of considerable interest and value not only to cultural anthropologists but to many in geography, economics, business, technology studies, and allied fields. Drawing on his personal experience in living in Eldoret, Swiderski creates an impressionistic sketch of the hybridization of imported and indigenous technologies in this community, and of the varied patterns that are created as the residents of the town and its hinterland employ these technologies in everyday life. The poetic focus on technology is a creative and effective device for exploring many wider issues--entrepreneurship, resource management, wealth, poverty, structural unemployment, gender relations, ethnic and class conflict, and other problems of life and development in Third World communities. Swiderski's unconventional approach sets this book apart from other studies focusing on the adaptation of technologies in Third World cultures. His descriptions of urban scenes are uniformly vivid, and his presentation of the ambiance of modern Africa is compelling. Eldoret will be warmly welcomed by students and scholars in a wide range of fields.

Eldoret: An African Poetics of Technology (Culture and Technology)

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

University of Arizona Press

Whenever a new language is learned, a new culture is also learned. Swiderski provides instructive examples of language learning situations by describing multilingual events using more than twenty of the world's languages. All aspects of language learning from the physical environment of the classroom to the perceptions of events and emotions that languages express are considered. Australian aboriginal languages and Native American languages are analyzed to illustrate the world of differences of which English, Chinese, and Russian are also a part. The politics of language teaching and the effect of language policy in the classroom are brought out in concrete examples. This study will be of interest to language teachers and the general international community as well.

Teaching Language, Learning Culture

Praeger

Lives Between Cultures: A Study of Human Nature Identity and Culture

Anthropology

Denali Pr

Poison Eaters: Snakes, Opium, Arsenic, and the Lethal Show

Testing the boundaries between food, poison and medicine is a public show made into a continuing drama of risk and survival. This book is the first to explore the tradition of deliberate poison eating, its practitioners, and the substances that might nourish or kill them. Readers interested in the human history of drugs and medicine, in feats of endurance usually survived and in the play of controlling and regulatory authorities that always accompanies drug and poison use will find Poison Eaters especially appealing.

Medical Books

Pharmacology

Universal-Publishers

Aphrodite descends to protect her son, the Trojan warrior Aeneas, when Diomedes on the side of the Greeks severely injures him. Diomedes has been encouraged by Athena to attack Aphrodite whenever he encounters her siding with the Trojans. He pursues her spear at the ready and launches it into the hand that shelters her son, causing a wound that drips immortal blood, the ichor of the gods. Homer's verses in Book 5 of the Iliad then break aside, or were annotated, for a few lines to explain that the gods do not consume earthly food and drink and are therefore without blood and undying. This eight line passage of the Iliad, and the two lines later in the book that describe Aphrodite's healing by her mother Dione are the only words in the epic of the Trojan War on the physical nature of the gods and one of the few in which a mortal attacks a divinity. The words of the Greek original contain a great deal more information on the subject than a bare English translation provides. Over the centuries of commentary on and translation of the Iliad into post-Homeric forms of Greek, Latin and other languages these words have been seen to expose stalking and a rape, the fundamental constituents of gods and mortals, the force and curse of a warrior, the differences in sustenance among living beings, and the texture of wartime injury and healing. This book is a temporal travelogue of many translations through the lives of translators and the times in which they lived, the same words transformed and mutated within the coruscating glass of our common langauge.

The Wounded Goddess: A Pursuit in the Iliad and After

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Independently published

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