Diphtheria

"A well-researched, qualitative analysis of how the US mass media covered typhoid fever, diptheria, and syphilis from 1870 to 1920. Ziporyn, a free-lance writer and former American Association for the Advancement of Science mass media fellow, finds consistently high press coverage of typhoid fever contrasted with media disinterest in diptheria and cautious reporting about syphilis. The press's approaches differed, she explains, because the news media responded to dissimilar social values about typhoid fever, diptheria, and syphilis at the turn of the century. Ziporyn's observations are aided by a thorough, well-footnoted analysis of publications across 14 categories." Choice

The Epidemic Streets represents a major advance in the historical study of death and disease in the nineteenth century. Anne Hardy has drawn on a wide range of public health records for a detailed epidemiological investigation of the behaviour of the infectious diseases in the Victorian city. Whooping cough and measles, scarlet fever and diptheria, smallpox, typhus, typhoid, and tuberculosis ravaged millions of families and made life desperately uncertain a hundred years ago; today they have almost ceased to trouble the developed world. Dr Hardy explores thefactors which helped to reduce their fatality, focusing particularly on the role of preventive medicine, and on the local and domestic circumstances which affected the behaviour of the different diseases. This is a significant contribution to the historical debate that arose from Thomas McKeown's theory ofmodern population growth, and it also extends our understanding of the ways in which Victorian society - both lay and medical - coped with the problems of endemic and epidemic infectious disease.

Discussing laws in the current research funding decision process, the author suggests ways to improve future funding of health research systems. Chapters recount ways of raising funds, the tragic way authorities improperly introduced diptheria immunization, consideration of how the peer review system evolved in response to massive infusion of funds in the 1940s, and the status quo generating a climate conducive to ethics violations, among others.

This fascinating work will be an invaluable tool to researchers, health care workers, members of government agencies and those in charitable organizations that support health research, as well as to anyone interested in current trends in this area, including patients.

Recent revelations of child abuse have highlighted the need for understanding the historical background to current attitudes towards child health and welfare. In the Name of the Child explores a variety of professional, social, political and cultural constructions of the child in the decades around the First World War. It describes how medical and welfare initiatives in the name of the child were shaped and how changes in medical and welfare provisions were closely allied to political and ideological interests.