Historian A. R. Ruis explores the origins of American school meal initiatives to explain why it has been so difficult to establish meal programs that satisfy the often competing interests of children, parents, schools, health authorities, politicians, and the food industry.  
 

Medical historian, medical researcher, and clinician Powel H. Kazanjian uses Novy’s archived letters, laboratory notebooks, lecture notes, and published works to examine medical research and educational activities at the University of Michigan and other key medical schools during a formative period in modern U.S. medical science.
 

Nursing with a Message transports readers to New York City in the 1920s and 1930s, charting the rise and fall of two community health centers.  Patricia D’Antonio examines the day-to-day operations of these clinics, as well as the community outreach work done by nurses who visited schools, churches, and homes. Assessing both the successes and failures of these public health projects, she also traces their legacy in shaping both the best and worst elements of today’s primary care system. 

 

In Selling Science, medical historian Stephen E. Mawdsley recounts the untold story of the first large clinical trial to control polio, using 55,000 healthy children. The value of the proposed experiment was questioned by many prominent health professionals, but as Mawdsley points out, compromise and coercion moved it forward. He shows that at a time when most Americans trusted scientists, their mutual encounter under the auspices of conquering disease was shaped by politics, marketing, and at times, deception.

Transplanting Care examines the daily lives of midwestern organ transplant patients and their caregivers, from pretransplant preparations through to the long posttransplant recovery. Drawing on scores of interviews with patients, relatives, and healthcare professionals, Laura L. Heinemann follows a variety of patients and loved ones as they undertake this difficult “transplant journey” while coping with a paucity of resources for caregiving.

In Privacy and the Past, medical historian Susan C. Lawrence explores the impact of research ethics and increasing privacy concerns on the study of history, offering insight into what historians should do when they research, write about, and name real people in their work. Engagingly written and powerfully argued, this book is an important first step in preventing privacy regulations from affecting the historical record and the ways that historians help us understand ourselves.

In American Catholic Hospitals, Barbra Mann Wall chronicles changes in Catholic hospitals during the twentieth century. 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. Wall 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.