New Books In Public Health

Throughout American history, lawmakers have limited the range of treatments available to patients, often with the backing of the medical establishment. The country's history is also, however, brimming with social movements that have condemned such restrictions as violations of fundamental American liberties. This fierce conflict is one of the defining features of the social history of medicine in the United States. In Choose Your Medicine: Freedom of Therapeutic Choice in America (Oxford UP, 2021), Lewis A. Grossman presents a compelling look at how persistent but evolving notions of a right to therapeutic choice have affected American health policy, law, and regulation from the Revolution through the Trump Era. Grossman grounds his analysis in historical examples ranging from unschooled supporters of botanical medicine in the early nineteenth century to sophisticated cancer patient advocacy groups in the twenty-first. He vividly describes how activists and lawyers have resisted a wide variety of legal constraints on therapeutic choice, including medical licensing statutes, FDA limitations on unapproved drugs and alternative remedies, abortion restrictions, and prohibitions against medical marijuana and physician-assisted suicide. Grossman also considers the relationship between these campaigns for desired treatments and widespread opposition to state-compelled health measures such as vaccines and face masks. From the streets of San Francisco to the US Supreme Court, Choose Your Medicine examines an underexplored theme of American history, politics, and law that is more relevant today than ever.Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As we now know, epidemics and pandemics are not new phenomena. In her new book The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2020), Manuel Barcia offers a striking rendition of the diseases that swept through the illegal slave trade Atlantic World. In fact, Barcia argues that the history of disease and the story of continuing traffic in enslaved people despite the abolition of the slave trade are processes that must be understood together. Barcia demonstrates that in the 19th century Atlantic, quarantines were politicized, sworn enemies were forced to work together to combat disease, and the medical expertise of enslaved people often prevailed despite efforts to silence or ignore it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Melody Glenn was a burned-out emergency physician who had grown to resent the large population of opioid dependent patients passing through her ER. While working at a methadone clinic, she realized how effective harm reduction treatments could be and set out to discover why they weren’t used more broadly. That’s when she found Dr. Marie Nyswander.In the 1960s, Nyswander defied the DEA and medical establishment to co-develop methadone maintenance as a treatment for heroin addiction. According to some addiction specialists, its discovery could be considered as monumental as the discovery of penicillin. Yet, it still carries a stigma today.Deftly weaving together interviews, media coverage, and historical documents, Glenn recovers Nyswander’s important legacy and reveals how the forces of racism, fearmongering politicians, and misinformation colluded to set us back decades in our understandings of opioids.With Nyswander as her guide, Glenn also shares her journey through addiction medicine as she confronts her own personal and philosophical quandaries around bias, ambition, and saviorism in the medical field.As the US continues to struggle with opioid and fentanyl use in communities, Mother of Methadone is a powerful reminder of the ways biases have prevented doctors from saving countless lives. Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). Her second book, Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America’s Forgotten War on Drugs, will be released in 2026. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Not a lot of authors go from spending their early twenties homeless and addicted to cocaine to becoming one of the world’s leading researchers on the neuroscience of addiction. But Dr. Judith Grisel, in her new book Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction (Doubleday, 2019), uses her personal story to illuminate the ways in which the brain, in collusion with social and biological factors, makes addiction possible. In our discussion, Grisel outlines the effects of different drugs, explains the “three laws of psychopharmacology,” and wonders if we’ll ever find medicine’s “holy grail” – a cure for addiction.Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, she edits Points, the blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How and when did Russia become a country of smokers? Why did makhorka and papirosy become ubiquitous products of tobacco consumption? Tricia Starks explores these themes as well as the connections between tobacco, gender, and empire in her latest monograph, Smoking Under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia (Cornell University Press, 2018). Starks illustrates how tobacco influenced facets of life, politics, morality, and culture in the 19th century from the perspectives of tobacco users, producers, and objectors. The book includes full-color ads for tobacco and papirosy cigarettes that add to the book’s rich prose. From Tolstoy’s anti-tobacco screed to the “Tobacco Queens” of St. Petersburg, Starks uses primary sources to craft an edifying narrative of the history of tobacco and tobacco consumption in the imperial period.Tricia Starks is Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. Her research interests include Russian and Soviet history, public health and the history of medicine, as well as culture and gender.Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is a History Instructor at Lee College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joseph Gfroerer spent nearly 40 years working as a statistician for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Starting in 1988, when the American drug war was taking its current shape, he led the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), one of the federal government’s largest and most important ongoing health surveys that tracks Americans’ use of illegal drugs, prescription drugs, alcohol and tobacco. War Stories from the Drug Survey: How Culture, Politics, and Statistics Shaped the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (Cambridge UP, 2018), written after he retired, shows where the survey came from, details how it gathers information, and tracks the impact that the shifting cultural and political climate surrounding drug use played on how these statistics were understood. Gfroerer provides necessary insight on what drug use statistics have meant, how they’ve been used (and misused), and what this means for our understanding of drug use in America today.Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr Nick Fancourt is a Horizon Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the Sydney Medical School. He also works as a paediatrician at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead. Nick researches childhood pneumonia, particularly in low and middle income countries. He lived in Timor-Leste from 2018-2020, working with local partners on intitiatives to strengthen communicable disease surveillance. As this episodes guest he will discuss child health issues and outcomes in Timor-Leste. Timor-Leste has made significant progress in child survival, with deaths among young children reduced by 50% in the 20+ years since independence. Further progress is needed to achieve Sustainable Development Goal targets and meet strategic health priorities of the Timor-Leste government. Prevention and treatment of pneumonia and malnutrition are essential to these efforts, given the high burden of these conditions. Novel approaches will be needed, especially to reach high-risk groups, and will have global significance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Seminal: On Sperm, Health, and Politics, Rene Almeling, Lisa Campo-Engelstein, and Brian T. Nguyen come together across disciplines to offer a kaleidoscopic view of the relationship between sperm, health, and the intersecting politics of gender, race, and reproduction. Always insightful and often provocative, the essays in this unprecedented collection cover a broad range of issues related to male reproductive and sexual health—including the latest technological developments for creating sperm; the specter of eugenics in contemporary medical markets; emerging approaches to male contraceptive methods, male infertility, and trans healthcare; controversies surrounding sperm donors and sperm banking; disparities in sexual health education for teens—all the while attending to the enormous variation in how individuals and societies understand, embody, and experience sperm. At a time when the most basic rights of reproductive autonomy are under severe threat, contributors to this volume argue this is precisely the moment to rethink and reimagine sperm from a variety of medical, political, and cultural perspectives. Ultimately, this volume aims to contribute to a more reproductively just society and broaden conversations around bodies, health and equity in the United States. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is at the intersection of space, behavior, and identity. He is currently conducting research about: escape rooms, the use of urban design in downtown historical neighborhoods of rural communities, and a study on belongingness in college and university. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his personal website, Google Scholar, Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social), Twitter (@ProfessorJohnst), or by email (johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ungendering Menstruation by Ela Przybyło discusses why and how menstrual pain needs to be incorporated into discussions of gender, embodiment, and disability. Honing a "cranky" approach to being a menstruating body expected to accept and embrace trauma, Ungendering Menstruation examines menstrual suppression, toxicity, and the cooptation of menstrual positivity rhetoric. Drawing on their own experiences as a toxic shock survivor and a menstrual pain and period dysphoria sufferer, Ela Przybyło questions why, on what terms, and for whom menstruation has been fixed around experiences of pain. Instead, they present a vision for menstrual justice that refuses the womaning of bleeding and the further erasure, dismissal, and denial of menstrual pain as real pain. If menstruating is framed as somatechnically elective, Przybyło contends, it provides avenues for both celebrating and appreciating cultures of bleeding as well as for remaining critical of the ways in which bleeding has been used as a transphobic and sexist tool to fix gender in place. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ben Westhoff is an award-winning investigative journalist whose best-selling 2019 book Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic (Grove Press, 2019), was one of the first to take fentanyl seriously as both a social phenomenon and a national threat. Since its release, Westhoff has become a policy expert, advising top government officials on the fentanyl crisis, and continuing to follow the story on his Substack account. The author of two previous nonfiction books and numerous articles in outlets like the Atlantic, The Guardian, and the Wall Street Journal, Westhoff’s fourth book, Little Brother: Love, Tragedy, and My Search for the Truth comes out this spring.Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices