Medical & Nursing

25001 books

Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power - Paperback

$19.95

by John Searle (Author)Our self-conception derives mostly from our own experience. We believe ourselves to be conscious, rational, social, ethical, language-using, political agents who possess free will. Yet we know we exist in a universe that consists of mindless, meaningless, unfree, nonrational, brute physical particles. How can we resolve the conflict between these two visions? In Freedom and Neurobiology, the philosopher John Searle discusses the possibility of free will within the conte...

Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic: A Manifesto for the Mind Sciences and Contemplative Practice - Paperback

$18.95

by B. Alan Wallace (Author)A radical approach to studying the mind. Renowned Buddhist philosopher B. Alan Wallace reasserts the power of shamatha and vipashyana, traditional Buddhist meditations, to clarify the mind's role in the natural world. Raising profound questions about human nature, free will, and experience versus dogma, Wallace challenges the claim that consciousness is nothing more than an emergent property of the brain with little relation to universal events. Rather, he maintains...

Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters - Paperback

$18.95

by Gordon Shepherd (Author)Leading neuroscientist Gordon M. Shepherd embarks on a paradigm-shifting trip through the "human brain flavor system," laying the foundations for a new scientific field: neurogastronomy. Challenging the belief that the sense of smell diminished during human evolution, Shepherd argues that this sense, which constitutes the main component of flavor, is far more powerful and essential than previously believed. Shepherd begins Neurogastronomy with the mechanics of smell...

The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance - Paperback

$18.95

by Nessa Carey (Author)Epigenetics can potentially revolutionize our understanding of the structure and behavior of biological life on Earth. It explains why mapping an organism's genetic code is not enough to determine how it develops or acts and shows how nurture combines with nature to engineer biological diversity. Surveying the twenty-year history of the field while also highlighting its latest findings and innovations, this volume provides a readily understandable introduction to the fo...

The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease and Inheritance - Hardcover

$26.95

People, Parasites, and Plowshares: Learning from Our Body's Most Terrifying Invaders - Hardcover

$28.95

by Dickson Despommier (Author), William Campbell (Foreword by)Dickson D. Despommier's vivid, visceral account of the biology, behavior, and history of parasites follows the interplay between these fascinating life forms and human society over thousands of years. Despommier focuses on long-term host-parasite associations, which have evolved to avoid or even subvert the human immune system. Some parasites do great damage to their hosts, while others have signed a kind of "peace treaty" in excha...

Bad Advice: Or Why Celebrities, Politicians, and Activists Aren't Your Best Source of Health Information - Hardcover

$24.95

by Paul Offit (Author)Science doesn't speak for itself. Neck-deep in work that can be messy and confounding and na ve in the ways of public communication, scientists are often unable to package their insights into the neat narratives that the public requires. Enter celebrities, advocates, lobbyists, and the funders behind them, who take advantage of scientists' reluctance to provide easy answers, flooding the media with misleading or incorrect claims about health risks. Amid this onslaught of...

The Custom-Made Brain: Cerebral Plasticity, Regeneration, and Enhancement - Hardcover

$27.95

by Jean-Didier Vincent (Author), Pierre-Marie Lledo (Author), Laurence Garey (Translator)Two leading neuroscientists introduce the concepts of "cerebral plasticity" and the "regenerating brain," describing what we know now about the processes through which the brain constantly reconstructs itself and the potential benefits this knowledge could have in addressing concerns for neurological, cognitive, and emotional health. The authors begin with a survey of the fundamental scientific developmen...

Another Person's Poison: A History of Food Allergy - Paperback

$19.95

by Matthew Smith (Author)To some, food allergies seem like fabricated cries for attention. To others, they pose a dangerous health threat. Food allergies are bound up with so many personal and ideological concerns that it is difficult to determine what is medical and what is myth. Another Person's Poison parses the political, economic, cultural, and genuine health factors of a phenomenon that dominates our interactions with others and our understanding of ourselves. For most of the twentieth ...

The Thirteenth Step: Addiction in the Age of Brain Science - Paperback

$19.95

by Markus Heilig (Author)The past thirty years have witnessed a revolution in the science of addiction, yet we still rely on outdated methods of treatment. Expensive new programs for managing addiction are also flourishing, but since they are not based in science, they offer little benefit to people who cannot afford to lose money or faith in their recovery. Clarifying the cutting-edge science of addiction for both practitioners and general readers, The Thirteenth Step pairs stories of real p...

$54.72

by Nigel Biggar (Author)Controversy about the morality of euthanasia and assisted suicide has been running for over a generation. The servise this book performs is making a careful examination of the opposing fronts and drawing ecumenically on both theological and philosophical resouces and pioneers an original way through to a mature judgement by tackling three basic questions: What makeshuman life valuable? Can it ever be moral to intend to kill someone? How much should we fear the wider, s...

Histories of Health in Southeast Asia: Perspectives on the Long Twentieth Century - Paperback

$36.00

by Tim Harper (Editor), Sunil S. Amrith (Editor)Health patterns in Southeast Asia have changed profoundly over the past century. In that period, epidemic and chronic diseases, environmental transformations, and international health institutions have created new connections within the region and the increased interdependence of Southeast Asia with China and India. In this volume leading scholars provide a new approach to the history of health in Southeast Asia. Framed by a series of synoptic p...

$135.00

by Alison Kafer (Author)In Feminist, Queer, Crip Alison Kafer imagines a different future for disability and disabled bodies. Challenging the ways in which ideas about the future and time have been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, Kafer rejects the idea of disability as a pre-determined limit. She juxtaposes theories, movements, and identities such as environmental justice, reproductive justice, cyborg theory, transgender politics, and disability that...

$44.91

by David Roman (Author)Acts of Intervention examines the ways that gay men have used theatre and performance to intervene in the AIDS crisis. It discusses dramatic texts and public performances--from cabarets and candlelight vigils to full-scale Broadway productions such as Angels in America and Rent--that have shaped, and been shaped by, the history of AIDS in national, regional, and local contexts. Román examines mainstream as well as alternative and activist forms of theatre, including sol...

Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania - Paperback

$46.80

by Stacey A. Langwick (Author)This subtle and powerful ethnography examines African healing and its relationship to medical science. Stacey A. Langwick investigates the practices of healers in Tanzania who confront the most intractable illnesses in the region, including AIDS and malaria. She reveals how healers generate new therapies and shape the bodies of their patients as they address devils and parasites, anti-witchcraft medicine, and child immunization. Transcending the dualisms between ...

A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era - Paperback

$46.80

by Paul A. Lombardo (Editor), Maxwell J. Mehlman (Contribution by), Angela Logan (Contribution by)In 1907, Indiana passed the world's first involuntary sterilization law based on the theory of eugenics. In time, more than 30 states and a dozen foreign countries followed suit. Although the Indiana statute was later declared unconstitutional, other laws restricting immigration and regulating marriage on "eugenic" grounds were still in effect in the U.S. as late as the 1970s. A Century of Eugeni...

Medicine, Mobility, and Power in Global Africa: Transnational Health and Healing - Paperback

$40.25

by Hansjarg Dilger (Editor), Abdoulaye Kane (Editor), Stacey A. Langwick (Editor)Recent political, social, and economic changes in Africa have provoked radical shifts in the landscape of health and healthcare. Medicine, Mobility, and Power in Global Africa captures the multiple dynamics of a globalized world and its impact on medicine, health, and the delivery of healthcare in Africa--and beyond. Essays by an international group of contributors take on intractable problems such as HIV/AIDS, m...

$53.91

by Richard W. Momeyer (Author)"Well organized, well argued, and well written . . . " --Choice"It is a lively document, with vigorous arguments leading to opinions that are controversial but strongly held." --Joseph M. Foley, Medical Humanities Review" . . . Momeyer's book has much to recommend it . . . The book would surely be a suitable focus for an undergraduate course in dealing with the philosophical issues involving death and our attitudes towards it." --David J. Mayo, Teaching Philosoph...

$117.00

by Erick Janssen (Editor)Although sexual psychophysiology has made great strides over the past few decades, the progress made has not been accompanied by much effort to integrate research findings or to stimulate methodological and theoretical discussions among researchers. Yet this new research area has the potential to make substantial contributions to understanding a wide range of phenomena, including the spread of HIV/STIs, sexual "addiction" or compulsivity, the use (or nonuse) of birth-...

Human Robotics: Neuromechanics and Motor Control - Paperback

$72.00

by Etienne Burdet (Author), David W. Franklin (Author), Theodore E. Milner (Author)A synthesis of biomechanics and neural control that draws on recent advances in robotics to address control problems solved by the human sensorimotor system.This book proposes a transdisciplinary approach to investigating human motor control that synthesizes musculoskeletal biomechanics and neural control. The authors argue that this integrated approach--which uses the framework of robotics to understand sensor...

The Market in Mind: How Financialization Is Shaping Neuroscience, Translational Medicine, and Innovation in Biotechnology - Paperback

$90.00

by Mark Dennis Robinson (Author)A critical examination of translational medicine, when private risk is transferred to the public sector and university research teams become tech startups for global investors.A global shift has secretly transformed science and medicine. Starting in 2003, biomedical research in the West has been reshaped by the emergence of translational science and medicine--the idea that the aim of research is to translate findings as quickly as possible into medical products...

Inequality and Growth: Theory and Policy Implications - Paperback

$45.00

by Theo S. Eicher (Editor), Stephen J. Turnovsky (Editor)Even minute increases in a country's growth rate can result in dramatic changes in living standards over just one generation. The benefits of growth, however, may not be shared equally. Some may gain less than others, and a fraction of the population may actually be disadvantaged. Recent economic research has found both positive and negative relationships between growth and inequality across nations. The questions raised by these result...

Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes - Hardcover

$64.80

by Nicholas A. Robins (Author)On the basis of an examination of the colonial mercury and silver production processes and related labor systems, Mercury, Mining, and Empire explores the effects of mercury pollution in colonial Huancavelica, Peru, and Potosí, in present-day Bolivia. The book presents a multifaceted and interwoven tale of what colonial exploitation of indigenous peoples and resources left in its wake. It is a socio-ecological history that explores the toxic interrelationships be...

Unsupervised Learning: Foundations of Neural Computation - Paperback

$90.00

by Geoffrey Hinton (Editor), Terrence J. Sejnowski (Editor)Since its founding in 1989 by Terrence Sejnowski, Neural Computation has become the leading journal in the field. Foundations of Neural Computation collects, by topic, the most significant papers that have appeared in the journal over the past nine years. This volume of Foundations of Neural Computation, on unsupervised learning algorithms, focuses on neural network learning algorithms that do not require an explicit teacher. The goal...

The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered States of Consciousness - Paperback

$54.00

by J. Allan Hobson (Author)An investigation into the brain's chemistry and the mechanisms of chemically altered states of consciousness.In this book, J. Allan Hobson offers a new understanding of altered states of consciousness based on knowledge of how our brain chemistry is balanced when we are awake and how that balance shifts when we fall asleep and dream. He draws on recent research that enables us to explain how psychedelic drugs work to disturb that balance and how similar imbalances m...

Teeth Aren't Just for Smiling: Oral Care and Its Impact on the Whole Body - Paperback

$19.42

by Brett Langston (Author)A popular misconception about oral care is that it's primarily about making teeth look as attractive as possible. Advertisements for tooth whiteners and veneers abound, but the fact is that while appearance is important, there's a lot more to oral care than just having a mouth full of straight, pearly white teeth. Dr. Brett Langston has spent his career as a prosthodontist - a dentist who specializes in the restoration of oral health and replacement of missing teeth-...

$162.00

by Santiago Ramon y. Cajal (Author), E. Horne Craigie (Translator), Juan Cano (Translator)Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934) made prolific and lasting contributions to understanding "the life of the infinitely small."Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934) made prolific and lasting contributions to understanding "the life of the infinitely small." Widely thought of as the founder of neuroscience, Cajal made remarkable explorations into the organization and function of the nervous system. His work ...

Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks - Paperback

$90.00

by James A. Anderson (Editor), Edward Rosenfeld (Editor)Surprising tales from the scientists who first learned how to use computers to understand the workings of the human brain.Since World War II, a group of scientists has been attempting to understand the human nervous system and to build computer systems that emulate the brain's abilities. Many of the early workers in this field of neural networks came from cybernetics; others came from neuroscience, physics, electrical engineering, mathem...

Chase, Chance, and Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty - Paperback

$72.00

by James H. Austin (Author)A personal story of the ways in which persistence, chance, and creativity interact in biomedical research.This first book by the author of Zen and the Brain examines the role of chance in the creative process. James Austin tells a personal story of the ways in which persistence, chance, and creativity interact in biomedical research; the conclusions he reaches shed light on the creative process in any field. Austin shows how, in his own investigations, unpredictable...

The Philosophy of Medicine Reborn: A Pellegrino Reader - Paperback

$81.00

by Edmund D. Pellegrino (Author), H. Tristram Engelhardt (Editor), Fabrice Jotterand (Editor)Edmund D. Pellegrino has played a central role in shaping the fields of bioethics and the philosophy of medicine. His writings encompass original explorations of the healing relationship, the need to place humanism in the medical curriculum, the nature of the patient's good, and the importance of a virtue-based normative ethics for health care. In this anthology, H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., and Fabri...

Semantic Cognition: A Parallel Distributed Processing Approach - Paperback

$81.00

by Timothy T. Rogers (Author), James L. McClelland (Author)This groundbreaking monograph offers a mechanistic theory of the representation and use of semantic knowledge, integrating the strengths and overcoming many of the weaknesses of hierarchical, categorization-based approaches, similarity-based approaches, and the approach often called theory theory. Building on earlier models by Geoffrey Hinton in the 1980s and David Rumelhart in the early 1990s, the authors propose that performance in ...

The Mind within the Net: Models of Learning, Thinking, and Acting - Paperback

$63.00

by Manfred Spitzer (Author)A highly readable, non-mathematical introduction to neural networks--computer models that help us to understand how we perceive, think, feel, and act.How does the brain work? How do billions of neurons bring about ideas, sensations, emotions, and actions? Why do children learn faster than elderly people? What can go wrong in perception, thinking, learning, and acting? Scientists now use computer models to help us to understand the most private and human experiences....