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19+ verk 861 medlemmar 18 recensioner 2 favoritmärkta

Om författaren

Perri Klass is a practicing pediatrician, an acclaimed author of fiction & nonfiction, & a prizewinning journalist. She has won five O. Henry Awards for her short stories, including three of the stories in "Love & Modern Medicine". Her fiction includes two novels, "Recombinations & Other Women's visa mer Children", & a collection of short stories, "I Am Having an Adventure". She has also written two collections of essays about medicine, "A Not Entirely Benign Procedure: Four Years as a Medical Student" & "Baby Doctor: A Pediatrician's Training". Her columns & articles have appeared in the "New York Times Magazine", the "Washington Post", the "Boston Globe", "Discover", & "Parenting". She recently won a James Beard Foundation Award for an article in "Gourmet", "The Lunch Box as Battlefield." Both Klass's fiction & her journalism have dealt with issues of medicine & society. In her medical career she practices pediatrics at Dorchester House, a neighborhood health center in Boston, & is medical director of the national literacy program Reach Out & Read, dedicated to making books & literacy promotion part of pediatric primary care. Klass lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Larry Wolff, a professor of history at Boston College, & their children. (Bowker Author Biography) visa färre
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The Seasons of Women: An Anthology (1995) — Bidragsgivare — 46 exemplar

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The epitome of Klass' work -- a pedantic and often obnoxious narrative voice overlying the fantasies and fears that are, in fact ubiquitous among medical trainees. After reading this I knew that I wasn't the first to secretly desire running off to practice medicine in some rural third-world country -- not out of benevolence, but to be able to utilize history and physical skills, without any pesky high technology to ruin my intellectual fun and I now know that I share the mixed dread and exhilaration boarding an aircraft knowing that they may call "Is someone on board a doctor?"
Klass is maybe the most renowned medical writer and although she is far from the best, she never fails to entertain.
… (mer)
 
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settingshadow | Aug 19, 2023 |
Great book for parents who are in the throes of trying to figure out what's going on with their "quirky kid." Lots of practical advice.
 
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CarolHicksCase | 2 andra recensioner | Mar 12, 2023 |
Reading about the rampant infant mortality a hundred years ago was hard to take, but the book got happier as mortality decreased over the 20th century. A lot of things helped, and especially interesting to read about how the many vaccines were developed and put into use over the years.
 
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steve02476 | 1 annan recension | Jan 3, 2023 |
This is not the book I was promised. It was obsessively focused on the USA, despite the original summary that caused me to pick it up implying it was going to be a global survey of the history of paediatric medicine (if I had been sufficiently familiar with the names mentioned, that might have been obvious). The historical sections gloss over what was happening elsewhere, except for very short sections, usually a sentence long, none more than a paragraph. There were also a lot of times where I was bemused that what I've read about American medical research (in medical journals) paints a much less rosy picture that this -- there were times when I wondered if the author had looked outside their own demographic (there is mention of some of it, but argh). One section that talks exclusively about US and UK writings on child death seems to think that these are representative of the whole world (also: author is not a literary scholar and certainly, from the works quoted, doesn’t seem to have gone very far from a very limited literary ‘classics’ collection, talking about them in a way that assumed familiarity with all of the works -- I, as a middle aged middle class white Anglo Australian missed most of the references)

I would recommend against reading the introduction/first two chapters, as not being relevant to the thesis of the book. My reading notes on the intro say:

"*wow is there some willing ignorance here - that there are no child deaths due to the various ills like poor water, poor nutrition etc. There is acknowledgement that the death rates are higher in poor and marginalised communities, but there isn't the recognition about how inaccessible some of the medical treatments are for populations both within and without the USA.*"

Chapter two, for inexplicable reasons, is entirely about the American civil war. Includes abhorent details of the treatment of African American women, including what reads as medical research without consent. From my reading notes:

"*I am bemused at how this chapter's recounting in detail the mistreatment of people under the American slavery system counts as either science or public health*"

Sections I did like: The sections on scarlet fever and diptheria were fascinating; slightly more European history there, not least because that is where some of the dramatic discoveries were made, and it is harder to gloss over them. I noted that p252 had an interesting discussion of ethics (which: I don't remember whether this was because it was the only mention, or because I had been so horrified at the lack of mention of ethics in other sections, but that I'm referencing a single page is concerning).

I would not normally keep a book that I rated this low, but there are sections that are potentially worth revisiting.
… (mer)
 
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fred_mouse | 1 annan recension | Sep 11, 2022 |

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19
Även av
2
Medlemmar
861
Popularitet
#29,721
Betyg
½ 3.7
Recensioner
18
ISBN
55
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1
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2

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