Illness and the Environment : A Reader in Contested Medicine

by Kroll-Smith, J. Stephen; Brown, Phil; Gunter, Valerie J.; Kroll-Smith, Steve

• ISBN13: 9780814747292
• ISBN10: 0814747299
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-08-01
• Publisher: New York University Press

Summary

In myriad ways, humans have gradually tailored their world to meet immediate material needs. In so doing, we have, in the minds of many, systematically altered a formerly hospitable environment into one more ambiguous in its effect on the human organism. Just as environments have adapted in response to human activity, so too is the human body now, in turn, forced to adapt to these altered conditions. Today, mysterious illnesses, from chronic fatigue to Gulf War Syndrome, meet us at every turn. Yet even as an increasing number of people attribute ailments to environmental problems, the suspected relationships between illness and environment remain unclear.Illness and the Environmentexamines how sick people and their allies struggle to achieve public recognition of somatic complaints and disabilities that they contend are related to "manufactured environments." The first of its kind, the anthology considers the political, legal, and medical conflicts arising from these illnesses, and will prove invaluable to researchers, scholars, public policy makers, trial attorneys, and activist organizations.

Table of Contents

Preface	xi
Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction: Environments and Diseases in a Postnatural World	1	(8)
Steve Kroll-Smith
Phil Brown
Valerie J. Gunter
PART 1. Setting the Stage
Knowledge, Citizens, and Organizations: An Overview of Environments, Diseases, and Social Conflict	9	(20)
Phil Brown
Steve Kroll-Smith
Valerie J. Gunter
PART 2. Environments and Diseases: Professional Boundaries and the Problem of Knowing
Limits of Epidemiology	29	(17)
Steve Wing
Physicians' Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practice Regarding Environmental Health Hazards	46	(26)
Phil Brown
Judith Kirwan Kelley
Environmental Illness as a Practical Epistemology and a Source of Professional Confusion	72	(23)
Steve Kroll-Smith
H. Hugh Floyd
PART 3. Measurement Disputes and Health Policy
Environmental Endocrine Hypothesis and Public Policy	95	(13)
Sheldon Krimsky
Who Cares If the Rat Dies? Rodents, Risks, and Humans in the Science of Food Safety	108	(12)
Lawrence Busch
Keiko Tanaka
Valerie J. Gunter
Threshold Limit Values: Historical Perspectives and Current Practice	120	(15)
Grace E. Ziem
Barry I. Castleman
Threshold Limit Values in the 1990s and Beyond: A Follow-Up	135	(10)
David Allen
PART 4. Toxins in the Workplace
An Axe to Grind: Class Relations and Silicosis in a 19th-Century Factory	145	(17)
Janet Siskind
From Dust to Dust: The Birth and Re-Birth of National Concern about Silicosis	162	(13)
David Rosner
Gerald E. Markowitz
Farmworker and Farmer Perceptions of Farmworker Agricultural Chemical Exposure in North Carolina	175	(17)
Sara A. Quandt
Thomas A. Arcury
Colin K. Austin
Rosa M. Saavedra
Competing Conceptions of Safety: High-Risk Workers or High-Risk Work?	192	(25)
Elaine Draper
PART 5. Toxins in the Community
Pollution, Politics, and Uncertainty: Environmental Epidemiology in North-East England	217	(18)
Peter Phillimore
Suzanne Moffatt
Eve Hudson
Dawn Downey
Round and Round It Goes: The Epidemiology of Childhood Lead Poisoning, 1950-1990	235	(23)
Barbara Berney
Lead Contamination in the 1990s and Beyond: A Follow-Up	258	(12)
Patricia Widener
Suffering, Legitimacy, and Healing: The Bhopal Case, Critical Events	270	(19)
Veena Das
PART 6. Living with Environments and Contested Diseases
Time	289	(19)
Sandra Steingraber
A Cancer Death	308	(25)
Martha Balshem
Notes from a Human Canary	333	(12)
Lynn Lawson
PART 7. Citizen Responses to Contested Medicine
Reframing Endometriosis: From ``Career Woman's Disease'' to Environment/Body Connections	345	(19)
Stella M. Capek
Popular Epidemiology and Toxic Waste Contamination: Lay and Profesional Ways of Knowing	364	(20)
Phil Brown
Environmental Movements and Expert Knowledge: Evidence for a New Populism	384	(25)
Stephen R. Couch
Steve Kroll-Smith
PART 8. Setting the Environmental Health Agenda
Competing Paradigms in the Assessment of Latent Disorders: The Case of Agent Orange	409	(21)
Wilbur J. Scott
Environmental Politics and Science: The Case of PBB Contamination in Michigan	430	(23)
Michael R. Reich
Environmental Health Research: Setting an Agenda by Spinning Our Wheels or Climbing the Mountain?	453	(20)
John Eyles
Contributors	473	(2)
Index	475