The Hardin Library Browsing Collection is located on the 3rd floor of the library, west of the main entrance. Below are a few of the many titles available for your reading pleasure.Mama might be better off dead : the failure of health care in urban America, Abraham, Laurie Kaye, Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1993. Browsing RA418.5.P6 A26 1993
This personally observed, lucid chronicle and call for reform of our ailing health system covers all levels of responsibility in the medical establishment, and deserves scrutiny by our administration’s health service planners. Abraham concludes that a reformed health care system should set limits on health spending while stressing ‘caring’ over ‘curing.’
Publisher’s Weekly“Ms. Abraham is a health care reporter who obviously devoted much effort to the preparation of this book. She seems to have spent much time getting to know the “Baneses,” a poverty-stricken multigenerational family of African-Americans. The family has a series of almost insurmountable health, financial, drug, and alcohol problems, which seem to be dwarfed by problems encountered when addressing the governmental and charitable health and welfare systems.”
Annals of Internal Medicine“Laurie Kaye Abraham [has] succeeded, in graphic terms that statistical and rhetorical abstractions cannot match, in showing why providing health insurance for the poor is not the same as providing health care and why any health reform plan that continues to ignore the needs of the poor will be doomed to failure.”
Health/PAC Bulletin
What kind of life : the limits of medical progress, Callahan, Daniel, New York : Simon and Schuster, 1990. Browsing RA445 .C33 1990
“Lucidly describes the irrationalities of the present health care system while outlining the benefits of a new model of health care which the author believes would serve people more intelligently in the long run.”
Book News, Inc.“An important contribution. It lays bare the bankrupt assumptions of the current health care system, and it serves as a forceful reminder of the trade-offs both within our health care system and between health and other societal values.”
Health Affairs
Worse than the disease : pitfalls of medical progress, Dutton, Diana Barbara, Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1988. Browsing RA418.5.M4 D88 1988
“In this book Diana Dutton successfully delineates the hazards of policy-making when professional groups dominate or usurp decision making in the delicate relationship between the scientific constituency and the whole of society. In a skillful and detailed analysis, she portrays the resulting disastrous ill effects of lack of appropriate linkage-science policy-making without public participation.”
The Pharos“The case for greater public involvement in matters relating to new medical technologies is well made by the authors. An equally good case could have been made for better science and better scientific judgment. Unfortunately the authors’ arguments about policy lack crispness; there is a tendency to editorialize too much about the virtues of public interest groups and the sins of scientists, industry spokesmen and academics. Still, the authors deal with an important topic; ‘’Worse Than the Disease’ is a book worth reading.”
The New York Times
