Library Displays and Exhibits

Social Movements and the Transformation of American Health Care examines dynamics of change in health care institutions through the lens of contemporary theory and research on collective action. Bringing together scholars from medicine, health management and policy, history, sociology, and political science, the book conceptualizes the American health care system as being organized around multiple institutions—including the state, biomedical fields, professions, and health delivery organizations. By shifting attention toward the organizing structures and political logics of these institutions, the essays in this book illuminate the diversity in both sites of health‐related collective action and the actors seeking transformations in health institutions.

Viewing contemporary history from the perspective of the AIDS crisis, Jennifer Brier provides rich, new understandings of the United States' complex social and political trends in the post-1960s era. Brier describes how AIDS workers--in groups as disparate as the gay and lesbian press, AIDS service organizations, private philanthropies, and the State Department--influenced American politics, especially on issues such as gay and lesbian rights, reproductive health, racial justice, and health care policy, even in the face of the expansion of the New Right. Infectious Ideas places recent social, cultural, and political events in a new light, making an important contribution to our understanding of the United States at the end of the twentieth century.

The politics and science of health and disease remain contested terrain among scientists, health practitioners, policy makers, industry, communities, and the public. Stakeholders in disputes about illnesses or conditions disagree over their fundamental causes as well as how they should be treated and prevented. This thought-provoking book crosses disciplinary boundaries by engaging with both public health policy and social science, asserting that science, activism, and policy are not separate issues and showing how the contribution of environmental factors in disease is often overlooked.

Health Rights Are Civil Rights tells the story of the important place of health in struggles for social change in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. Jenna M. Loyd describes how Black freedom, antiwar, welfare rights, and women’s movement activists formed alliances to battle oppressive health systems and structural violence, working to establish the principle that health is a right.

This book is the recipient of the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of medicine.

Hoffman examines the question of the compatibility of politics, policy-making, and professional work. Based on nineteen case studies of organizations, Hoffman looks at “what happened” as doctors and planners set out to redistribute services to minorities and the poor between 1960 and 1980.

In More Than Medicine, Jennifer Nelson reveals how feminists of the ‘60s and ‘70s applied the lessons of the new left and civil rights movements to generate a women’s health movement. The new movement shifted from the struggle to revolutionize health care to the focus of ending sex discrimination and gender stereotypes perpetuated in mainstream medical contexts. Moving from the campaign for legal abortion to the creation of community clinics and feminist health centers, Nelson illustrates how these activists revolutionized health care by associating it with the changing social landscape in which women had power to control their own life choices.

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has placed a national spotlight on the shameful state of healthcare for America's poor. In the face of this highly publicized disaster, public health experts are more concerned than ever about persistent disparities that result from income and race. This book tells the story of one groundbreaking approach to medicine that attacks the problem by focusing on the wellness of whole neighborhoods. Since their creation during the 1960s, community health centers have served the needs of the poor in the tenements of New York, the colonias of Texas, the working class neighborhoods of Boston, and the dirt farms of the South. As products of the civil rights movement, the early centers provided not only primary and preventive care, but also social and environmental services, economic development, and empowerment.

In the early twentieth century, a group of women workers hired to apply luminous paint to watch faces and instrument dials found themselves among the first victims of radium poisoning. Claudia Clark's book tells the compelling story of these women, who at first had no idea that the tedious task of dialpainting was any different from the other factory jobs available to them. But after repeated exposure to the radium-laced paint, they began to develop mysterious, often fatal illnesses that they traced to conditions in the workplace. Their fight to have their symptoms recognized as an industrial disease represents an important chapter in the history of modern health and labor policy. Clark's account emphasizes the social and political factors that influenced the responses of the workers, managers, government officials, medical specialists, and legal authorities involved in the case.

Recent history has witnessed a revolution in women's health care. Beginning in the late 1960s, women in communities across the United States challenged medical and male control over women's health. Few people today realize the extent to which these grassroots efforts shifted power and responsibility from the medical establishment into women's hands as health care consumers, providers, and advocates. Into Our Own Hands traces the women's health care movement in the United States. Richly documented, this study is based on more than a decade of research, including interviews with leading activists; documentary material from feminist health clinics and advocacy organizations; a survey of women's health movement organizations in the early 1990s; and ethnographic fieldwork. Sandra Morgen focuses on the clinics born from this movement, as well as how the movement's encounters with organized medicine, the state, and ascendant neoconservative and neoliberal political forces of the 1970s to the1980s shaped the confrontations and accomplishments in women's health care.

Health social movements (HSMs) are an important political force concerning health access and quality of care, as well as for broader social change. We define HSMs as collective challenges to medical policy, public health policy and politics, belief systems, research and practice which include an array of formal and informal organisations, supporters, networks of co-operation and media. HSMs make many challenges to political power, professional authority and personal and collective identity. These movements address (a) access to, or provision of, health-care services; (b) disease, illness experience, disability and contested illness; and (c) health inequality and inequity based on race, ethnicity, gender, class and/or sexuality.

Most public health practitioners know that public health has relied on biomedical advances and administrative improvements, but it is less commonly understood that social movements in health have also been sources of motivation for population health advances. This review considers the impacts of social movements focused on urban conditions and health, on the health of children, and on behavioral and substance-related determinants of health and illustrates how these movements have significantly influenced public health activities and programs. We hope this review will motivate public health workers to make common cause with social activists and to encourage social activists to ally with public health professionals.

Because of the importance of grassroots social movements, or “change from below,” in the history of US reform, the relationship between social movements and demands for universal health care is a critical one.
National health reform campaigns in the 20th century were initiated and run by elites more concerned with defending against attacks from interest groups than with popular mobilization, and grassroots reformers in the labor, civil rights, feminist, and AIDS activist movements have concentrated more on immediate and incremental changes than on transforming the health care system itself.
However, grassroots health care demands have also contained the seeds of a wider critique of the American health care system, leading some movements to adopt calls for universal coverage.

The health policy advisory center, community organizing, and big business of health, 1967-1975.
Soon after its founding in the politically tumultuous late 1960s, the Health Policy Advisory Center (Health/PAC) and its Health/PAC Bulletin became the strategic hub of an intense urban social movement around health care equality in New York City. Over the years, the organization's stance toward community-oriented health politics evolved considerably, from enthusiastically promoting its potential to later confronting its limits.