Reviews for Makers of the Western Tradition: Portraits from History, Combined Edition - J. Kelley Sowards

The average rating for Makers of the Western Tradition: Portraits from History, Combined Edition - J. Kelley Sowards based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-03-20 00:00:00 Joseph Lovoy Brandt's thesis in "No Magic Bullet" is that in order to develop effective public health policy for controlling disease we must first resolve the underlying social or cultural conflicts between the medical and the moral approaches to disease. Specifically discussed in this book are the venereal or sexually transmitted diseases. The book is also an interestingly historical view of how these diseases have been treated throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries with a majority of the book discussing how the government addressed the issue during WW1 and WW2. The American "puritanical" tendency to view STDs as "moral punishment for sin" has seriously impeded the development of what Brandt calls "magic bullets" or drugs to stop infection. These diseases (he primarily includes syphilis, gonorrhea, Herpes 2 and HIV/AIDS) are intertwined with social and cultural attitudes about sex and societal mores around sexuality. He shows how these attitudes have slowed and/or prevented cures or public health policies that would better protect the public and prevent the spread of infection, even after the advent of penicillin. Understanding the historical perspective and the corresponding social and cultural attitudes help public policy makers and public health officials develop better global health policy that will keep all people safer. The book goes into the funding and educational issues/problems as well. The book is basically written as a dissertation and thus is not terribly easy to get through. I found the language and sentence structure (I'm reading in 2020) to be a bit hard to get through...it took a much longer time for me to read these 200 pages than my usual pace. The inclusion of the WW posters during the health campaigns were interesting and of course the book reflects the antiquated (negative) attitudes towards women of the time but in general is an important book for anyone interested in the history of epidemic disease.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-04-17 00:00:00 Kyle Ellis As others have mentioned, it's a little outdated, but patterns of discourse around and response to STIs has been eerily cyclical, so it's still relevant to learn from the pre- and early-HIV/AIDs period. Brandt tackles the ways in which social constructions around illness ultimately affect the way they are treated or, at times, perpetuated due to lack of effective response. There has been a history of responding to STIs from moral grounds instead of science, which continues in the debate around sexuality education. One thing that may not be clear to those interested in this subject (that was an added bonus for me) is that it has a wealth of information about the shaping of laws around sex work. As well, it paints the story of how laws around sex work and STI treatment have been shaped by the military.