The Spring Bookshelf

Recent Books by Faculty of Harvard Medical, Dental, and Public Health Schools

Laura Riley
You & Your Baby: Pregnancy
Meredith Books
For events that have been taking place for millions of years, pregnancy and childbirth remain incredibly complicated. An Ob–Gyn, mother, and HMS assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Massachusetts General Hospital, Laura Riley incorporates the practical, life-altering aspects of preparing to have a child side-by-side with easily readable descriptions of the developments in a pregnant woman’s body. This guide is formatted into weekly chapters, starting several weeks prior to conception and ending three months after birth. Each chapter is broken into sections describing the fetus’s development, the changes in the mother’s body, issues surrounding the mother’s emotional well-being, and diet and exercise. When discussing the emotional preparations for dealing with pregnancy and having a child, Riley writes about varied topics, such as dealing with nosy relatives, financial planning, and the technicalities of -maternity-leave laws. The book comes with a pregnancy organizer and includes glossy color photographs of the fetus in different developmental stages.

Alan D. Lopez, Colin D. Mathers, Majod Ezzati, Dean T. Jamison, Christopher J. L. Murray, Editors
Global Burden of Disease and Risk Factors
Oxford University Press and The World Bank
In order to plan effective global health policies, administrators and public health workers need accurate information about which diseases and injuries are affecting people in different parts of the world and which risk factors are associated with them. The first major attempt to create a comprehensive survey of this information was made in 1993 with the publication of Global Burden of Disease. Since the book’s publication, however, both the world and the health profession have changed, as HIV/AIDS has spread in Africa, health measurement instruments have improved, and more extensive population surveillance systems have come into use. This new issue contains more accurate data on diseases, injuries, and causes of death, along with an explanation of the project’s methods and results, an assessment of trends in mortality, and a discussion of the major causes of death for children under five. The text was compiled by Alan Lopez of the University of Queensland in Australia; Colin Mathers of the World Health Organization; Majod Ezzati, HSPH assistant professor of international health; Dean Jamison of the University of California, San Francisco; and Christopher Murray, the Richard Saltonstall professor of public policy at HSPH and director of the Harvard Initiative for Global Health.

Daniel L. Segal, Frederick L. Coolidge, Erlene Rosowsky
Personality Disorders and Older Adults: Diagnosis, Assessment, and Treatment
John Wiley & Sons
Patients with personality disorders are, as Joel Sadavoy, head of geriatric psychiatry at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, says in his introduction, “among the most likely to induce some rather untherapeutic feelings in therapists.” Those with personality disorders can be eccentric, erratic, dramatic, anxious, sadistic, passive-aggressive, or depressed. When combined with the stresses and physical and mental changes that accompany aging, the disorders can become incapacitating. Aging brings attendant emotional problems, such as anxiety and depression, even to those who were relatively healthy, and can undermine a person’s coping mechanisms, making them more vulnerable to tendencies that they had some control over earlier in life. The process of aging can also mask personality disorders, throwing up complications and alternate possible explanations for behaviors, as well as complicating symptoms. Compounding the problem, those suffering from personality disorders are more likely to have isolated themselves, leaving them with little support when they need it most.

Christos Mantzoros, Editor
Obesity and Diabetes
Humana Press
The interconnected problems of diabetes and obesity are becoming more serious both nationally and internationally; diabetes alone affects more than 20 million U.S. residents; obesity, more than 60 million. In this text, Christos Mantzoros, HMS associate professor of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, brings together articles on the conditions by some of the world’s experts. The chapters contain reviews of the history and epidemiology of the conditions, as well as their genetics, pathophysiology, clinical manifestations, complications, and the lifestyle and pharmacological approaches to treating them.

David Brendel
Healing Psychiatry: Bridging the Science/Humanism Divide
MIT Press
Today psychiatry is divided between a scientific view of brain function and a humanistic view of personal suffering in a social and cultural context. In this book, David Brendel, HMS assistant professor of psychiatry at McLean Hospital, argues that this rupture needs to be healed so the practice can incorporate both views of human behavior. He argues that psychiatrists can use “clinical pragmatism,” being open to a variety of explanations and communicating thoroughly with patients, to help sort out the interactions between society, their patients’ lives, and their patients’ brain chemistry. Brendel also points to dialectical reasoning, in which both sides of an argument can hold relevance, as being useful to psychiatry, since so much about a patient’s illness and its causes is unclear.

Janna Malamud Smith
My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud
Houghton Mifflin
Bernard Malamud, the first author to win both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, died 20 years ago, and since then has slowly disappeared from discussions of the great 20th century writers and from required reading lists. In this book, his daughter provides the first biography of him, based on his journals, old letters, and her personal recollections. Explaining why she felt compelled to write the memoir, Janna Smith, an HMS lecturer on psychology at Cambridge Hospital, wrote, “What once was a trio [of contemporary Jewish writers]—Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth—became a dyad, partly because Malamud died first, but also because biographies are a way we designate writers as significant and keep their fiction alive.” Smith explores her father’s past, his strengths, and his frailties, noting how aspects of his life, such as his early shame over his father’s work as an unsuccessful immigrant grocer, became transformed in the literature he created.

D.I. Mostofsky, A.G. Forgione, D.B. Giddon, Editors
Behavioral Dentistry
Blackwell Munksgaard
A patient lying hypnotized on a dentist’s chair—the image seems like it could come from a scene in a B-rated horror film or an image in a quirky New Yorker cartoon. But hypnotism’s use in dentistry is one of several very real subjects discussed in this compilation of articles that explore the intersection of dentistry and social science. The social sciences are becoming more and more integrated into medical practice, the book’s editors note, and dentistry could benefit from its insights, as well. On a regular basis, dentists work with patients afraid of pain and needles, children who would rather be at the playground, diabetics and elderly patients with special needs, and a variety of other situations requiring a knowledge of social issues. Articles in this book include discussions on promoting community health, managing young patients’ fears, the relationship between stress and inflammation, and the connection between oral health and an individual’s quality of life.

Daniel B. Jones, Shishir K. Maithel, Benjamin E. Schneider, Editors
Atlas of Minimally Invasive Surgery
Ciné-Med
Minimally invasive surgery has only recently been integrated into surgical education and residency programs, says Josef Fischer, chair of the Department of Surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the William McDermott professor of surgery at HMS, in his introduction. As a result, “there is an immense need for an inexpensive, clearly illustrated book as to how to do the common ... minimally invasive surgeries.” In this book, Daniel Jones, associate professor of surgery; Shishir Maithel, research fellow in surgery; and Benjamin Schneider, instructor in surgery, all at BID, provide illustrations and explanations of common minimally invasive procedures. The atlas covers biliary, foregut, thoracic, colorectal, and obesity surgeries, as well as enteral access and surgeries for solid organs and hernias.

Susan Pories, Sachin Jain, Gordon Harper, Editors
The Soul of a Doctor: Harvard Medical Students Face Life and Death
Algonquin Books
Hospital encounters can expose a broad swath of human life and emotion—death, injury, childbirth, fear, recovery, and sorrow among them. In this compilation edited by Susan Pories, HMS assistant professor of surgery at BID; Sachin Jain, a fourth-year HMS student; and Gordon Harper, HMS associate professor of psychiatry, third-year students describe some of their experiences on the wards and the intense emotional reactions resulting from these initial encounters with patients. In one essay, Alaka Ray describes a patient who refuses to undergo medical exams, already convinced she had a form of cancer featured on Oprah. In another, Amanda Muñoz describes how, once on the wards, compassionate communication with patients can fly out the window. Another student describes becoming immune to the discomfort of seeing naked bodies and asking about sexual histories. Essays survey a range of topics, including helping patients and their relatives cope with loss, communication skills, and the need for health care reform.

Katherine Swartz
Reinsuring Health: Why More Middle-class People Are Uninsured and What Government Can Do
Russell Sage Foundation
The number of uninsured Americans has risen over the past two decades; currently, about 45.5 million have no health insurance. Of the uninsured, approximately a third are middle class. In this book, Katherine Swartz, HSPH professor of health policy and management, describes how changes in the labor market have helped convince employers to stop providing insurance for their workers. People seeking individual health care plans often run into prohibitively high rates, leading those who are young, healthy, or without enough money to forgo coverage altogether. To combat the problem, Swartz argues for a government-backed reinsurance program that would protect insurance companies that provide small-group and individual health insurance against risk.

—Rebecca Tinkelman

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