Posts tagged ‘medicine’
New Government Report: Private Health Insurance Premiums and Rate Reviews
Private Health Insurance Premiums and Rate Reviews
by Mark Newsom
Paperback, 24 pages, 2011, $20.00
ISBN: 9781437980844
“Health insurance premiums (HIP) have been trending up, while the value of coverage has trended down. Both administrative and medical costs continue to rise, but the rate of growth in these expenses slowed between 2008 and 2009. The rise in medical costs is primarily attributable to the price of services, not increased utilization. This report provides an overview of the concepts, regulation, and public data regarding private HIP. Contents of this report: (1) Intro.; (2) Drivers of HIP Increases: Health Benefits Exp.; Unit Prices; Health Service Utilization; Administrative Costs; Health Insurance Corporation Profits; The Underwriting Cycle; (3) Review of Health Insurance Rates: State Rate Filing and Reviews; Federal Reforms Affecting HIP. Charts and tables. A print on demand report.”
Purchase this print-on-demand publication for $20.00:
Dear Doctor Franklin: E-mails to a Founding Father about Science, Medicine and Technology
Dear Doctor Franklin:
E-mails to a Founding Father about
Science, Medicine and Technology
by Stuart A. Green (Friends of Franklin)
(Paperback, 320 pages, 2008, ISBN: 1422394700, $24.95)
In this unique book on the history of science, Green writes emails to Benjamin Franklin, who died in 1790 but whom Green imagines coming back to life, about developments over the past two centuries.
Author Stuart A. Green writes: “I have written these emails assuming that you carried out the wish you described in 1773: ‘I should prefer to any ordinary death, being immersed in a cask of Madeira wine . . . to be later recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country.’”
These emails inform Franklin of progress in science, medicine and technology from his time until now. Includes more than 70 portraits of Franklin’s friends and relatives, and of those researchers who have led medical and scientific advances during the past two centuries. Illustrations.
Hebrew Medical Astrology: David Ben Yom Tov, Kelal Qatan: Original Hebrew Text, Medieval Latin Translation, Modern English Translation (American Philosophical Society Transaction 95-5, ISBN: 0871699559)
Hebrew Medical Astrology:
David Ben Yom Tov, Kelal Qatan: Original Hebrew Text, Medieval Latin Translation, Modern English Translation
(American Philosophical Society Transaction 95-5, ISBN: 0871699559)
Edited by Gerrit Bos, Charles Burnett and Tzvi Langer
(Paperback, 121 pages, 2005, $24.00)
The “Kelal Qatan (Concise Summary)” was composed by David Ben Yom Tov, a Hebrew scholar who lived in the first half of the 14th century. He is known in Latin simply as David Iudaeus.
This is a text on medical astrology, dealing primarily with the astrological indications pertaining especially to fevers. It is the most detailed and extensive original Hebrew treatise on astrological medicine surviving in Hebrew Literature.
Contents of this edition: Introduction; Original Hebrew Text; The Latin Text; Modern English Translation; Glossary; and Bibliography. Color and black and white illustrations.
“Though the text begins with an account of ancient and Medieval astrological medicine, it explains the background that led the ancients (Ptolemy, Hippocrates, Galen etc.) to astrological medicine,” writes C. Del Valle in a review for the journal Iberia Judaica ( Spanish [PDF] • English Translation [PDF] ).
“Next is a study of the life and work of David Ben Yom, with special reference to the Hebrew authors associated with astrological medicine. Apart from some of the Hebrew translators who worked in the field (David Calonico, Solomon Avigdor), the authors cite a hitherto unpublished work of Pinças Narbonne and that is just one part of astrological medicine. The influence of the astral world in the sublunary world and specifically the power that the moon exerts on the plants and animals, Pinças makes a study of the influence of hebdomales lunar cycles in human pathology.
“The authors acknowledge that in the history of astrological medicine there are still many elements to be researched. But there is absolutely no doubt that this small booklet, a mere 120 pages, clearly has advanced our knowledge of Hebrew medieval medicine. The American Philosophical Society must be recognized its success in the publication of this work.”
Lionel Gossman’s Towards a Rational Historiography (American Philosophical Society Transaction 73-5, ISBN: 142237467X)
Towards a Rational Historiography
(American Philosophical Society Transaction 79-3, ISBN: 142238196X)
by Lionel Gossman (Paperback, 68 pages, 1989, $25.00)
Author Lionel Gossman maintains that underlying the argument that historiography cannot be subsumed under a poetics or a rhetoric (in the sense of a system of purely linguistic or literary tropes) is a larger claim, namely that a wide range of activities, from literary criticism, through legal debate, theology, ethics, politics, psychology, and medicine to the natural sciences, all constitute rational practices, even if there is considerable variation in the degree of formalism and rigor and in the type of argument most commonly employed in each of these different of fields of inquiry.
See the 
of this book before you purchase it.
Hence Gossman emphasizes the practice or process of doing history rather than the product. What appeals to him in the idea of reason as a practice is its open, liberal, and democratic character. Historiography as a rational practice supposes a community of participants rather than the “anomie” of a world in which every man is his own historian or, at best, the relation of hero and follower that appears to be implied by privileging the historical “text.”
“In a 1963 essay on Voltaire’s History of Charles XII,” author Lionel Gossman tells the American Philosophical Society, “I had argued, in reaction to the seemingly entrenched positivism of the historical profession, that in constructing their narratives historians use the same literary figures and tropes as writers of fiction.
“After the publication of Hayden White’s groundbreaking Metahistory by the Johns Hopkins University Press (of whose editorial board I was then a member), I became associated with a group of historians, philosophers, and literary scholars, who were putting forward similar arguments.
“Soon, however, as often happens, what had been a challenging, critical position became a new orthodoxy. My students seemed to believe that there was no difference at all between history and fiction.
“I was convinced there was and I began to argue that modern history at least was a problem-solving rather than a myth-making activity, an ongoing process of criticism and revision, which could never, certainly, result in a representation of past reality but which in fact neither aimed nor claimed to offer that.
“I suggested that we consider historical narrative as closer to the competing evidence-based narratives presented in a court of law than to literary fictions. Towards a Rational Historiography was my attempt to stake out a position that was neither naively positivist nor completely skeptical.”
Edward Berenson writes in his book The Trial of Madame Caillaux: “Unlike many recent critics of historians and historical practice, especially those influenced by French literary theory, Gossman grounds his discussion in a solid sense of what historians ‘actually do’, not just when they write their narratives but when they perform their research, integrate and evaluate the work of others, revise and reconceptualize their scholarship in the face of new evidence and critical scrutiny.”
