Doctors know government and politics like lawyers know medicine—enough to really make a mess of things. Thus, physicians loath to recommend major surgery (especially of debatable benefit) for their patients, eagerly advocate for radical “reform” of our health care system, even though the body politic also bears lifelong scars after disfiguring interventions. Why do doctors, so distrustful of th...

Part I.—Economic Factors and Crime. Crime is a great source of waste. Millions worth of property is destroyed by criminal activity every year, in every country of any importance. Lakhs of rupees are spent on detection of crime and on bringing to book the offenders. Thousands of men are sent to prisons when their crimes are detected, and they have to be fed and housed at State cost. It is true t...

Biennial Conference of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health – The Body Politic: States in the History of Medicine and Health, an extremely important European meeting in the field of history of medicine, whose main organizer was the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health, took place in the amphitheatre of “Carol Davila” University of Medicine and P...

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BACKGROUND The evidence on the association between politics and health is scarce considering the importance of this topic for population health. Studies that investigated the effect of different political regimes on health outcomes show inconsistent results. METHODS Bayesian time-series cross-section analyses are used to examine the overall impact of regional politics on variations in Italian...

The Nation’s poor have been a recurring issue in the body politic. Sometimes it has been in response to widespread distress, as in the Great Depression that helped launch Social Security, federally aided public assistance, and unemployment insurance. On other occasions, as in 1964, it has been the anomaly of that “other America” in the midst of plenty that commanded attention. Apparently the ri...

The social history of madness is a vibrant area of intellectual enquiry which in the past 20 years has generated an impressive series of monographs and essay collections. This volume is a scholarly addition to the literature. Although its origins lie i n a seminar series and a conference, both held at the University of Exeter, the strong focus on institutions during the long nineteenth century ...

Robert LaFollette, the great progressive Senator and presidential candidate, famously argued that, ‘‘The cure for what ails democracy is more democracy.’’ One might aptly characterize Bruce Cain’s book, Democracy More or Less, as an extended rebuttal to LaFollette’s populist prescription for healing the body politic. Cain mounts a sustained assault on what he sees as the naı̈vely Whiggish optimi...