Tragically, contact between Indians and the Europeans extended beyond just trade goods; the invasion of foreign microbes devastated Indian communities well beyond the coastal region. When John Lawson visited the Carolina interior in the 1690s, he encountered the Congaree people, whose numbers and villages had been dramatically reduced by smallpox and other diseases. In 1660, Lawson, born into a London gentry family and aspiring to a career as a natural scientist, had set sail for the Carolina colony that was founded after the restoration of the British monarchy. He traveled more than a thousand miles as an employee of the colony's proprietors, who were eager to attract additional colonists and foster economic development. Lawson's keen eye for the native and non-native people, flora, and fauna of the region was evidenced in his journal A New Voyage to Carolina, published in 1709.

"This innovative, trans-faculty subject teaches how information technologies (IT) are reshaping and redefining the health care marketplace through improved economies of scale, greater technical efficiencies in the delivery of care to patients, advanced tools for patient education and self-care, network integrated decision support tools for clinicians, and the emergence of e-commerce in health care. Student tutorials provide an opportunity for interactive discussion. Interdisciplinary project teams comprised of Harvard and MIT graduate students in medicine, business, law, education, engineering, computer science, public health, and government collaborate to design innovative IT applications. Projects are presented during the final class. ĺĘ Starting in Spring 2010, this course will be titled Enabling Technology Innovation in Healthcare and the Life Sciences."

Despite major cultural, legal, and medical impediments the use of birth control, including abortion, by American women was widespread at the turn of the century. In their quest to control unwanted pregnancies, American women could be surprisingly resourceful in the methods they used. In this audio excerpt from a 1974 interview with historian Sherna Gluck, Miriam Allen deFord described methods of birth control in vogue in the 1910s, including spermicides, douches, the Dutch pessary (an early diaphragm), and the use of ergot pills to induce abortion.

Let’s Talk About Medicines is an educational program developed by Wisconsin Health Literacy to help students obtain a better understanding of how to more safely and effectively use medicine, which can lead to better health. This lesson plan highlights: different types of medications, taking prescription medication safely, how to read and understand prescription medicine labels, and questions to ask your doctor.

Let’s Talk About Pain Medicines is an educational program developed by Wisconsin Health Literacy to help students obtain a better understanding of how to more safely and effectively use prescription pain (opioid) medicine. This lesson plan highlights: differences between opioids and other pain medicines, ways to take opioids, history of the opioid epidemic, common terms and dosage instructions, signs of an overdose and information about naloxone, the risks of taking opioids with other medicine/drugs, and how to store opioids in a safe place and get rid of unused opioids.

AIDS emerged as a health crisis in the 1980's and early 1990's. While many Americans initially associated the disease with gay men, ignorance about AIDS contributed to its rapid spread, first to intravenous drug users and then to heterosexuals. The lack of information available to people at risk particularly affected health workers like Lorraine Theibaud, a registered nurse at San Francisco General Hospital. Theibaud and her colleagues, fearful about contracting or spreading the disease, were not given adequate information or training on how to protect themselves or their patients. When she discovered safety methods and technology that were not available at her hospital, Theibaud organized health workers to demand access to new safety techniques. Her campaign worked, winning workers new safety training and a permanent monitoring committee.

Students create large-scale models of microfluidic devices using a process similar to that of the PDMS and plasma bonding that is used in the creation of lab-on-a-chip devices. They use disposable foam plates, plastic bendable straws and gelatin dessert mix. After the molds have hardened overnight, they use plastic syringes to inject their model devices with colored fluid to test various flow rates. From what they learn, students are able to answer the challenge question presented in lesson 1 of this unit by writing individual explanation statements.

Alexander Graham Bell first exhibited his telephone at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, but many people were initially dubious about the utility of Bell's invention. Nevertheless, by the mid-1890s, about 300,000 phones were in use and by World War I, the number reached 10.5 million. Learning to use this new device, Americans wondered what to say to start a telephone conversation. Bell's choice for an initial greeting was "Ahoy." Others argued for more formal greetings like "What is wanted?" or "Are you there?" In 1877, Thomas Alva Edison, the famous inventor who developed the first practical telephone transmitter, solved the problem by introducing "Hello!" as the standard English telephone greeting. The word had been around for a little while--Twain had even used it in Tom Sawyer --but why Edison chose to use it is not known. Whatever the derivation, "hello" had become standard by 1880 when Mark Twain used it in this comic sketch, "A Telephonic Conversation."

Railroads were among the earliest U.S. industries to apply modern management principles to their operations. Beginning in the 1850s and 1860s, railroads were the first American businesses to have a large number of salaried managers and an internal organizational structure with clear lines of communication, responsibility, and authority. These managerial innovations, standard by the 1880s, were necessary to control a large number of employees and offices scattered over a vast geographical area. With the growing professionalization of railroad management came a burgeoning professional literature. Marshall M. Kirkman wrote prolifically about railroad management. This excerpt from his multi-volume The Science of Railways: Organization and Forces (1896) extolled the virtues of military-like discipline in the running of American railroads.

Students will discuss the special considerations that must be made when dealing with the human body, and will gain an appreciation for the amazing devices that have improved our quality of life. They will also explore how " čĎForm Fits Function'. This lesson should serve as a starting point for students to begin to ponder how the medical devices in their everyday lives actually work.

Medical Terminology for Healthcare Professions is an Open Educational Resource (OER) that focuses on breaking down, pronouncing, and learning the meaning of medical terms within the context of anatomy and physiology. This resource is targeted for Healthcare Administration, Health Sciences, and Pre-Professional students.

In the Cold War period of the 1950s and early 1960s, an era in which married life was often idealized as essential for personal happiness and success, non-conformance became a social problem in need of study and explanation. Experts in social science fields of psychology and sociology, and commentators in the popular press conducted research and published findings that sought to account for the relatively large numbers of men and women who remained unmarried despite societal pressures to wed. In this sequel to an earlier article on unmarried women, Look magazine writer Eleanor Harris, in response to suggestions of readers, addressed the topic of bachelorhood by presenting testimonies of selected men on the reasons they remained unmarried and conclusions of authorities regarding these explanations. The divergent ways that the two articles presented their subjects revealed some gender biases of the period. Unmarried women were depicted as "depressed" or "frantic," while single men were typed as "fixated on a mother figure," inclined to "antiresponsibility," or "latent homosexuals." Men often failed to find the "perfect" woman; women frequently could not find even an "eligible" man. Ultimately, the articles portrayed the unwed female's predicament far more portentously than the male's: women were "likely to get stranded" if they waited too long to get married, but it was "never too late" for men.

Students obtain a basic understanding of microfluidic devices, how they are developed and their uses in the medical field. After conducting the associated activity, they watch a video clip and learn about flow rate and how this relates to the speed at which medicine takes effect in the body. What they learn contributes to their ongoing objective to answer the challenge question presented in lesson 1 of this unit. They conclude by solving flow rate problems provided on a worksheet.

Consumer products came to the fore in the economy of the 1920s, putting new technologies like radios, toasters, and electric irons into even working-class homes. A quarter of a century separates these two model kitchens

This 1903 police department arrest record reflects the faith in data and science espoused by some Progressives. The reputedly scientific measurements instituted by French anthropologist Alphonse Bertillon claimed to detect innate criminality and other character flaws, many associated with particular ethnic and racial groups, through physical evidence. Although it bore the stamp of scientific approval, this and other contemporary techniques for differentiating people based on race or physical characteristics incorporated widely held beliefs that Southern Europeans, Asians, and African Americans were inherently and biological different from and inferior to white Anglo Saxons. These beliefs, in turn, lent credence to the rise of Jim Crow and immigrant exclusion.

Fall River, Massachusetts, mill worker Thomas O'Donnell (who had immigrated to the U.S. from England eleven years earlier) appeared before the U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor on October 18, 1883, to answer the panel's questions about working-class economic conditions. An unemployed mule spinner for more than half of the year, he described the introduction of new production methods at the Fall River, Massachusetts, textile factory where he worked as a mule spinner (a worker who tended the large yarn-making machines). These changes allowed the mill's owners to employ children, and they also left the mule spinner unemployed for much of the year. O'Donnell described the sharp decline in his family's living standards that followed and the ways they struggled to make ends meet.

Radio and other popular entertainments, like movies, created a truly national popular culture during the 1920s. Pausing to tune in to his favorite program, this farmer represents an extreme example of radio's broad popularity during the 1920s. For rural Americans, radios not only delivered music and sports but also vital information on commodity prices and weather reports. While they linked rural residents to the rest of the country, radio broadcasts and movie theaters also provided a vehicle for advertising and a spur for consumer culture.

Silicosis, a deadly lung disease caused when workers inhale fine particles of silica dust—a mineral found in sand, quartz, and granite—became a national cause célèbre during the Great Depression when it was recognized as a significant disease among lead, zinc, and silver miners, sandblasters, and foundry and tunnel workers. In 1938 the federal government declared silicosis America's number one industrial health problem and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins convened a National Silicosis Conference in Washington, D.C. Despite such attempts to deal with the silicosis crisis, workers continued to complain of their plight. Hundreds of letters were sent to federal officials from across the country. The three letters included here (sent to Secretary Perkins) attested to workers' desperation and to their confidence that the government would agree to investigate.

The eight-session subject uses literary narratives and poetry to study ethical issues in medicine. Methodology emphasizes the importance of context, contingency, and circumstance in recognizing, evaluating, and resolving moral problems. Focus on developing the skills of critical and reflective reading that increase effectiveness in clinical medicine. Texts include short fiction and poetry by Woolf, Chekhov, Carver, Kafka, Hurston, Marquez, and Tolstoy. Instructor provides necessary philosophic and literary context followed by class discussion. Students keep a reading journal that examines the meanings of illness, the moral role of the physician, and the relevance of emotions, culture, faith, values, social realities, and life histories to patient care.

Many artists working in the decades after the American Revolution came from the ranks of artisans and mechanics. In a republic that dispensed with aristocratic patrons and royal academies, art came to be supported by a middling populace more interested in portraits than grand history painting. Sculpture in marble, time consuming and expensive, was even more remote than paints, and the new nation lacked grand palaces or mansions for display. John Frazee, born in Rahway, New Jersey in 1790, lacked the benefit of formal instruction but still progressed from carving lettering on gravestones to fashioning busts of the rich and famous. Without formal knowledge or the constraints of European customs, American-born and trained artist-artisans such as Frazee resorted to indigenous and ingenious solutions to the problems they faced in a commercializing society, such as Frazee's mechanical invention to transfer an image from painting to a marble bust.