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An epidemiologist, in the late 1940s a vaccine looked promising to combat tuberculosis, which was running rampant. Comstock was assigned to test the latest "BCG" vaccine to ensure it was truly effective, but his study came to the startling conclusion that it was not -- just in time to stop the planned immunization of children. He then set to work to find something that would help contain the disease, and by 1952 had found that the drug isoniazid (INH) worked to prevent and treat tuberculosis. It has proved so effective that it's still a first-line treatment today. Comstock then founded the Johns Hopkins Training Center for Public Health Research and Prevention, where he worked for 30 years researching cancer, heart disease and other public health problems. Dr. Comstock never retired: he worked until a few days before his death on July 15, from prostate cancer. He was 92. From This is True for 14 July 2007 Suggestions for further reading:
 By: Susan Sontag List Price: $14.00 Amazon Price: $11.20 Editorial Review: In 1978 Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as "one of the most liberating books of its time." A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment. By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is--just a disease. Cancer, she argues, is not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment and, it is highly curable, if good treatment is followed. Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of a new, stigmatized disease replete with mystifications and punitive metaphors, Sontag wrote a sequel to Illness as Metaphor, extending the argument of the earlier book to the AIDS pandemic.These two essays now published together, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, have been translated into many languages and continue to have an enormous influence on the thinking of medical professionals and, above all, on the lives of many thousands of patients and caregivers.  By: Colleen AycockMark Scott List Price: $39.95 Amazon Price: $35.95 Editorial Review: Joe Gans captured the world lightweight title in 1902, becoming the first black American world title holder in any sport. Gans was a master strategist and tactician, and one the earliest practitioners of "scientific" boxing. As a black champion reigning during the Jim Crow era, he endured physical assaults, a stolen title, bankruptcy, and numerous attempts to destroy his reputation. Four short years after successfully defending his title in the 42-round "Greatest Fight of the Century," Joe Gans was dead of tuberculosis. This biography features original round-by-round ringside telegraph reports of his most famous and controversial fights, a complete fight history, photographs, and early newspaper drawings and cartoons.  By: Alexandre Dumas List Price: $12.95 Amazon Price: $10.36 Editorial Review: One of the greatest love stories of all time, this novel has fascinated generations of readers. Dumas's subtle and moving portrait of a woman in love is based on his own love affair with one of the most desirable courtesans in Paris. This is a completely new translation commissioned for the World's Classics.  By: Charles F. Manski List Price: $25.50 Amazon Price: $22.95 Editorial Review: This book provides a language and a set of tools for finding bounds on the predictions that social and behavioral scientists can logically make from nonexperimental and experimental data. The economist Charles Manski draws on examples from criminology, demography, epidemiology, social psychology, and sociology as well as economics to illustrate this language and to demonstrate the broad usefulness of the tools. There are many traditional ways to present identification problems in econometrics, sociology, and psychometrics. Some of these are primarily statistical in nature, using concepts such as flat likelihood functions and nondistinct parameter estimates. Manski's strategy is to divorce identification from purely statistical concepts and to present the logic of identification analysis in ways that are accessible to a wide audience in the social and behavioral sciences. In each case, problems are motivated by real examples with real policy importance, the mathematics is kept to a minimum, and the deductions on identifiability are derived giving fresh insights. Manski begins with the conceptual problem of extrapolating predictions from one population to some new population or to the future. He then analyzes in depth the fundamental selection problem that arises whenever a scientist tries to predict the effects of treatments on outcomes. He carefully specifies assumptions and develops his nonparametric methods of bounding predictions. Manski shows how these tools should be used to investigate common problems such as predicting the effect of family structure on children's outcomes and the effect of policing on crime rates. Successive chapters deal with topics ranging from the use of experiments to evaluate social programs, to the use of case-control sampling by epidemiologists studying the association of risk factors and disease, to the use of intentions data by demographers seeking to predict future fertility. The book closes by examining two central identification problems in the analysis of social interactions: the classical simultaneity problem of econometrics and the reflection problem faced in analyses of neighborhood and contextual effects.  By: Frank Ryan List Price: $21.99 Amazon Price: $19.79 Editorial Review: Tuberculosis has claimed more than a billion lives worldwide. In this acclaimed book, Dr. Frank Ryan tells the remarkable story of the dedicated doctors, chemists, and bacteriologists who halted the course of this ferocious disease--until the "old enemy" found in AIDS a deadly ally to form a drug-resistant synergy. 8 pages of photos. |
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