Sander L Gilman: 12 books

The conflation of reality and the fantastic, ambiguity, the relentless confrontation with horror, the fractured sense of identity: Franz Kafka created a wholly unique and enduring worldview through his literature and life, and he remains one of the central intellectual and cultural figures of our...

According to the World Health Organization we are in the midst of a global obesity crisis. Is obesity a disease itself or a symptom of underlying physiological or psychological illnesses? Is it a sign of social excess and therefore not a disease in the medical sense at all? Is it really 'new'? Sander...

The connection and science behind race, racism, and mental illness In 2012, an interdisciplinary team of scientists at the University of Oxford reported that - based on their clinical experiment - the beta-blocker drug, Propranolol, could reduce implicit racial bias among its users. Shortly after...

Our bodies are not fixed. They expand and contract with variations in diet, exercise, and illness. They also alter as we age, changing over time to be markedly different at the end of our lives from what they were at birth. In a similar way, our attitudes to bodies, and especially posture—how people...

No documentation of National Socialism can be undertaken without the explicit recognition that the "German Renaissance" promised by the Nazis culminated in unprecedented horror—World War II and the genocide of European Jewry. With The Third Reich Sourcebook, editors Anson Rabinbach and...

The humanities in higher education are too often labeled as impractical and are not usually valued in today's marketplace. Yet in professional fields, such as the health sciences, interest in what the humanities can offer has increased. Advocates claim the humanities offer health care professionals...

Diets and dieting have concerned – and sometimes obsessed – human societies for centuries. The dieters' regime is about many things, among them the control of weight and the body, the politics of beauty, discipline and even self-harm, personal and societal demands for improved health, spiritual...

Das Wien, in dem Sigmund Freud Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts lebte, war mehr als andere europäische Städte von antisemitischer Stimmung und Propaganda geprägt. Auch die "ernsthafte" medizinische Literatur, mit der Freud sich auseinandersetzte, war mit rassistischen Vorurteilen durchsetzt....

Diseases and Diagnoses discusses why such social problems as addiction, sexually transmitted diseases, racial predisposition for illness, surgery and beauty, and electrotherapy, all of which concerned thinkers a hundred years ago, are reappearing at a staggering rate and in diverse national contexts....

The modern world is faced with a terrifying new ‘disease’, that of ‘obesity’. As people get fatter, we have come to see excess weight as unhealthy, morally repugnant and socially damaging. Fat it seems has long been a national problem and each age, culture and tradition have all defined a...

This timely study demonstrates how images of beauty and ugliness have constructed a visual history that records the artificial boundaries dividing "healthy" bodies from those that are "ill". "Gilman tells an excellent tale."—Jewish Chronicle

Over the past forty years, the health humanities, previously called the medical humanities, has emerged as one of the most exciting fields for interdisciplinary scholarship, advancing humanistic inquiry into bioethics, human rights, health care, and the uses of technology. It has also helped inspire...