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Health and Medicine
Folk medicine, mental illness, drug abuse, midwifery, herbalists and granny doctors, diet and nutrition, black lung, AIDS, cancer, rural clinics, and obstacles to community health care including cultural and language barriers
Anderson, Roger T., and others. 2014. “Breast Cancer Screening, Area Deprivation, and Later-Stage Breast Cancer in Appalachia: Does Geography Matter?” Health Services Research 49 (April): 546–567. “Central cancer registry data (2006–2008) from three Appalachian states were linked to Medicare claims and census data.” Tables; shaded county outline maps.
Arnold, Carrie. 2016. “A Scourge Returns: Black Lung in Appalachia.” Environmental Health Perspectives 124, no. 1 (January): A13-A18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1289/ehp.124-A13.
Bansah, Abednego K., David H. Holben, and Tania Basta. 2014. “Food Insecurity Is Associated with Depression among Individuals Living with HIV/AIDS in Rural Appalachia.” Journal of Appalachian Studies 20, no. 2 (Fall): 194-206. Cross-sectional study among 82 individuals.
Berkes, Howard. 2013. “Doctors Confirm Black Lung in Victims of Mine Blast” [2010; W. Va.; Upper Big Branch mine; 29 fatalities]. Black Lung Returns to Coal Country series, 17 May. NPR radio. 1,230 words. Sidebar: “What Is Black Lung?”; Related Stories; Comments. http://n.pr/10JXFac.
Blake, Mariah. 2015. “Welcome to Beautiful Parkersburg, West Virginia: Home to one of the most brazen, deadly corporate gambits in U.S. history” [DuPont; C8-tainted water; cancer; birth defects]. Huffington Post, 27 August. 8,800 words, with multi-media: photos, video clips, and documents. http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/welcome-to-beautiful-parkersburg/.
Brake, Sherri. 2014. The Haunted History of the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. [No location]: CreateSpace. 176 pp. History; built 1860s; Weston, W. Va.
Buer, Lesly-Marie. 2015. “Is There a Prescription Drug ‘Epidemic’ in Appalachian Kentucky? Media Representations and Implications for Women Who Misuse Prescription Drugs.” In Recovery, Renewal, Reclaiming: Anthropological Research toward Healing, ed. L. King, 85-116. Southern Anthropological Society Proceedings, no. 43. Knoxville, Tenn.: Newfound Press.
Carter, Eric D. 2014. “Malaria Control in the Tennessee Valley Authority: Health, Ecology, and Metanarratives of Development” [mosquito control]. Journal of Historical Geography 43 (January): 111-127.
Cavender, Anthony. 2013. “The Medical World of John Sevier” [1745-1815]. Journal of East Tennessee History 85: 90-107. Changes in medical science throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are at the core” of this analysis, with excerpts from Sevier’s journal listing specific diseases.
Cavender, Anthony P. 2014. “A Vision Lost: Dr. Robert J. Preston and the South-Western Lunatic Asylum, 1887-1906” [Marion, Va.]. Virginia Magazine of History & Biography 122, no. 3: 202-229. Discusses the moral treatment practiced by Preston.
Cavender, Anthony P. 2015. “Idioms of Distress among White Women Patients at the Southwestern Lunatic Asylum, Marion, Virginia, 1887-1891.” In Recovery, Renewal, Reclaiming: Anthropological Research toward Healing, ed L. King, 139-157. Southern Anthropological Society Proceedings, no. 43. Knoxville, Tenn.: Newfound Press.
Chubinski, Jennifer, Sarah Walsh, Toby Sallee, and Eric Rademacher. 2014. “Painkiller Misuse among Appalachians and in Appalachian Counties in Kentucky.” Journal of Appalachian Studies 20, no. 2 (Fall): 154-169. Tables; county outline map.
Dalton, Elizabeth D. 2014. “The Protective Effects of Adolescent Motherhood in South Central Appalachia: Salvation From Drugs and Emptiness.” Journal of Transactional Nursing 26, no. 4: 409-417.
Editorial Board. 2014. “Miners Battle Black Lung, and Bureaucracy.” New York Times, 7 September, 18(A). 347 words. “Government data show the disease, preventable but not curable, has killed more than 76,000 miners since 1968. And it appears to be on the rise again.” http://nyti.ms/1ud6LOs.
Einstein, Sarah. 2015. Mot: A Memoir [creative nonfiction]. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 152 pp. “The story of an unlikely friendship .... In unsparing prose and with a sharp eye for detail, Einstein brings the reader into the world of Mot’s delusions and illuminates a life that would otherwise be hidden from us.” W. Va.; homelessness; mental illness; friendship.
Eyre, Eric. 2016. “Drug Firms Fueled ‘Pill Mills’ in Rural WV.” Charleston Gazette-Mail, 23 May. 1,027 words. “Over five years, the nation’s largest drug wholesalers flooded notorious ‘pill mill’ pharmacies in West Virginia’s smallest towns and poorest counties with hundreds of thousands of painkillers, according to court records the companies had sought to keep secret for more than a year.” http://www.wvgazettemail.com/news-health/20160523/drug-firms-fueled-pill-mills-in-rural-wv#sthash.
Felton, Tom. 2014. “Proud to Have Been Called Nurses: Recalling Davis Memorial Hospital School of Nursing” [Elkins, W. Va.]. Goldenseal: West Virginia Traditional Life 40, no. 2 (Summer): 20-25. Attached article: “Cadet Nurses Maggie and Terri Payne,” by Audrey Stanton-Smith, 26-29.
Fletcher, Rebecca Adkins. 2016. “Keeping Up with the Cadillacs: What Health Insurance Disparities, Moral Hazard, and the Cadillac Tax Mean to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 30, no. 1 (March): 18-36. “...article draws from ethnographic research with the United Steelworkers...at a steel mill and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union...at a food-processing plant in urban Central Appalachia.”
Gutman, David. 2015. “How Did WV Come to Lead the Nation in Overdoses”? Charleston Gazette-Mail, 17 October. 2,727 words. http://www.wvgazettemail.com/article/20151017/GZ01/151019539.
Hall, Martin T., Carl G. Leukefeld, and Jennifer R. Havens. 2013. “Factors Associated with High-Frequency Illicit Methadone Use among Rural Appalachian Drug Users.” American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse 39, no. 4 (July): 241-246. From interviews with 503 rural drug users between 2008 and 2010.
Harris, John M., Jr., MD. 2016. “Medical Ethics, Methodism, and a Nineteenth-Century West Virginian’s Battle with Quakery.” West Virginia History, n.s. 10, no. 1 (Spring): 27-44. “In 1881, the new and rapidly industrializing state of West Virginia...passed the strongest antiquackery law in the nation,” setting a precedent for other states’ regulation of medical practice.
Hash, Kristina M., Elaine T. Jurkowski, and John A. Krout, ed. 2014. Aging in Rural Places: Policies, Programs, and Professional Practice. Foreword by Graham D. Rowles. New York: Springer. 308 pp. Examines key issues and provides case examples.
Hendryx, Michael, and Kestrel A. Innes-Wimsatt. 2013. “Increased Risk of Depression for People Living in Coal Mining Areas of Central Appalachia.” Ecopsychology 5, no. 3 (September): 179-187. Tables; from a survey of 8,591. http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/eco.2013.0029.
Hendryx, Michael. 2013. “Personal and Family Health in Rural Areas of Kentucky with and without Mountaintop Coal Mining” [Floyd, Elliot, and Rowan Co.]. Journal of Rural Health 29, no. 1 (August): s79-s88. Tables; map.
Hendryx, Michael, and Juhua Luo. 2014. “An Examination of the Effects of Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining on Respiratory Symptoms and COPD Using Propensity Scores.” International Journal of Environmental Health Research 25, no. 3 (July): 265-276. Health survey of 682 adults in two rural areas of Virginia.
Hoey, Brain A. 2015. “Creating Healthy Community in the Postindustrial City” [Huntington, W. Va.]. In Recovery, Renewal, Reclaiming: Anthropological Research toward Healing, ed L. King, 5-44. Southern Anthropological Society Proceedings, no. 43. Knoxville, Tenn.: Newfound Press.
Keefe, Susan E., and Lisa Curtin. 2015. “The Cultural Context of Depression in Appalachia: Evangelical Christianity and the Experience of Emotional Distress and Healing.” In Recovery, Renewal, Reclaiming: Anthropological Research toward Healing, ed L. King, 117-137. Southern Anthropological Society Proceedings, no. 43. Knoxville, Tenn.: Newfound Press.
Krause, Denise D., Jeralynn S. Cossman, and Warren L. May. 2016. “Oral Health in Appalachia: Regional, State, Sub-State, and National Comparisons.” Journal of Appalachian Studies 22, no. 1 (Spring): 80-102. Maps; tables. “Mississippi and West Virginia scored especially low.”
Lerner, Sharon. 2015. “The Teflon Toxin: DuPont and the Chemistry of Deception” [Parkersburg, W. Va.]. The Intercept, 17 August. 6,000 words. See also: Part 2: The Case Against DuPont, and Part 3: How DuPont Slipped Past the EPA. “Until recently, few people had heard much about chemicals like C8. One of tens of thousands of unregulated industrial chemicals, perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA — also called C8 because of the eight-carbon chain that makes up its chemical backbone — had gone unnoticed for most of its eight or so decades on earth, even as it helped cement the success of one of the world’s largest corporations.” https://theintercept.com/2015/08/11/dupont-chemistry-deception/.
Lilly, Jessica, and Roxy Todd. 2015. “What’s an Appalachian Food Desert and Why Are They Increasing?” Inside Appalachia, series. West Virginia Public Broadcasting, 15 October 15. Podcast, 53:58 min. Shaded county outline maps: “Food Deserts in Appalachia,” and “West Virginia Food Deserts.” http://www.tinyurl.com/q4g347d. (See also: “Inside Appalachia: What Would You Do if Your Grocery Store Disappeared” [podcast], by the same authors, 10 July 1915. http://www.tinyurl.com/qau48sn).
Lindsey, Heather. 2015. “They Have Insurance, but a Third of Breast Cancer Patients in Appalachia Are Not Taking Their Prescribed Adjuvant Hormone Therapy.” Oncology Times (blog), 10 August. 1,301 words. http://journals.lww.com/oncology-times/blog/onlinefirst/pages/post.aspx?PostID=1294.
Lord, Rich, and Adam Smeltz. 2016. “Flood of Pain Pills into Kentucky Brought Crackdown.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 24 May. 1,100 words. “Lea Ann Marlow wasn’t alone among physicians who doled out painkillers like lollipops and attracted a devoted interstate patient population. She may have been the only one brazen enough to claim to be pharmaceutical royalty.” http://www.post-gazette.com/news/nation/2016/05/24/Flood-of-pain-pills-into-Kentucky-brought-crackdown/stories/201605240028.
Luanpitpong, Sudjit, Michael Chen, Travis Knuckles, Sijin Wen, Juhua Luo, Emily Ellis, Michael Hendryx, and Yon Rojanasakul. 2014. “Appalachian Mountaintop Mining Particulate Matter Induces Neoplastic Transformation of Human Bronchial Epithelial Cells and Promotes Tumor Formation.” Environmental Science & Technology48, no.21 (November): 12912-12919. Charts; illustrations. “...we now have solid evidence that dust collected from residential areas near MTR sites causes cancerous changes to human lung cells.” http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/es504263u.
MacGillis, Alec. 2015. “More Trouble in Coal Country: Health Care at Risk for 12,000 Retired Miners and Their Families.” ProPublica: Journalism in the Public Interest, 27 October. 1,703 words. “Peabody Energy, the nation’s largest coal company, is seeking release from a pledge to pay into a health insurance fund.” https://shar.es/15rNYy.
Michaels, Kathryn Anne. 2013. Wednesday’s Children: Memoirs of a Nurse-Turned-Social-Worker in the Appalachian Mountains [N.C.]. Charleston, S.C.: Monkeypaw Press. 202 pp.
Mohr, James C. 2013. Licensed to Practice: The Supreme Court Defines the American Medical Profession. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 216 pp. “...an 1889 U.S. Supreme Court case, Dent v. West Virginia, effectively transformed medical practice from an unregulated occupation to a legally recognized profession .... the licensing precedents established in West Virginia became the bedrock on which the modern American medical structure was built.”
Montell, William Lynwood. 2015. Tales from Kentucky Nurses. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 281 pp. Two hundred accounts from frontier times to the present, including a chapter on the Frontier Nursing Service, biographies of the informants, and an index by county.
Morris, Jim, Chris Hamby, and others. 2013-2014. “Breathless and Burdened” (series). Center For Public Integrity. Pulitzer Prize winning “yearlong investigation examines how doctors and lawyers, working at the behest of the coal industry, have helped defeat the benefits claims of miners sick and dying of black lung.” http://www.publicintegrity.org/environment/breathless-and-burdened.
Park, Haeyoun, and Matthew Bloch. 2016. “Epidemic of Drug Overdose Deaths Ripples across America.” New York Times, 20 January, 13(A). 842 words, with shaded-county maps. “Some of the largest concentrations of overdose deaths were in Appalachia and the Southwest.” (Map Sources: “Drug Poisoning Mortality: United States, 2002--2014,” by Lauren M. Rossen and others, National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) http://nyti.ms/1OuuROb.
Petsonk, Edward L., Cecile Rose, and Robert Cohen. 2013. “Coal Mine Dust Lung Disease: New Lessons from an Old Exposure” [resurgent pneumoconiosis]. American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine 187, no. 11 (June 1): 1178-1185. http://www.atsjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1164/rccm.201301-0042CI.
Rich, Nathaniel. 2016. “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare.” New York Times Magazine, 6 January. 8,300 words. “Rob Bilott was a corporate defense attorney for eight years. Then he took on an environmental suit that would upend his entire career — and expose a brazen, decades-long history of chemical pollution.” Parkersburg, W. Va.; PFOA (C8) cancer causing contamination of air, soil, water. http://nyti.ms/1JtKRkc.
Schoenberg, Nancy E., Christina R. Studts, Jenna Hatcher-Keller, Eliza Buelt, and Elwanda Adams. 2013. “Patterns and Determinants of Breast and Cervical Cancer Non-Screening among Appalachian Women.” Women & Health 53, no. 6 (August): 552 - 571. Based on interviews with 222 women in six eastern Kentucky counties.
Schrift, Melissa, Anthony Cavender, and Sarah Hoover. 2013. “Mental Illness, Institutionalization and Oral History in Appalachia: Voices of Psychiatric Attendants.” Journal of Appalachian Studies 19, no. 1-2 (Spring-Fall): 82-107. Oral histories of former attendants at Southwestern Virginia Mental Health Institute “reveal the dynamics of an overlooked occupational culture that speaks to the perception and management of mental illness in a rural Appalachian community.”
Scibilia, Anthony Julius. 2013. “Being Prometheus in 1943: Bringing Penicillin to the Working Man.” Pennsylvania History 80, no. 3 (Summer): 442-450. Penicillin was developed in the kitchen of a physician of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Plant in Aliquippa, Pa., and successfully tested on steelworkers throughout the Beaver Valley in 1943.
Snyder, Audrey, and Esther Thatcher. 2014. “From the Trunk of a Volkswagen Beetle: A Mobile Nursing Clinic in Appalachia.” Family & Community Health 37, no. 3 (July-September): 239-247. “...roving Health Wagon in the 1980s and 1990s in Southwest Virginia. Family nurse practitioner Sister Bernadette Kenny was instrumental in bringing care on wheels to rural residents.”
Sorrell, Evelyn Ashley. 2015. “‘She Now Cries Out’: Linda Neville and the Limitations of Venereal Disease Control Policies in Kentucky.” Chap. 12 in Women of the Mountain South: Identity, Work, and Activism, ed. C. Rice and M. Tedesco, 350-371. Athens: Ohio University Press. “...when Progressive Era reformers attempted to eliminate blindness in infants due to veneral disease, specifically gonorrhea and syphilis, mountain women were deemed responsible for spreading the disease. The solution, therefore, was to control women’s, rather than men’s, sexuality.”
Tallant, April, Elaine Russell, Sarah Tennyson, Erica Allison, Jenn Whinnem, and Donald Kostelec. 2014. “MountainWise: A Story Worth Sharing, People Worth Preserving--Community Transformation Grant Project of Western North Carolina.” Journal of Appalachian Studies 20, no. 2 (Fall): 181-193. Aims to facilitate active living, healthy eating, tobacco-free living, and community-clinical linkages.
Tavernise, Sabrina. 2014. “Law’s Expanded Medicaid Coverage Brings a Surge in Sign-Ups.” New York Times, 20 January, 1(A). 1,433 words. Profiles of McDowell County, W. Va., residents in desperate circumstances now eligible for “Obamacare,” under the Affordable Care Act. http://nyti.ms/1cNmbMP.
Temple, John. 2015. American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America’s Deadliest Drug Epidemic. Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press. 299 pp. “American Pain’s doctors distributed massive quantities of oxycodone to hundreds of customers a day, mostly traffickers and addicts .... The narrative swings back and forth between Florida and Kentucky.” See also: Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic(2015), by Sam Quinones.
Welch, Wendy, ed. 2014. Public Health in Appalachia: Essays from the Clinic and the Field. Contributions to Southern Appalachian Studies series, no 35. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. 207 pp. Contents: PART ONE: HEALTH ISSUES. No reason to smile: dental care in rural Appalachia / Sarah Raskin and A. Carole Pratt -- Cancer in Appalachia / Morgan Fields, Gretchen E. Ely and Mark Dignan -- The growing problem of diabetes in Appalachia / Carl J. Greever, Rachel Ward and Christian L. Williams -- When Oxycontin struck, and how the community struck back: one woman remembers / Sue Ella Kobak -- PART TWO: CULTURALLY APPROPRIATE HEALTHCARE DELIVERY SYSTEMS. Blending primary care and behavioral health: an ideal model for the diverse cultures of Appalachia / Bob Franko -- Telehealth in Appalachia / Steve North -- Mountain Empire Older Citizens, Inc., and economic development in southwest Virginia: from “home-”delivered meals to “all-”inclusive care for the elderly / Marilyn Pace Maxwell and Tony Lawson -- PART THREE: CULTURAL THEORY AND CLINICAL POLICY. The elephant on the examining table: “patient responsibility” examined as a construct of public health and clinical health care / Wendy Welch and Esther Thatcher -- The effects of fatalism, faith, and family dynamics on health among Appalachian youth / Tauna Gulley -- Finding the spark: enabling community participation in research, planning and delivery / Tom Plaut.
West Virginia Public Broadcasting. 2015. The Needle and the Damage Done: West Virginia’s Heroin Epidemic[series; podcasts]. West Virginia Morning [program]. Charleston, W. Va.: WVPB, 25-29 May. Week-long radio series of 15 stories examining the state’s heroin problem from the standpoint of the addict, emergency room physician, and lawmakers. Maps, statistics. Stories by: Glynis Board, Clark Davis, Jessica Lilly, Ashton Marra, Liz McCormick, Dave Mistich, Roxy Todd, Beth Vorhees, and Jesse Wright. http://wvpublic.org/topic/needle-and-damage-done-west-virginias-heroin-epidemic.
Zhu, Motao, Songzhu Zhao, Kelly K. Gurka, Sahiti Kandati, and Jeffrey H. Coben. 2013. “Appalachian Versus Non-Appalachian U.S. Traffic Fatalities, 2008–2010.” Annals of Epidemiology 23, no. 6 (June): 377-380. “Though the Appalachian region is home to less than 10 percent of the United States’ population, the region’s traffic fatality rate is 45 percent higher than that of non-Appalachian areas.” Tables.