First made available online last month, Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry has released its most recent lists of books received for review at the journal (which you can access on our publisher’s website at this link.) These books include Carlo Caduff’s The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger and Janis Jenkins’ Extraordinary Conditions: Culture and Experience in Mental Illness. Last year, we featured Caduff’s text (here) and Jenkin’s text (here) in book release features here on the blog.

The journal has also received the following two books for review. Here are the two releases:

Image via UPenn Press website

New from the University of Pennsylvania Press is a collection of essays entitled Medical Humanitarianism: Ethnographies of Practice (available here.) Edited by Sharon Abramowitz and Catherine Panter-Brick, with a foreword by Peter Piot, the book explores the experiences of health workers and other practitioners who deliver humanitarian medical aid throughout the world. The book promises a “critical” yet “compassionate” account of humanitarian projects spanning Indonesia, Ethiopia, Haiti, Liberia, and other nations.

Image via Cornell UP website.

From Cornell University Press comes Gabriel Mendes’ Under the Strain of Color:
Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry (available here.) This historical text examines a mental health clinic in the 1940s established to treat psychiatric complaints amongst a primarily black, urban, underserved population. Unlike other treatment centers for mental illness at the time, the Lafargue Clinic was unique in its emphasis on the medical as well as the social contexts in which its patients experienced distress. The clinic challenged existing notions of “color-blind” psychiatry and became both a scientific and equally political institution, highlighting the “interlocking relationships” between biomedicine, the state, racial inequity, and community-based health care.