At the dawn of the Progressive Era, when America was experiencing an industrial boom, many working families often ate contaminated food, lived in decaying urban tenements, and had little access to medical care. In a city that demanded change, Los Angeles women, rather than city officials, championed the call to action. Cultivating Health, an interdisciplinary chronicle, details women's impact on remaking health policy, despite the absence of government support. Combining primary source and municipal archival research with comfortable prose, Jennifer Lisa Koslow explores community nursing, housing reform, milk sanitation, childbirth, and the campaign against venereal disease in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Los Angeles. She demonstrates how women implemented health care reform and civic programs while laying the groundwork for a successful transition of responsibility back to government. Koslow highlights women's home health care and urban policy-changing accomplishments and pays tribute to what would become the model for similar service-based systems in other American centers.

Documents how racial and social inequalities are built into our food system, and how communities are creating environmentally sustainable and socially just alternatives.

Ecclesiastes 7:9 NKJV Do not hasten in your spirit to be angry, for anger rests in the bosom of fools. Why are you reading this book about anger? I believe that you have already committed your way to God. You might desire at this time to help others to entrust everything in their lives to God's guidance and control.

Discover a different side of Japanese swordsmanship through this fascinating treatise by a samurai doctor on how to maintain a healthy mind, body, and spiritual life Samurai are best known for taking life—but here is a samurai doctor’s prescription for how to preserve life, and to make yours a long and healthy one. Unlike other samurai of his time, the samurai Kaibara Ekiken (1630–1714) was concerned less with swordsmanship than with how to maintain and nurture the healthy mind and body upon which martial techniques and philosophy depended. While serving as the chief medical doctor and healer to the Kuroda clan, he came to a holistic view of how the physical, mental, and spiritual lives of his patients were connected. Drawing from his medical practice, the principles of traditional Chinese medicine, and his life experience, Ekiken created this text as a guide to sustaining health and stamina from youth to old age. Ekiken’s advice regarding moderation, food and drink, sleep, sexual activity, bathing, and therapeutic practices is still amazingly intuitive and appropriate nearly three hundred years after this book was written.

Research demonstrates that even if empathy – the capacity to perceive or share emotions with other beings or objects – is not part of a person’s communication skill set, it can be taught. Empathy can, therefore be viewed as an acquired communication skill. Cultivating and practicing the skill of empathy among health care providers enhances the quality of care experienced by their patients which, in turn, can even improve work satisfaction for health care providers. Many communication textbooks or manuals for care giving professions primarily focus on specific communication skills and techniques. Cultivating Empathy takes a different approach; the book sets empathy as the foundation of all therapeutic interactions and teaches the reader to learn the art of empathy by using constructive approaches and research findings from social sciences and neuroscience. --

This volume offers an insight into the promotion of global health by creating a culture-sensitive social policy. It provides a factual case study in every chapter and gives recommendations for promoting health across cultures.

Academic staff and students within higher education settings are confronted by a learning environment that is academically stimulating, informative, career-focused and socially rich, which can be intensely competitive and highly charged. Within this learning environment, academic staff and students are often at risk of compromising their wellbeing in their pursuit of academic excellence. This book provides an examination of the key areas that are important to the sustenance of wellbeing within higher education settings, with a view to promoting healthy learning environments. The chapter authors are predominantly working in the Asia-Pacific rim, but the book also includes more universal perspectives. The synthesis of the issues covered in the book is crucial to the understanding of higher education as not only an environment for gaining knowledge and skills relevant for success in academic and career domains, but also as an environment for developing socially adept and authentic communication skills. The ideas presented in this book will further assist academic staff and students to consider ways to more fully participate in their learning environment so that they can optimize their valuable contributions to the professional communities they serve.