Non-Fiction Books

Sayantani DasGupta, a young Indian American woman, entered medical school with a vision of saving lives and making the world a better place. What she found instead was a difficult path of politics, sexism, and red tape. Based on wry "field notes" she took throughout her journey in the healing profession, this enlightening story of learning to be a doctor will provoke tears, laughter, and thoughtful reflection. . . . In these pages, DasGupta's trials and tribulations--and those of her patients--are vividly rendered. Whether it is a fourteen-year-old giving birth, a terrified AIDS patient, or elderly lovebirds with a less-than-ordinary sex problem, DasGupta illuminates the miracle of life and the struggle to sustain it. Yet she also shines a penetrating light on today's medical landscape--the militarism of medicine (where the patient is often the enemy), the gender wars, and the increasingly restrictive practice of managed care. A remarkable account of medicine on the cusp of the twenty-first century, HER OWN MEDICINE is filled with wisdom and written with grace, lucid intellect, and a striking respect for life and the profession that heals it.

A collection of women’s illness narratives Stories of Illness and Healing is the first collection to place the voices of women experiencing illness alongside analytical writing from prominent scholars in the field of narrative medicine. The collection includes a variety of women’s illness narratives―poetry, essays, short fiction, short drama, analyses, and transcribed oral testimonies―as well as traditional analytic essays about themes and issues raised by the narratives. Stories of Illness and Healing bridges the artificial divide between women’s lives and scholarship in gender, health, and medicine. The authors of these narratives are diverse in age, ethnicity, family situation, sexual orientation, and economic status. They are doctors, patients, spouses, mothers, daughters, activists, writers, educators, and performers. The narratives serve to acknowledge that women’s illness experiences are more than their diseases, that they encompass their entire lives. The pages of this book echo with personal accounts of illness, diagnosis, and treatment. They reflect the social constructions of women’s bodies, their experiences of sexuality and reproduction, and their roles as professional and family caregivers. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Stories of Illness and Healing draws the connection between women’s suffering and advocacy for women’s lives.

From computer support and hotel reservations to laboratory results and radiographic interpretations, it seems everything can be ‘outsourced’ in our globalized world. One would not think so with parenthood, however, especially motherhood, as it is a fundamental activity humans have historically preserved as personal and private. In our modern age, however, the advent and accessibility of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and the ease with which they have traversed global borders, has fundamentally altered the meaning of childbearing and parenting. In thetwenty-first century, parenthood is no longer achieved only through gestation, adoption, or traditional surrogacy, but also via assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), where science and technology play lead roles. Furthermore, in a globalized world economy, where the movement and transfer of people and commodities are increasing to serve the interests of capitalism, gamete donation and surrogate birth can traverse innumerable geographic, socio-economic, racialized, and political borderlands. Thus, reproduction itself can be outsourced. This edited volume explores one specific aspect of the new assisted reproductive technologies: gestational surrogacy and how its practice is changing the traditional concept of parenthood across the globe. The phenomenon of transnational surrogacy has given rise to a thriving international industry where money is being ‘legally’ exchanged for babies and ‘reproductive labor’ has taken on a lucrative commercial tone. Yet, law, research, and activism are barely aware of this experience and are still playing catch-up with rapidly changing on-the-ground realities. This interdisciplinary collection of essays assuages the dearth of knowledge and addresses significant issues in transnational commercial gestational surrogacy as it takes shape in a peculiar relation between the West (primarily the United States) and India.