In my paper, I shall argue that Western medicine has passed through epistemological and paradigmatic shifts from Bedside medicine to Hospital medicine to Laboratory medicine (and, now, Techno-medicine). Having gained modern knowledge of anatomy, instead of previous two-dimensional perception of...

The history of Calcutta Medical College (CMC) is intertwined with the rise of rational scientific medicine in India. This new kind of medicine was premised on dissection-based anatomical knowledge and was secular in nature. The first dissection in CMC by a high-caste Hindu ushered in...

U.S. state and local governments are increasingly restricting smoking in public places. This paper analyzes nationally representative databases, including the Nationwide Inpatient Sample, to compare short-term changes in mortality and hospitalization rates in smoking-restricted regions with...

We examine the effects of cold weather periods on family budgets and on nutritional outcomes in poor American families. Expenditures on food and home fuels are tracked by linking the Consumer Expenditure Survey to temperature data. Using the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination...

We construct and test a new model of employer-provided health insurance provision in the presence of adverse selection in the health insurance market. In our model, employers cannot observe the health of their employees, but can decide whether to offer insurance. Employees sort themselves among...

We examine the extent to which food insecurity questions and the standard poverty measure are correlated with various dietary and physiologic outcomes. Our findings suggest that the correlations vary tremendously by age. We find that the food insecurity questions are correlated with the dietary...