Background
Harrington, Anne was born on June 15, 1960 in New York City. Daughter of Gerard Junior and Sue Leia (Sayer) Harrington.
( A mere "symbol" of medicine--the sugar pill, saline in...)
A mere "symbol" of medicine--the sugar pill, saline injection, doctor in a white lab coat--the placebo nonetheless sometimes produces "real" results. Medical science has largely managed its discomfort with this phenomenon by discounting the placebo effect, subtracting it as an impurity in its data through double-blind tests of new treatments and drugs. This book is committed to a different perspective--namely, that the placebo effect is a "real" entity in its own right, one that has much to teach us about how symbols, settings, and human relationships literally get under our skin. Anne Harrington's introduction and a historical overview by Elaine Shapiro and the late Arthur Shapiro, which open the book, review the place of placebos in the history of medicine, investigate the current surge in interest in them, and probe the methodological difficulties of saying scientifically just what placebos can and cannot do. Combining individual essays with a dialogue among writers from fields as far-flung as cultural anthropology and religion, pharmacology and molecular biology, the book aims to expand our ideas about what the placebo effect is and how it should be seen and studied. At the same time, the book uses the challenges and questions raised by placebo phenomena to initiate a broader interdisciplinary discussion about our nature as cultural animals: animals with minds, brains, and bodies that somehow manage to integrate "biology" and "culture," "mechanism" and "meaning," into a seamless whole.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/067466986X/?tag=2022091-20
( By the 1920s in Central Europe, it had become a truism ...)
By the 1920s in Central Europe, it had become a truism among intellectuals that natural science had "disenchanted" the world, and in particular had reduced humans to mere mechanisms, devoid of higher purpose. But could a new science of "wholeness" heal what the old science of the "machine" had wrought? Some contemporary scientists thought it could. These years saw the spread of a new, "holistic" science designed to nourish the heart as well as the head, to "reenchant" even as it explained. Critics since have linked this holism to a German irrationalism that is supposed to have paved the way to Nazism. In a penetrating analysis of this science, Anne Harrington shows that in fact the story of holism in Germany is a politically heterogeneous story with multiple endings. Its alliances with Nazism were not inevitable, but resulted from reorganizational processes that ultimately brought commitments to wholeness and race, healing and death into a common framework. Before 1933, holistic science was a uniquely authoritative voice in cultural debates on the costs of modernization. It attracted not only scientists with Nazi sympathies but also moderates and leftists, some of whom left enduring humanistic legacies. Neither a "reduction" of science to its politics, nor a vision in which the sociocultural environment is a backdrop to the "internal" work of science, this story instead emphasizes how metaphor and imagery allow science to engage "real" phenomena of the laboratory in ways that are richly generative of human meanings and porous to the social and political imperatives of the hour.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691050503/?tag=2022091-20
( The Description for this book, Medicine, Mind, and the ...)
The Description for this book, Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought, will be forthcoming.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691084653/?tag=2022091-20
Harrington, Anne was born on June 15, 1960 in New York City. Daughter of Gerard Junior and Sue Leia (Sayer) Harrington.
Bachelor summa cum laude, Harvard University, 1982; Doctor of Philosophy, University of Oxford, 1985.
Research fellow, Wellcome Institute, London, 1985-1986; Humboldt research fellow, Freiburg (Germany) U., 1986-1988; assistant professor, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988-1991; Morris Kahn associate professor, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991-1995; professor, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, since 1995. Consultant Network on Mind-Body Interactions, MacArthur Foundation, Chgo, 1992-1999. Fellow Mind-Brain-Behavior Initiative, Harvard University, Cambridge, since 1993, governing board, since 1994, associate director, 1996-1997, co-director, since 1997.
( By the 1920s in Central Europe, it had become a truism ...)
( A mere "symbol" of medicine--the sugar pill, saline in...)
( The description for this book, Medicine, Mind, and the ...)
( The Description for this book, Medicine, Mind, and the ...)
(Reprint)
(1)
Member American Association for the Advancement of Science, History of Science Society.
Married Godehard Oepen, September 10, 1989 (divorced 1997).