In-Class Research Worksheets
Links to the Google Doc worksheets we will use during the library session.
Research Librarian for English
Possible Print Books of Interest
Request print books using the Request Item feature in Virgo (if you want the whole book). When the book is on hold for you and ready to be picked up, you will receive an email letting you know it is available. If you only need a couple of chapters of a book or an essay or two from a collection, you might also use the Request a scan feature in Virgo to ask for just the sections you need to be scanned for you (the scan limit is usually 20% of the book or less).
Deadly Glow: The Radium Dial Worker Tragedy by Call Number: Health Sciences RC965 .R25 M85 1999ISBN: 9780875532455Publication Date: 1999Deadly Glow is an important story of a public health tragedy. It chronicles the lives of numerous young women who worked in radium application plants in the early 1900s painting numerals on instrument and watch dials. From their experience, the harmful effects of radium deposited in the body became known. The victims suffered from skin ulcerations, tumors, and other severe medical symptoms. Physicians were baffled and misdiagnosed their conditions as heart disease and even syphilis. Solving the intriguing mystery of the workers' disabling, yet unknown, disease would be a complex and difficult task requiring brilliant detective work of several investigators. In time, this tragedy would be recognized as the worlds' first mass experience with injury and death caused by exposure to atomic radiation.
The End of Illness by Call Number: Brown Library RA776.5 .A38 2012ISBN: 1451610173Publication Date: 2012Can we live robustly until our last breath? Do we have to suffer from debilitating conditions and sickness? Is it possible to add more vibrant years to our lives? Dr. David Agus tackles these fundamental questions and dismantles misperceptions about what "health" really means. Presenting an eye-opening picture of the human body and all the ways it works--and fails--Dr. Agus shows us how a new perspective on our individual health will allow us to achieve a long, vigorous life. Offering insights and access to powerful new technologies that promise to transform medicine, Dr. Agus emphasizes his belief that there is no "right" answer, no master guide that is "one size fits all."
Envisioning Disease, Gender, and War: Women's Narratives of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic by Call Number: Clemons PN56 .D56 F57 2012ISBN: 9780312234492Publication Date: 2012This critical study illuminates the neglected intersection of war, disease, and gender as represented in an important subgenre of World War I literature. It calls into question public versus private perceptions of time, mass media, urban spaces, emotion, and the increasingly uncertain status of the future.
The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris by Call Number: Ebook: Use link in Virgo record to access.ISBN: 0393254755Publication Date: 2019Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. From the Spanish flu to the 1924 outbreak of pneumonic plague in Los Angeles to the 1930 "parrot fever" pandemic, through the more recent SARS, Ebola, and Zika epidemics, the last one hundred years have been marked by a succession of unanticipated pandemic alarms. In The Pandemic Century, a lively account of scares both infamous and less known, Mark Honigsbaum combines reportage with the history of science and medical sociology to artfully reconstruct epidemiological mysteries and the ecology of infectious diseases. We meet dedicated disease detectives, obstructive or incompetent public health officials, and brilliant scientists often blinded by their own knowledge of bacteria and viruses.
The Tainted Gift: The Disease Method of Frontier Expansion by Call Number: Clemons E98 .D6 M36 2009ISBN: 9780313353383Publication Date: 2009Barbara Alice Mann's The Tainted Gift offers riveting accounts of four specific incidents: The 1763 smallpox epidemic among native peoples in Ohio during the French and Indian War; the cholera epidemic during the 1832 Choctaw removal; the 1837 outbreak of smallpox among the high plains peoples; and the alleged 1847 poisonings of the Cayuses in Oregon. Drawing on previously unavailable sources, Mann's work is the first to give one of the most controversial questions in U.S. history the rigorous scrutiny it requires. Chapters focus on four charges of deliberate disease spreading among Native American peoples. An extraordinary collection of primary and oral sources, including much that has only recently become available, that helps provide a clearer picture of the Federal campaigns for control of Western territories.
Women and Psychosis: Multidisciplinary Perspectives by Call Number: Clemons HQ1206 .W8676 2019ISBN: 9781498591911Publication Date: 2019Interrogating the relationship between women and psychosis from a variety of perspectives, this edited collection explores personal, literary, spiritual, psychological, biological, and psychodynamic approaches. The contributors reflect on medieval mystics and witches, postpartum psychosis, disordered eating, art and literature, feminism, and male/female differences in schizophrenia. Women with experience of psychosis, psychotherapists, and a shaman provide first-person accounts to give the book a personal grounding. Curated with the intent to expand the way we think about women and psychosis, the contributors to this collection recognize that "voices and visions" do not occur in a vacuum, but are experienced within, and are influenced by, particular socio-cultural contexts.
Helpful URLs
- Ask a LibrarianQuestions? Ask us! Chat, call, text, or email anytime.
- Interlibrary LoanNeed a book or article we don't own? Request a copy through Interlibrary Loan borrowing.
- Purchase RecommendationsIs there an item you think the UVA Library should own but doesn't? Make a purchase recommendation.
- Using Databases Off GroundsHave questions about accessing databases from off-grounds? Find more information here.
Preparing for Research
This guide was created to help you prepare for your final paper and as a general guide to resources for researching the many facets of illness.
In preparation for your assignment, you should think about some possible questions or topics of interest to begin your research. You will also want to spend some time thinking about how you will conduct your research.
- Fine-tune your searches.
Think broadly when brainstorming search terms - what synonyms or related terms could stand in for your key search terms?
You can combine search terms using AND (polio AND history) and OR (tuberculosis OR TB OR consumption).
In many databases, the asterisk (*) is a truncation or "wildcard" symbol that will match all possible endings for a word stem. For example, sex* will match sexism, sexual, sexuality, sexualize, etc.
Most databases have filters or facets that allow you to narrow your results by subject, date range, etc. Limit your searches to help you find the sources you need.
- Think about where you might find the type of information you are seeking.
Will you find the research you need in a book? An article? A newspaper? A documentary? An interview? Cast a wide net when looking for the types of resources that could help answer your research question or support an argument you are making.
- Know the difference between academic and non-academic sources, and when it's appropriate to use them.
Most databases allow you to limit results to academic/scholarly/peer-reviewed sources. Be mindful of your assignment and what you're being asked to provide -- in this case, you need at least one academic source that is not on your syllabus. Need a refresher? Watch the short video Peer Review in 3 Minutes.
- When you find a good source, use it to find other good sources.
Use the subject terms and keywords associated with an item to find other items on similar topics.
Scholarly books and articles will have works cited, bibliographies, or footnotes you can mine for additional resources.
Need help? Ask a librarian.
Finding articles
Multidisciplinary Databases
Academic Search Complete is a large general database of articles from scholarly journals, magazines, and newspapers on many topics. Updated daily, it can be the best source for resources about very current topics.
ProQuest offers UVa faculty, staff, and students access to 35 separate databases, covering numerous fields from the hard sciences to social sciences, as well as newspapers, government records, and statistical data.
JSTOR includes older issues of scholarly journals in many disciplines, from the start to 3-5 years ago.
Literature & Film
The MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB) indexes the broadest range of resources about literature in all languages, as well as film, television, and popular culture, including over 4,000 journals as well as books and dissertations. For articles not available full-text in MLA, click on “Find@UVA” or look up the journal title in Virgo, the library catalog.
History
America History and Life Covers the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to present with records from 2,000 English-language journals published worldwide. Includes book reviews. Articles in this database were written between 1964-present.
Historical Abstracts Find articles about the history of the world from 1450 to the present, published in over 2,000 journals from many countries. Includes book reviews. Does not include articles about the US or Canada. For these see America: History and Life.
Health & Psychology
Health Source: Consumer Edition Magazines, pamphlets and reference books covering a wide range of health topics. Includes a drug guide and a medical dictionary.
Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition Scholarly journals and some reference books covering nursing and allied health professions.
Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection includes abstracts and full-text of almost 600 journals in psychology and related fields.
See an A-Z list of all databases
Finding books & articles using Virgo
Virgo, the UVA Library’s primary search tool, contains catalog records for books, print journals, DVDs, maps, and digitized materials, as well as links to online articles from our rich array of subscription journals. You can search catalog materials and articles together - a regular search will provide tabs for books, articles, and other materials. You can also use the Filter tools on the left to limit your results by author, language, publication date, and more. To find ebooks and other materials available online, set the Availability filter to Online to limit your catalog search results.
Example Subject terms:
- Diseases - Philosophy
- Diseases in Literature
- Body Image -- Psychological Aspects -- Case Studies
- Communicable Diseases
- Mental Disorders
- Mental Illness
- Public Health
Possible E-Books of Interest
A Condition of Doubt: The Meanings of Hypochondria by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 9780199892365Publication Date: 2012The hypochondriac is a complicated figure, often treated with scorn and derision, resented for making excessive demands on attention and health care resources. Lacking credibility but needing to be taken seriously, the hypochondriac is most doctors' least favorite patient. Yet people who suffer from hypochondria endure the anxiety of suspecting they are seriously ill, or are about to be, and having their suspicions and their suffering dismissed as baseless. A Condition of Doubt seeks to change the way we think about hypochondria, and to use hypochondria to sharpen our thinking about health care.
Ethics and Chronic Illness by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 0367210207Publication Date: 2019This book provides an account of the ethics of chronic illness. Chronic illness differs from other illnesses in that it is often incurable, patients can live with it for many years, and its day-to-day management is typically carried out by the patient or members of their family. These features problematize key distinctions that underlie much existing work in medical ethics including those between beneficence and autonomy, between treatment and prevention, and between the recipient and provider of treatment. The author carries out a detailed reappraisal of the roles of both autonomy and beneficence across the different stages of treatment for a range of chronic illnesses.
Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 9780807833100Publication Date: 2009The forty-year Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which took place in and around Tuskegee, Alabama, from the 1930s through the 1970s, has become a profound metaphor for medical racism, government malfeasance, and physician arrogance. Susan M. Reverby's Examining Tuskegee is a comprehensive analysis of the notorious study of untreated syphilis among African American men, who were told by U.S. Public Health Service doctors that they were being treated, not just watched, for their late-stage syphilis. With rigorous clarity, Reverby investigates the study and its aftermath from multiple perspectives and illuminates the reasons for its continued power and resonance in our collective memory.
Fractured Borders: Reading Women's Cancer Literature by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 9780472099092Publication Date: 2005Women have been writing about cancer for decades, but since the early 1990s, the body of literature on cancer has increased exponentially as growing numbers of women face the searing realities of the disease and give testimony to its ravages and revelations. Fractured Borders: Reading Women's Cancer Literature surveys a wide range of contemporary writing about breast, uterine, and ovarian cancer, including works by Marilyn Hacker, Margaret Edson, Carole Maso, Audre Lorde, Eve Sedgwick, Mahasweta Devi, Lucille Clifton, Alicia Ostriker, Jayne Anne Phillips, Terry Tempest Williams, and Jeanette Winterson, among many others. DeShazer's readings bring insights from body theory, performance theory, feminist literary criticism, French feminisms, and disability studies to bear on these works, shining new light on a literary subject that is engaging more and more writers.
Illness: The Cry of the Flesh by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 1138704318Publication Date: 2019What is illness? Is it a physiological dysfunction, a social label, or a way of experiencing the world? How do the physical, social, and emotional worlds of a person change when they become ill? Can there be well-being within illness? In this remarkable and thought-provoking book, Havi Carel explores these questions by weaving together the personal story of her own illness with insights and reflections drawn from her work as a philosopher. Carel's fresh approach to illness raises some uncomfortable questions about how we all -- whether healthcare professionals or not -- view the ill, challenging us to become more thoughtful. Illness unravels the tension between the universality of illness and its intensely private, often lonely, nature. It offers a new way of looking at a matter that affects every one of us. Illness: The Cry of the Flesh will prove essential reading to those studying philosophy, medical ethics, and medical anthropology, as well as those in the healthcare and medical professions. It will also be of interest to individuals who live with illness, and their friends and families.
Illness as Narrative by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 0822961903Publication Date: 2012For most of literary history, personal confessions about illness were considered too intimate to share publicly. By the mid-twentieth century, however, a series of events set the stage for the emergence of the illness narrative. The increase of chronic disease, the transformation of medicine into big business, the women's health movement, the AIDS/HIV pandemic, the advent of inexpensive paperbacks, and the rise of self-publishing all contributed to the proliferation of narratives about encounters with medicine and mortality. While the illness narrative is now a staple of the publishing industry, the genre itself has posed a problem for literary studies. What is the role of criticism in relation to personal accounts of suffering? Can these narratives be judged on aesthetic grounds? Are they a collective expression of the lost intimacy of the patient-doctor relationship? Is their function thus instrumental--to elicit the reader's empathy?
Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture by Call Number: E-book, Access using link in VirgoISBN: 9780816648221Publication Date: 2010From seventeenth-century broadsides about the handling of dead bodies, printed during London's plague years, to YouTube videos about preventing the transmission of STDs, public health advocacy and education has always had a powerful visual component. Imagining Illness explores the diverse visual culture of public health, broadly defined, from the nineteenth century to the present. Contributors to this volume examine historical and contemporary visual practices--Chinese health fairs, documentary films produced by the World Health Organization, illness maps, fashions for nurses, and live surgery on the Internet-in order to delve into the political and epidemiological contexts underlying their creation and dissemination.
Itch, Clap, Pox: Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-century Imagination by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 9780300217056Publication Date: 2019A lively interdisciplinary study of how venereal disease was represented in eighteenth-century British literature and art In eighteenth-century Britain, venereal disease was everywhere and nowhere: while physicians and commentators believed the condition to be widespread, it remained shrouded in secrecy, and was often represented using slang, symbolism, and wordplay. In this book, literary critic Noelle Gallagher explores the cultural significance of the "clap" (gonorrhea), the "pox" (syphilis), and the "itch" (genital scabies) for the development of eighteenth-century British literature and art. As a condition both represented through metaphors and used as a metaphor, venereal disease provided a vehicle for the discussion of cultural anxieties about gender, race, commerce, and immigration. Gallagher highlights four key concepts associated with venereal disease, demonstrating how infection's symbolic potency was enhanced by its links to elite masculinity, prostitution, foreignness, and facial deformities. Casting light where the sun rarely shines, this study will fascinate anyone interested in the history of literature, art, medicine, and sexuality.
Kept from All Contagion: Germ Theory, Disease, and the Dilemma of Human Contact in Late Nineteenth-Century Literature by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 9781438478494Publication Date: 2020Highlights connections between authors rarely studied together by exposing their shared counternarratives to germ theory's implicit suggestion of protection in isolation.
Negotiating Thinness Online: The Cultural Politics of Pro-Anorexia by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 0429958951Publication Date: 2020This book interrogates the thin ideal in pro-anorexia online spaces and the way in which it operates on a continuum with everyday discourses around thinness. Since their inception in the late twentieth century, pro-anorexia online spaces have courted controversy: they have been vilified by the media and deleted by Internet moderators. This book explores the phenomenon during its tipping point where it migrated from websites and discussion forums to image-centric social media platforms - all the while seeking to circumvent censorship by, for instance, repudiating 'pro-ana' or adopting hashtags to obfuscate content. The author argues that instead of being driven further underground, 'pro-ana' is blurring the boundaries between normative and deviant conceptions of thinness. Situating the phenomenon in relation to accepted constructions of thinness, promulgated by establishments as far ranging as medicine and women's magazines, this book asks if 'pro-ana' holds the potential to critique that which has long been considered normal: the culture of compulsory thinness. Engaging with debates including the current climate of postfeminism and neoliberalism, digital censorship, the pre-eminence of white, middle-class, heterofemininity, and the articulation of pain in realising the thin ideal, Negotiating Thinness Online examines what happens when the margins and the mainstream merge.
The Opioid Epidemic and U.S. Culture: Expression, Art, and Politics in the Age of Adiction by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 9781949199703Publication Date: 2020The Opioid Epidemic and US Culture brings a new set of perspectives to one of the most pressing contemporary topics in Appalachia and the nation as a whole. A project aimed both at challenging dehumanizing attitudes toward those caught in the opioid epidemic and at protesting the structural forces that have enabled it, this edited volume assembles a multidisciplinary community of scholars and practitioners to consider the ways that people have mobilized their creativity in response to the crisis. From the documentary The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia to the role of cough syrup in mumble rap, and from a queer Appalachian zine to protests against the Sackler family's art-world philanthropy, the essays here explore the intersections of expressive culture, addiction, and recovery.
Polio: An American Story by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 9780195152944Publication Date: 2005All who lived in the early 1950s remember the fear of polio and the elation felt when a successful vaccine was found. Now David Oshinsky tells the gripping story of the polio terror and of the intense effort to find a cure, from the March of Dimes to the discovery of the Salk and Sabin vaccines--and beyond. Here is a remarkable portrait of America in the early 1950s, using the widespread panic over polio to shed light on our national obsessions and fears. Oshinsky paints a suspenseful portrait of the race for the cure, weaving a dramatic tale centered on the furious rivalry between Salk and Sabin. Indeed, the competition was marked by a deep-seated ill will among the researchers that remained with them until their deaths. The author also tells the story of Isabel Morgan, perhaps the most talented of all polio researchers, who might have beaten Salk to the prize if she had not retired to raise a family. As backdrop to this feverish research, Oshinsky offers an insightful look at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which was founded in the 1930s by FDR and Basil O'Connor.
Punishing Disease: HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 9780520291584Publication Date: 2018From the very beginning of the epidemic, AIDS was linked to punishment. Calls to punish people living with HIV--mostly stigmatized minorities--began before doctors had even settled on a name for the disease. Punishing Disease looks at how HIV was transformed from sickness to badness under the criminal law and investigates the consequences of inflicting penalties on people living with disease. Now that the door to criminalizing sickness is open, what other ailments will follow? With moves in state legislatures to extend HIV-specific criminal laws to include diseases such as hepatitis and meningitis, the question is more than academic.
What Is Mental Illness? by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 0674046498Publication Date: 2011According to a major health survey, nearly half of all Americans have been mentally ill at some point in their lives more than a quarter in the last year. Can this be true? What exactly does it mean, anyway? What is a disorder, and what is just a struggle with real life? This lucid and incisive book cuts through both professional jargon and polemical hot air, to describe the intense political and intellectual struggles over what counts as a real disorder, and what goes into the DSM, the psychiatric bible. Is schizophrenia a disorder? Absolutely. Is homosexuality? It was till gay rights activists drove it out of the DSM a generation ago. What about new and controversial diagnoses? Is social anxiety disorder a way of saying that it s sick to be shy, or female sexual arousal disorder that it s sick to be tired? An advisor to the DSM, but also a fierce critic of exaggerated overuse, McNally defends the careful approach of describing disorders by patterns of symptoms that can be seen, and illustrates how often the system medicalizes everyday emotional life. Neuroscience, genetics, and evolutionary psychology may illuminate the biological bases of mental illness, but at this point, McNally argues, no science can draw a bright line between disorder and distress. In a pragmatic and humane conclusion, he offers questions for patients and professionals alike to help understand, and cope with, the sorrows and psychopathologies of everyday life.
