Illinois Press Book Blog

An interview with Terry Trilling-Josephson about her new book Cafe Society: The Wrong Place for the Right People will air on WBGO Journal Friday, July 3, at 7:30 PM (eastern time).  An extended web extra and an excerpt from the book will be available on WBGO’s site after the interview airs.

Good health care is essential, and Americans watch closely as President Obama and Congress struggle to determine how to deliver basic medical service to all Americans.

It helps to put the problem of health care in perspective. Consider the medical situation in the United States in the early twentieth century. Then the nation had a large number of medical colleges (166 in 1904), and they turned out twice as many graduates as were required to meet the people’s needs. In proportion to population, the United States had twice as many physicians as England, four times as many as France, five times as many as Germany, and six times as many as Italy. Most of these schools were owned by doctors, who operated them for a profit. Standards were low and laboratory instruction was minimal. The nation had too many medical schools, too many physicians, and a great oversupply of poor or mediocre practitioners. Before the advent of university-based medical education, Chicago had an abundance of medical schools, but with regard to medical education it was aptly called “the plague sport of the nation.”

The reform of medical education that gathered momentum in the early twentieth century gradually transformed the quality of health care in America. Today medical education in the United States is based in universities, and the nation is widely recognized as a world center of medical research and education.

Yet, the problem of delivering quality health care to all the American people remains.

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Winton U. Solberg is professor emeritus of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and author of the new book Reforming Medical Education: The University of Illinois College of Medicine, 1880-1920.

Inside Higher Ed blogger and local UI personality Oronte Churm has launched perhaps the first ever “Southern Illinois Rocks” online contest in celebration of the publication of his novel, A Democracy of Ghosts.

The book is set in southern Illinois, the part of our state known as Egypt (frequently confused with Little Egypt, a burlesque dancer who appeared at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago).

Among Oronte’s many fine prizes are a couple from us: UIP’s backlist classic Bloody Williamson by Paul M. Angle and a 3-volume set of the Folksongs of Illinois CDs, hidden gems that we distribute for the Illinois Humanities Council.

Enter by July 10 for your chance to win. Support regional writers. Visit Egypt. (And if you can guess which former UIP employee is now Mrs. Churm, you’ll win a prize from me.)

Jeff Biggers, author of In the Sierra Madre (and The United States of Appalachia), contributes a Top 10 list to the Huffington Post on President Obama and mountaintop coal removal.

“Here’s the beyond-the-Beltway truth: With millions of pounds of explosives ripping across the Appalachian mountains every day, and the Office of Surface Mining (OMSRE) still operating without a director, it is almost beyond belief that President Obama, CEQ chief Nancy Sutley and EPA head Lisa Jackson have made no attempt to visit actual mining sites under their jurisdiction.”

Today the Marketing Department says goodbye to two long term staff members. Assistant Marketing Director Barbara Horne retires after 30 years at the U of I and Marketing Designer Nancy Lopeman is moving to another department within the University. We will also miss Acquisitions Assistant Marla Osterbur who is making a similar transition.

Best wishes in your new destinations beyond the railroad tracks and chiller plants.

The Chronicle covers the ways in which academic e-mail lists like H-Net and others have changed to accommodate new directions in online communications. Web 2.0 keeps marching on.

But now collaborating online with colleagues is so accepted that scholars are trying new tools that are easier to use and, well, a little more exciting. When was the last time someone enthusiastically recommended a new e-mail list to you?

Steven Ashby and C. J. Hawking, authors of the new book Staley: The Fight for a New American Labor Movement, will be interviewed July 1st, 1:05-2:00 PM (Central), on Urbana’s NPR affiliate WILL AM-580.

The director of  University of Akron Press has some advice for university presses in this morning’s Inside Higher Ed.

University presses must become part of the new information infrastructure of the university. Presses must partner with departments, centers, and scholars to publish groundbreaking materials. University presses need to be good listeners. The university press editorial board, if made up of a diverse cross-section of faculty members, is a way to initiate this process. At board meetings, interactions have led to the discovery of programs that are being run independently at various schools that could be made much more vital through cooperative efforts.

OK, you can follow the University of Illinois Press on Twitter.

http://twitter.com/illinoispress

Galleycat covers the story of a book review, an unhappy author, and the author’s quest to fight the power.