Death Is in the Breeze by
"The present work, a product of six years of research using primary sources of the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, focuses on the pharmacopoeias, medical dictionaries, textbooks, scientific journals, and lectures available to doctors and medical students of the time -- what physicians caring for soldiers in the war knew, and when they knew it. The book also looks at how medical conditions encountered by the Civil War surgeon were treated then, how those entities would be treated now, and when knowledge leading to current therapies became available"--Introduction.
Health Divided by
The United States' health care system stands out for its strict division of policies dealing with public health and individual medicine. Until the end of the nineteenth century, health care in the United States was seen as a local issue, with the sole exception being the government's role in providing care to seamen and immigrants. Then, as Health Divided reveals, the health problems that plagued the American South in the early twentieth century, from malaria to hookworm and pellagra, along with the political power of the southern Democrats during the New Deal, fueled the emergence of national intervention in public health work. services--setting the stage for the growth of employer-sponsored health insurance. The vision of those who built the institutions that became the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was, we see here, far more expansive and innovative than has previously been realized--and it came surprisingly close to succeeding. Exploring the history behind its failure, and tracing the inextricable links between public health and national health policy, this book provides a valuable new perspective on the origins of America's disjointed health care system.
Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic by
Health in early America was generally good. The food was plentiful, the air and water were clean, and people tended to enjoy strong constitutions as a result of this environment. Practitioners of traditional forms of health care enjoyed high social status, and the cures they offered--from purging to mere palliatives--carried a powerful authority. Consequently, most American doctors felt little need to keep up with Europe's medical advances relying heavily on their traditional depletion methods. However, in the years following the American Revolution as poverty increased and America's water and air became more polluted, people grew sicker. Traditional medicine became increasingly ineffective. Instead, Americans sought out both older and newer forms of alternative medicine and people who embraced these methods: midwives, folk healers, Native American shamans, African obeahs and the new botanical and water cure advocates. In this overview of health and healing in early America, Elaine G. Breslaw describes the evolution of public health crises and solutions. Breslaw examines "ethnic borrowings" (of both disease and treatment) of early American medicine and the tension between trained doctors and the lay public. While orthodox medicine never fully lost its authority, Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic argues that their ascendance over other healers didn't begin until the early twentieth century, as germ theory finally migrated from Europe to the United States and American medical education achieved professional standing.
Patient Expectations by
During the first half of the nineteenth century a major shift occurred in the medical treatment of illness in the United States, as physicians abandoned the use of "heroic" depletive therapies -- the pukes and purges made famous in the 1790s by Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia -- in favor of a let-nature-take-its-course approach to most diseases. Standard histories of American medicine have long attributed this shift to new theories and training methods as well as increased competition from homeopaths and botanical doctors. In this book, Catherine L. Thompson challenges that interpretation by emphasizing the role of patients as active participants in their own health care rather than passive objects of medical treatment. Focusing on Massachusetts, then as now a center of U.S. medical education and practice, Thompson draws on data from patients' journals, medical account ledgers, physicians' daybooks, and court records to link changes in medical treatment to a gradual evolution of patient expectations across varied populations. Specifically, she identifies three developments -- the increasing use of cash in medical transactions, growing religious pluralism, and the rise of malpractice suits -- as key factors in transforming patients into active medical consumers unwilling to submit to doctors' advice without considering alternatives. By showing how nineteenth-century patients shaped therapeutic practice "through the medical choices they made or didn't make," Thompson's study alters our understanding of American medicine in the past and has implications for its present and future.
Pox by
The untold story of how America's Progressive-era war on smallpox sparked one of the great civil liberties battles of the twentieth century. At the turn of the last century, a powerful smallpox epidemic swept the United States from coast to coast. The age-old disease spread swiftly through an increasingly interconnected American landscape: from southern tobacco plantations to the dense immigrant neighborhoods of northern cities to far-flung villages on the edges of the nascent American empire. In Pox, award-winning historian Michael Willrich offers a gripping chronicle of how the nation's continentwide fight against smallpox launched one of the most important civil liberties struggles of the twentieth century. At the dawn of the activist Progressive era and during a moment of great optimism about modern medicine, the government responded to the deadly epidemic by calling for universal compulsory vaccination. To enforce the law, public health authorities relied on quarantines, pesthouses, and "virus squads"-corps of doctors and club-wielding police. Though these measures eventually contained the disease, they also sparked a wave of popular resistance among Americans who perceived them as a threat to their health and to their rights. At the time, anti-vaccinationists were often dismissed as misguided cranks, but Willrich argues that they belonged to a wider legacy of American dissent that attended the rise of an increasingly powerful government. While a well-organized anti-vaccination movement sprang up during these years, many Americans resisted in subtler ways-by concealing sick family members or forging immunization certificates. Pox introduces us to memorable characters on both sides of the debate, from Henning Jacobson, a Swedish Lutheran minister whose battle against vaccination went all the way to the Supreme Court, to C. P. Wertenbaker, a federal surgeon who saw himself as a medical missionary combating a deadly-and preventable-disease. As Willrich suggests, many of the questions first raised by the Progressive-era antivaccination movement are still with us: How far should the government go to protect us from peril? What happens when the interests of public health collide with religious beliefs and personal conscience? In Pox, Willrich delivers a riveting tale about the clash of modern medicine, civil liberties, and government power at the turn of the last century that resonates powerfully today.
Revolutionary Medicine by
Before the advent of modern antibiotics, one's life could beabruptly shattered by contagion and death, and debility from infectiousdiseases and epidemics was commonplace for early Americans, regardless ofsocial status. Concerns over health affected the founding fathers and theirfamilies as it did slaves, merchants, immigrants, and everyone else in NorthAmerica. As both victims of illness and national leaders, the Founders occupieda unique position regarding the development of public health in America. Revolutionary Medicine refocuses thestudy of the lives of George and Martha Washington, Benjamin Franklin, ThomasJefferson, John and Abigail Adams, and James and Dolley Madison away from theusual lens of politics to the unique perspective of sickness, health, andmedicine in their era. For the founders, republican ideals fostered a reciprocalconnection between individual health and the "health" of the nation. Studyingthe encounters of these American founders with illness and disease, as well astheir viewpoints about good health, not only provides us with a richer and morenuanced insight into their lives, but also opens a window into the practice ofmedicine in the eighteenth century, which is at once intimate, personal, andfirst hand. Perhaps most importantly, today's American public healthinitiatives have their roots in the work of America's founders, for theyrecognized early on that government had compelling reasons to shoulder some newresponsibilities with respect to ensuring the health and well-being of itscitizenry. The state of medicine and public healthcare today is still awork in progress, but these founders played a significant role in beginning theconversation that shaped the contours of its development.
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