Diseases in the District of Maine 1772 - 1820

Diseases in the District of Maine 1772 - 1820

Author: Richard J. Kahn

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 565

ISBN-13: 0190053259

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"This previously unpublished primary source allows modern readers to reimagine medicine as practiced two hundred years ago by a rural physician in New England through his case histories, correspondence, biographical sketches, and personal commentary. Throughout his fifty-year practice, beginning with a preceptorship in Hingham, Massachusetts, Jeremiah Barker documented his constant efforts to keep up with and contribute to the medical literature in a changing medical landscape, as practice and authority shifted from historical to scientific methods. He performed experiments and autopsies, became interested in the new chemistry of Lavoisier, risked scorn in his use of alkaline remedies, studied epidemic fever and approaches to bloodletting, and struggled to understand epidemic fever, childbed fever, cancer, public health, consumption, mental illness, and the "dangers of spirituous liquors.""--


A Midwife's Tale

A Midwife's Tale

Author: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2010-12-22

Total Pages: 459

ISBN-13: 0307772985

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PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • Drawing on the diaries of one woman in eighteenth-century Maine, "A truly talented historian unravels the fascinating life of a community that is so foreign, and yet so similar to our own" (The New York Times Book Review). Between 1785 and 1812 a midwife and healer named Martha Ballard kept a diary that recorded her arduous work (in 27 years she attended 816 births) as well as her domestic life in Hallowell, Maine. On the basis of that diary, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich gives us an intimate and densely imagined portrait, not only of the industrious and reticent Martha Ballard but of her society. At once lively and impeccably scholarly, A Midwife's Tale is a triumph of history on a human scale.


Sickness and Health in America

Sickness and Health in America

Author: Judith Walzer Leavitt

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 606

ISBN-13: 9780299153243

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Adds 21 new essays and drops some that appeared in the 1984 edition (first in 1978) to reflect recent scholarship and changes in orientation by historians. Adds entirely new clusters on sickness and health, early American medicine, therapeutics, the art of medicine, and public health and personal hygiene. Other discussions are updated to reflect such phenomena as the growing mortality from HIV, homicide, and suicide. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR


Health Care in America

Health Care in America

Author: John C. Burnham

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2015-05-15

Total Pages: 429

ISBN-13: 1421416093

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A comprehensive history of sickness, health, and medicine in America from Colonial times to the present. In Health Care in America, historian John C. Burnham describes changes over four centuries of medicine and public health in America. Beginning with seventeenth-century concerns over personal and neighborhood illnesses, Burnham concludes with the arrival of a new epoch in American medicine and health care at the turn of the twenty-first century. From the 1600s through the 1990s, Americans turned to a variety of healers, practices, and institutions in their efforts to prevent and survive epidemics of smallpox, yellow fever, cholera, influenza, polio, and AIDS. Health care workers in all periods attended births and deaths and cared for people who had injuries, disabilities, and chronic diseases. Drawing on primary sources, classic scholarship, and a vast body of recent literature in the history of medicine and public health, Burnham finds that traditional healing, care, and medicine dominated the United States until the late nineteenth century, when antiseptic/aseptic surgery and germ theory initiated an intellectual, social, and technical transformation. He divides the age of modern medicine into several eras: physiological medicine (1910s–1930s), antibiotics (1930s–1950s), technology (1950s–1960s), environmental medicine (1970s–1980s), and, beginning around 1990, genetic medicine. The cumulating developments in each era led to today's radically altered doctor-patient relationship and the insistent questions that swirl around the financial cost of health care. Burnham's sweeping narrative makes sense of medical practice, medical research, and human frailties and foibles, opening the door to a new understanding of our current concerns.


The Life and Times of William Withering

The Life and Times of William Withering

Author: Peter Sheldon (MD.)

Publisher:

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13:

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William Withering whilst travelling from Birmingham to Stafford and stopping to change horses, was asked to see a patient suffering from the dropsy. A few weeks later, enquiring about her progress, he was told she had improved following the use of a remedy of an old woman in Shropshire. He was able to discren that of all its ingredients, the one likely to be responsible was derived from the purple foxglove (Digitalis purpurea). His most famous contribution to the world of medicine was to study its optimum dosage, and accurately to chart its side effects. Withering was also a mineralogist and botanist. He was a member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham. Within this book we traverse world events of the 18th century - wars and riots, the Industrial Revolution, the effects in the Midlands of the French Revolution, the events in India, and many others. We chart the lives of other physicians, famous politicians, artists, playwrights, cabinet makers and others, who collectively weave the tapestry of the time. Then we move into modern times with the advent of digoxin, the current version of digitalis. We assess its place in the medicine of today.This book is intended not only for members of the medical and allied professions, but for all who, like Withering, seek truth from the Nature that surrounds us.