Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis
During the Civil War, the utility and widespread availability of opium and morphine made opiates essential to wartime medicine. After the war ended, thousands of ailing soldiers became addicted, or "enslaved," as nineteenth-century Americans phrased it. Veterans, their families, and communities struggled to cope with addiction's health and social ......
The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution
This LA Times Book Prize finalist is a timely and fascinating account of the raucous public demand for smallpox inoculation during the American Revolution and the origin of vaccination in the United States. Finalist of the LA Times Book Prize for History by the LA Times, Winner of the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize by the Massachusetts ......
Body Snatching, Bloodletting, and Anatomy in America
Throughout the seventeenth century, medical lecturers demonstrated human anatomy by dissecting a cadaver while surrounded by students. After the Revolutionary War, though, instructors realized that they needed many more cadavers to serve a growing number of medical students. Enter the "resurrectionists" - body snatchers. Resurrectionists were a ......
Understanding Jonathan Swift's medical and literary life The Dean Disordered bridges biography and literary criticism to examine the chronic afflictions suffered by the great Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, investigating not only how these ailments affected his day-to-day social life and ambitions but also how he represented them in his ......
Understanding Jonathan Swift' s medical and literary life The Dean Disordered bridges biography and literary criticism to examine the chronic afflictions suffered by the great Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, investigating not only how these ailments affected his day-to-day social life and ambitions but also how he represented them in his ......
What was considered a good, normal, or healthy voice in the nineteenth century? In 1854, singing master Manuel Garcia became the first person to see the vocal cords at work in a human throat. Less than a decade later, surgeon Paul Broca identified what he called a speech center in the brain. The almost simultaneous invention of the laryngoscope ......
Health and Medical Transitions Among Southern California Indians
Native Americans long resisted Western medicine - but had less power to resist the threat posed by Western diseases. And so, as the Office of Indian Affairs reluctantly entered the business of health and medicine, Native peoples reluctantly began to allow Western medicine into their communities. Fighting Invisible Enemies traces this transition ......
A history of epilepsy and the work required to manage it. In the middle of the twentieth century, medical advancements like anticonvulsant drugs and electroencephalograms promised new possibilities for managing seizures. At the same time, people with epilepsy were navigating a complex medical landscape and enduring social prejudice. In Secrecy ......
Philadelphia's Yellow Fever Epidemic and the Stagnation of American Medicine
Explaining the deadly stasis of American medicine in the nineteenth century The 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia was a shock to the system of American medicine - or it should have been. In the decades that followed the most infamous health crisis of the early republic, American doctors by and large failed to move beyond ancient ideas ......
