Medicine in Colonial America

Medicine in Colonial America PDF Author: Oscar Reiss
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 544

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Medicine in Colonial America, Oscar Reiss recognizes the theories and practices exercised by colonial physicians, and illustrates the gradual evolution of Dark Age medical ignorance to the beginnings of modern-day enlightenment. Reiss identifies the various levels of training for physicians from extensive schooling at respected universities to the informal instruction of mountebanks and quacks. He illustrates the numerous, unorthodox methods including bleeding, vomiting, purging, and cupping, used by both charlatans and educated practitioners alike to treat disease, and weighs the quality of colonial life against the available medical knowledge of the day. Reiss discusses the early attempts to license physicians, competitive pricing of medical service, colonial surgery and early autopsies, and cites important medical breakthroughs and theories. An interesting and informative read, Medicine in Colonial America will be of great value to physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and dentists as well as historians.

Medicine in Colonial America

Medicine in Colonial America PDF Author: Oscar Reiss
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 544

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Medicine in Colonial America, Oscar Reiss recognizes the theories and practices exercised by colonial physicians, and illustrates the gradual evolution of Dark Age medical ignorance to the beginnings of modern-day enlightenment. Reiss identifies the various levels of training for physicians from extensive schooling at respected universities to the informal instruction of mountebanks and quacks. He illustrates the numerous, unorthodox methods including bleeding, vomiting, purging, and cupping, used by both charlatans and educated practitioners alike to treat disease, and weighs the quality of colonial life against the available medical knowledge of the day. Reiss discusses the early attempts to license physicians, competitive pricing of medical service, colonial surgery and early autopsies, and cites important medical breakthroughs and theories. An interesting and informative read, Medicine in Colonial America will be of great value to physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and dentists as well as historians.

Medicine and the American Revolution

Medicine and the American Revolution PDF Author: Oscar Reiss, M.D.
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476604959
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Get Book Here

Book Description
Nearly nine times as many died from diseases during the American Revolution as did from wounds. Poor diet, inadequate sanitation and sometimes a lack of basic medical care caused such diseases as dysentery, scurvy, typhus, smallpox and others to decimate the ranks. Scurvy was a major problem for both the British and American navies, while venereal diseases proved to be a particularly vexing problem in New York. Respiratory diseases, scabies and other illnesses left nearly 4,000 colonial troops unable to fight when George Washington's troops broke camp at Valley Forge in June 1778. From a physician's perspective, this is a unique history of the American Revolution and how diseases impacted the execution of the war effort. The medical histories of Washington and King George III are also provided.

Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru

Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru PDF Author: Adam Warren
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822973871
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book Here

Book Description
By the end of the eighteenth century, Peru had witnessed the decline of its once-thriving silver industry and had barely begun to recover from massive population losses due to smallpox and other diseases. At the time, it was widely believed that economic salvation was contingent upon increasing the labor force and maintaining as many healthy workers as possible. In Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru, Adam Warren presents a groundbreaking study of the primacy placed on medical care to generate population growth during this era. The Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century shaped many of the political, economic, and social interests of Spain and its colonies. In Peru, local elites saw the reforms as an opportunity to positively transform society and its conceptions of medicine and medical institutions in the name of the Crown. Creole physicians, in particular, took advantage of Bourbon reforms to wrest control of medical treatment away from the Catholic Church, establish their own medical expertise, and create a new, secular medical culture. They asserted their new influence by treating smallpox and leprosy, by reforming medical education, and by introducing hygienic routines into local funeral rites, among other practices. Later, during the early years of independence, government officials began to usurp the power of physicians and shifted control of medical care back to the church. Creole doctors, without the support of the empire, lost much of their influence, and medical reforms ground to a halt. As Warren’s study reveals, despite falling in and out of political favor, Bourbon reforms and creole physicians were instrumental to the founding of modern medicine in Peru, and their influence can still be felt today.

Medicine in Colonial America

Medicine in Colonial America PDF Author: Charlie Samuel
Publisher: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc
ISBN: 9780823965984
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 32

Get Book Here

Book Description
Discusses various ways settlers and Native Americans practiced medicine during colonial times, describing diseases, supplies, and common practices.

Revolutionary Medicine

Revolutionary Medicine PDF Author: Jeanne E Abrams
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 081475936X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Get Book Here

Book Description
An engaging history of the role that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin played in the origins of public health in America. Before the advent of modern antibiotics, one’s life could be abruptly shattered by contagion and death, and debility from infectious diseases and epidemics was commonplace for early Americans, regardless of social status. Concerns over health affected the Founding Fathers and their families as it did slaves, merchants, immigrants, and everyone else in North America. As both victims of illness and national leaders, the Founders occupied a unique position regarding the development of public health in America. Historian Jeanne E. Abrams’s Revolutionary Medicine refocuses the study of the lives of George and Martha Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams, and James and Dolley Madison away from politics to the perspective of sickness, health, and medicine. For the Founders, republican ideals fostered a reciprocal connection between individual health and the “health” of the nation. Studying the encounters of these American Founders with illness and disease, as well as their viewpoints about good health, not only provides a richer and more nuanced insight into their lives, but also opens a window into the practice of medicine in the eighteenth century, which is at once intimate, personal, and first hand. Today’s American public health initiatives have their roots in the work of America’s Founders, for they recognized early on that government had compelling reasons to shoulder some new responsibilities with respect to ensuring the health and well-being of its citizenry—beginning the conversation about the country’s state of medicine and public healthcare that continues to be a work in progress.

Colonial Pathologies

Colonial Pathologies PDF Author: Warwick Anderson
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822388081
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Get Book Here

Book Description
Colonial Pathologies is a groundbreaking history of the role of science and medicine in the American colonization of the Philippines from 1898 through the 1930s. Warwick Anderson describes how American colonizers sought to maintain their own health and stamina in a foreign environment while exerting control over and “civilizing” a population of seven million people spread out over seven thousand islands. In the process, he traces a significant transformation in the thinking of colonial doctors and scientists about what was most threatening to the health of white colonists. During the late nineteenth century, they understood the tropical environment as the greatest danger, and they sought to help their fellow colonizers to acclimate. Later, as their attention shifted to the role of microbial pathogens, colonial scientists came to view the Filipino people as a contaminated race, and they launched public health initiatives to reform Filipinos’ personal hygiene practices and social conduct. A vivid sense of a colonial culture characterized by an anxious and assertive white masculinity emerges from Anderson’s description of American efforts to treat and discipline allegedly errant Filipinos. His narrative encompasses a colonial obsession with native excrement, a leper colony intended to transform those considered most unclean and least socialized, and the hookworm and malaria programs implemented by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1920s and 1930s. Throughout, Anderson is attentive to the circulation of intertwined ideas about race, science, and medicine. He points to colonial public health in the Philippines as a key influence on the subsequent development of military medicine and industrial hygiene, U.S. urban health services, and racialized development regimes in other parts of the world.

For All of Humanity

For All of Humanity PDF Author: Martha Few
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816531870
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
Smallpox, measles, and typhus. The scourges of lethal disease—as threatening in colonial Mesoamerica as in other parts of the world—called for widespread efforts and enlightened attitudes to battle the centuries-old killers of children and adults. Even before edicts from Spain crossed the Atlantic, colonial elites oftentimes embraced medical experimentation and reform in the name of the public good, believing it was their moral responsibility to apply medical innovations to cure and prevent disease. Their efforts included the first inoculations and vaccinations against smallpox, new strategies to protect families and communities from typhus and measles, and medical interventions into pregnancy and childbirth. For All of Humanity examines the first public health campaigns in Guatemala, southern Mexico, and Central America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Martha Few pays close attention to Indigenous Mesoamerican medical cultures, which not only influenced the shape and scope of those regional campaigns but also affected the broader New World medical cultures. The author reconstructs a rich and complex picture of the ways colonial doctors, surgeons, Indigenous healers, midwives, priests, government officials, and ordinary people engaged in efforts to prevent and control epidemic disease. Few’s analysis weaves medical history and ethnohistory with social, cultural, and intellectual history. She uses prescriptive texts, medical correspondence, and legal documents to provide rich ethnographic descriptions of Mesoamerican medical cultures, their practitioners, and regional pharmacopeia that came into contact with colonial medicine, at times violently, during public health campaigns.

The Doctor in Colonial America

The Doctor in Colonial America PDF Author: Zachary Friedenberg
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Medicine
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this book, the author re-creates medicine in the Colonial past. It was a world where surgeons, working at military hospitals, received one and one-third dollars a day for their efforts; where operations, most frequently amputations, were performed without benefit of anesthesia; and where nostalgia was deemed a legitimate diagnosis and was treated as an organic disease during the Revolutionary War. During this time when "antiseptic" was a new word, readers will discover how puritanically minded people were resistant to smallpox inoculations as being against the will of God; about physicians forced to experiment with new vaccines on their own family members for want of other subjects; and even about how best to treat an outbreak of scurvy aboard a slave ship. More than just a historical work, this book examines the medical theories and surgical practices that provided the groundwork for modern medicine.

The Army Medical Department, 1775-1818

The Army Medical Department, 1775-1818 PDF Author: Mary C. Gillett
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Government publications
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
Appendices include laws and legislation concerning the Army Medical Department. Maps include those of territories and frontiers and Continental Army hospital locations. Illustrations are chiefly portraits.

The Cold, Hard Facts about Science and Medicine in Colonial America

The Cold, Hard Facts about Science and Medicine in Colonial America PDF Author: Elizabeth Raum
Publisher: Capstone
ISBN: 1429672153
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 18

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Describes life in the American colonies, focusing on beliefs related to science and medicine"--