Science and Medicine in the Old South

Science and Medicine in the Old South PDF Author: Ronald Numbers
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807124956
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
With a few notable exceptions, historians have tended to ignore the role that science and medicine played in the antebellum South. The fourteen essays in Science and Medicine in the Old South help to redress that neglect by considering scientific and medical developments in the early nineteenth-century South and by showing the ways in which the South’s scientific and medical activities differed from those of other regions. The book is divided into two sections. The essays in the first section examine the broad background of science in the South between 1830 and 1860; the second section addresses medicine specifically. The essays frequently counterpoint each other. In the first section, Ronald Numbers and Janet Numbers argue that he South’s failure to “keep pace” with the North in scientific areas resulted from demographic factors. William Scarborough asserts that slavery produced a social structure that encouraged agricultural and political careers rather than scientific and industrial ones. Charles Dew offers a strong indictment of slavery, suggesting that the conservative influence of the institution severely discouraged the adoption of modern technologies. Other essays examine institutions of higher learning in the South, southern scientific societies, and the relationship between science and theology. The section on medicine in the Old South also examines the ways in which the medical needs and practices of the Old South were both similar to and distinct from those of other regions. K. David Patterson argues that slavery in effect imported African diseases into the Southeast and created a “modified West African disease environment.” James H. Cassedy points out that land-management policies determined by slavery—land clearing, soil exhaustion—also helped created a distinctive disease environment. Other contributors discuss southern public health problems, domestic medicine, slave folk beliefs, and the special medical needs of blacks. Science and Medicine in the Old South is a long-overdue examination of these segments of the southern cultural milieu. These essays will do much to clarify misconceptions about the time and the region; moreover, they suggest directions for future research.

Science and Medicine in the Old South

Science and Medicine in the Old South PDF Author: Ronald Numbers
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807124956
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
With a few notable exceptions, historians have tended to ignore the role that science and medicine played in the antebellum South. The fourteen essays in Science and Medicine in the Old South help to redress that neglect by considering scientific and medical developments in the early nineteenth-century South and by showing the ways in which the South’s scientific and medical activities differed from those of other regions. The book is divided into two sections. The essays in the first section examine the broad background of science in the South between 1830 and 1860; the second section addresses medicine specifically. The essays frequently counterpoint each other. In the first section, Ronald Numbers and Janet Numbers argue that he South’s failure to “keep pace” with the North in scientific areas resulted from demographic factors. William Scarborough asserts that slavery produced a social structure that encouraged agricultural and political careers rather than scientific and industrial ones. Charles Dew offers a strong indictment of slavery, suggesting that the conservative influence of the institution severely discouraged the adoption of modern technologies. Other essays examine institutions of higher learning in the South, southern scientific societies, and the relationship between science and theology. The section on medicine in the Old South also examines the ways in which the medical needs and practices of the Old South were both similar to and distinct from those of other regions. K. David Patterson argues that slavery in effect imported African diseases into the Southeast and created a “modified West African disease environment.” James H. Cassedy points out that land-management policies determined by slavery—land clearing, soil exhaustion—also helped created a distinctive disease environment. Other contributors discuss southern public health problems, domestic medicine, slave folk beliefs, and the special medical needs of blacks. Science and Medicine in the Old South is a long-overdue examination of these segments of the southern cultural milieu. These essays will do much to clarify misconceptions about the time and the region; moreover, they suggest directions for future research.

Joseph Jones, M.D.

Joseph Jones, M.D. PDF Author: James O. Breeden
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813194407
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
Of the many books written over the past century about the Old South and the American Civil War, a very few explore the scientific history of the South or the medical history of the war itself. In the first volume of this impressive biography of Joseph Jones, Mr. Breeden does much to illuminate the development of scientific thought and of medicine in the nineteenth-century South. Jones was far in advance of most of his fellow physicians. The thoroughness of his research, the tenacity of his effort, and the brilliance of his findings won him respect while he was still a very young scholar. When the war came, he showed himself fiercely patriotic as a soldier but coldly empirical as a scientific investigator of many infectious diseases. In the course of the biography the author illumines the development of modern medicine in this country and the state of the nation's medical schools in the middle of the nineteenth century. The greater part of this volume is devoted to Jones's wartime service, which was mainly behind the battle lines in the hospitals and prison camps. The growth of the problem of gangrene among the wounded—a horrifying result of overcrowding and lack of sanitation—is examined in particularly telling detail; the ravaging of the Andersonville prison camp by this and other diseases was the subject of some of Jones's most controversial research, and his written report as a reluctant witness in the trial of the Southerners held responsible. At the outset of the war, Joseph Jones was an energetic and well trained young doctor with considerable experience in teaching and research; by its end he was perhaps the foremost expert on infectious diseases in the South or in the nation.

Doctoring the South

Doctoring the South PDF Author: Steven M. Stowe
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807876267
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
Offering a new perspective on medical progress in the nineteenth century, Steven M. Stowe provides an in-depth study of the midcentury culture of everyday medicine in the South. Reading deeply in the personal letters, daybooks, diaries, bedside notes, and published writings of doctors, Stowe illuminates an entire world of sickness and remedy, suffering and hope, and the deep ties between medicine and regional culture. In a distinct American region where climate, race and slavery, and assumptions about "southernness" profoundly shaped illness and healing in the lives of ordinary people, Stowe argues that southern doctors inhabited a world of skills, medicines, and ideas about sickness that allowed them to play moral, as well as practical, roles in their communities. Looking closely at medical education, bedside encounters, and medicine's larger social aims, he describes a "country orthodoxy" of local, social medical practice that highly valued the "art" of medicine. While not modern in the sense of laboratory science a century later, this country orthodoxy was in its own way modern, Stowe argues, providing a style of caregiving deeply rooted in individual experience, moral values, and a consciousness of place and time.

Medicine and Slavery

Medicine and Slavery PDF Author: Todd Lee Savitt
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252008740
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Widely regarded as the most comprehensive study of its kind, this volume offers valuable insight into the alleged medical differences between whites and blacks that translated as racial inferiority and were used to justify slavery and discrimination. In Medicine and Slavery, Todd L. Savitt evaluates the diet, hygiene, clothing, and living and working conditions of antebellum African Americans, slave and free, and analyzes the diseases and health conditions that afflicted them in urban areas, at industrial sites, and on plantations.

Medical Apartheid

Medical Apartheid PDF Author: Harriet A. Washington
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 076791547X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • The first full history of Black America’s shocking mistreatment as unwilling and unwitting experimental subjects at the hands of the medical establishment. No one concerned with issues of public health and racial justice can afford not to read this masterful book. "[Washington] has unearthed a shocking amount of information and shaped it into a riveting, carefully documented book." —New York Times From the era of slavery to the present day, starting with the earliest encounters between Black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, Medical Apartheid details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge—a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It reveals how Blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the twentieth century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of Blacks. Shocking new details about the government’s notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, prisons, and private institutions. The product of years of prodigious research into medical journals and experimental reports long undisturbed, Medical Apartheid reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and makes possible, for the first time, an understanding of the roots of the African American health deficit. At last, it provides the fullest possible context for comprehending the behavioral fallout that has caused Black Americans to view researchers—and indeed the whole medical establishment—with such deep distrust.

African American Slave Medicine

African American Slave Medicine PDF Author: Herbert C. Covey
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739131273
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
African-American Slave Medicine offers a critical examination of how African-American slaves medical needs were addressed during the years before and surrounding the Civil War. Drawing upon ex-slave interviews conducted during the 1930s and 1940s bythe Works Project Administration (WPA), Dr. Herbert C. Covey inventories many of the herbal, plant, and non-plant remedies used by African-American folk practitioners during slavery. He demonstrates how active the slaves were in their own medical care and the important role faith played in the healing process. This book links each referenced plant or herb to modern scientific evidence to determine its actual worth and effects on the patients. Through his study, Dr. Covey unravels many of the complex social relationships found between the African-American slaves, Whites, folk practitioners, and patients. African-American Slave Medicine is a compelling and captivating read that will appeal to scholars of African-American history and those interestedin folk medicine.

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine PDF Author: Mark Jackson
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 0199546495
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 691

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Book Description
In three sections, the Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine celebrates the richness and variety of medical history around the world. It explore medical developments and trends in writing history according to period, place, and theme.

A Southern Practice

A Southern Practice PDF Author: Charles Arnould Hentz
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813918815
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 668

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Book Description
Charles Arnould Hentz (1827-1894) was a physician practicing in the rural South in the years leading up to and through the Civil War. This volume includes the diary that Hentz kept for 25 years, as well as his autobiography written at the end of his life. The entries describe the life of a rural doctor who treated patients enslaved and free, birthed children, treated victims of stabbings and shootings, and faced the threat of epidemic fever. Stowe's (history, Indiana U.) introduction gives an overview of Hentz's life and examines some of the recurrent themes in his writing. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

A History of Public Health

A History of Public Health PDF Author: George Rosen
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421416018
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
For seasoned professionals as well as students, A History of Public Health is visionary and essential reading.

Southern Folk Medicine, 1750-1820

Southern Folk Medicine, 1750-1820 PDF Author: Kay K. Moss
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1643362917
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Explores homespun remedies and medicinal herbs Southern Folk Medicine, 1750-1820 explores methods of cure during a time when the South relied more heavily on homespun remedies than on professionally prescribed treatments. Bringing to light several previously unpublished primary sources, Kay K. Moss inventories the medical ingredients and practices adopted by physicians, herb women, yeoman farmers, plantation mistresses, merchants, tradesmen, preachers, and quacks alike. Moss shows how families passed down cures as heirlooms, how remedies crossed cultural and ethnic boundaries, and how domestic healers compounded native herbs and plants with exotic ingredients. Moss assembles her picture of domestic medical practice largely from an analysis of twelve commonplace books—or repositories of information, medical and otherwise—kept by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century southerners. She reveals that men and women of all social classes collected medical guidance and receipts in handwritten journals. Whether well educated or unlettered, many preferred home remedies over treatment by the region's few professional physicians. Of particular interest to natural historians, an extensive guide to medicinal plants, their scientific names, and their traditional uses is also included.