Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures

by Tegan Kehoe

Overview

Healthcare history is more than leeches and drilling holes in skulls. It is stories of scientific failures and triumphs.

Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures presents a visual and narrative history of health and medicine in the United States, tracing paradigm shifts such as the introduction of anesthesia, the adoption of germ theory, and advances in public health. In this book, museum artifacts are windows into both famous and ordinary people’s experiences with healthcare throughout American history, from patent medicines and faith healing to laboratory science.

With 50 vignette-like chapters and 50 color photographs, Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures showcases little-known objects that illustrate the complexities of our relationship with health, such as a bottle from the short period when the Schlitz beer company sold lager that was supposed to be high in vitamin D during the first vitamin craze. It also highlights famous moments in medicine, such as the discovery of penicillin, as illustrated by a mold-culturing pan. Each artifact tells some piece of the story of how its creators or users approached fundamental questions in health. Some of these questions are, “What causes sickness, and what causes health?” and “How much can everyone master the principles of health, and how much do laypeople need to rely on outside authorities?”

Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures describes the days when surgeons worked on patients without anesthesia and wiped their scalpels on their coats, and the day that EMTs raced to provide help when the Twin Towers were attacked in 2001. The book discusses social and cultural influences that have shaped healthcare, providing insight relevant to today’s problems and colorful anecdotes along the way.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781538135464
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	02/15/2022
Series:	AASLH Exploring America's Historic Treasures
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	1,081,615
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.42(h) x 0.79(d)

About the Author

Tegan Kehoe is a public historian who specializes in the history of healthcare and science. She is the exhibit and education specialist at the Paul S. Russell, MD Museum of Medical History and Innovation at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and received her MA in history and museum studies from Tufts University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1: Unwashed Groins and Child Labor: Cancer in the Early Industrial Age

Chapter 2: George Washington’s Toothbrush

Chapter 3: The Age of the Vaccine

Chapter 4: No Wrong Way to Eat

Chapter 5: A Pioneering Operation

Chapter 6: Healing by a Higher Power

Chapter 7: Morton’s Ether Inhaler and the Advent of Anesthesia

Chapter 8: Bitters and Irregulars: Alternative Healing in the Nineteenth Century

Chapter 9: Blood Shed After the Battle: Bleeding Cups

Chapter 10: Under the Surgeon’s Tent: The Physician in the Civil War

Chapter 11: “Inflammatory Mischief” Meets Antiseptic Techniques

Chapter 12: Answering the Milk Question

Chapter 13: Skull Shape and Scientific Racism

Chapter 14: “Health and Comfort of Body, With Grace and Beauty of Form”

Chapter 15: East Meets West in the Medicine Cabinet: A Chinese Doctor in America

Chapter 16: The “Cure” That Wasn’t

Chapter 17: Cocaine the Medicine and the Drug

Chapter 18: Don Pedrito, a Legendary Healer

Chapter 19: A Wooden Leg in a Mechanized World

Chapter 20: A Community Doctor’s Legacy

Chapter 21: Carville, the “Louisiana Leper Home”

Chapter 22: The Professional Nurse Only

Chapter 23: The Pandemic of the Century: The 1918 Flu

Chapter 24: The Bubonic Plague Meets Bacteriology

Chapter 25: Safe, Simple, Sure? The Power of X-Rays

Chapter 26: “Are You Playing The Health Game?”

Chapter 27: The Problem with “Good” Genes

Chapter 28: Machinery and Machinations

Chapter 29: Diabetes: A Fatal Disease Becomes Chronic

Chapter 30: The Tools of a Contested Trade: A Midwife's Kit

Chapter 31: Sipping on the Sunshine Vitamin

Chapter 32: Preemie Care Beyond the World’s Fair

Chapter 33: The Penicillin Revolution

Chapter 34: Blood Transfusion Comes of Age

Chapter 35: Insuring and Ensuring Health

Chapter 36: Nursing at War

Chapter 37: The Science and Politics of Inhaling Dust

Chapter 38: Health Uplifted, Health Upended

Chapter 39: DDT: The Double-Edged Sword

Chapter 40: The Iron Lung and the Polio Epidemics

Chapter 41: Two Eras of Change in Pharmacy

Chapter 42: More than a Metaphor: The Straitjacket

Chapter 43: Changing Ways of Looking at the Gut

Chapter 44: The Pill's New Era of Choice (For Some)

Chapter 45: Smoking Under Scrutiny

Chapter 46: Ed Roberts and the Independent Living Movement

Chapter 47: Bypassing the Heart

Chapter 48: False Hopelessness or False Hope: The Early Years of AIDS

Chapter 49: September 11 and Emergency Response

Chapter 50: Saving Lives Amid the Opioid Crisis

Conclusion

About the Author

Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

As the COVID-19 pandemic pushes public health and health care to the forefront of global concern, Kehoe offers great insight into how conceptualizations and treatments of disease and promotion of health have evolved over centuries through analysis of 50 medical artifacts. The collection would be a great supplement to George Rosen's canonical A History of Public Health though of course Kehoe's text brings readers closer to the present. The author's introduction notes that medicine has been variously conceived, whether as a progressive march forward of science or as a gruesome, macabre activity. The objects presented here include those representing both sides of the conceptual universe, from tools employed in developing vaccines and antibiotics, encapsulating the former, to some used in nefarious applications of eugenics and pesticide use, recalling the latter. The volume will be a great tool for students of public health history, presenting tangible evidence from the late 1700s to the present. Kehoe's text may also help contextualize current culture wars surrounding responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, including popular debates about masking, vaccinations, and lockdowns. This is a great resource for undergraduates, scholars of medical history, and medical antiquarians. Highly recommended. All readers.

Choice Reviews

Like visiting a museum without ever leaving your favorite reading chair. Kehoe offers a fascinating selection of objects with lively and engaging interpretations.

Elena Conis

Centered on the way tangible artifacts can encourage empathy with patients of the past, Kehoe’s well-sourced and approachable primer to the history of the health sciences through its material culture could start curious budding history enthusiasts on a lifelong love affair with the subject.

Megan Rosenbloom

Though much of medical practice is now conducted digitally and virtually, illness and healing still exist as they always have in the realm of bodies, substances, and objects. In this informative and visually fascinating book Tegan Kehoe explores the history of medicine through the physical. George Washington’s toothbrush, an iron lung, a straitjacket, a nurse’s uniform, and an ambulance crushed on 9/11 are among the 50 artifacts through which Kehoe expertly captures the ingenuity, heroism, cruelty, and even humor of medicine through the ages.

Suzanne Koven

As the COVID-19 pandemic pushes public health and health care to the forefront of global concern, Kehoe offers great insight into how conceptualizations and treatments of disease and promotion of health have evolved over centuries through analysis of 50 medical artifacts. The collection would be a great supplement to George Rosen's canonical A History of Public Health though of course Kehoe's text brings readers closer to the present. The author's introduction notes that medicine has been variously conceived, whether as a progressive march forward of science or as a gruesome, macabre activity. The objects presented here include those representing both sides of the conceptual universe, from tools employed in developing vaccines and antibiotics, encapsulating the former, to some used in nefarious applications of eugenics and pesticide use, recalling the latter. The volume will be a great tool for students of public health history, presenting tangible evidence from the late 1700s to the present. Kehoe's text may also help contextualize current culture wars surrounding responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, including popular debates about masking, vaccinations, and lockdowns. This is a great resource for undergraduates, scholars of medical history, and medical antiquarians. Highly recommended. All readers.

Choice