Health and Healing in America

This week, we begin reading Michael Willrich’s thorough and well-written account of smallpox epidemics and eradication campaigns at the turn of the 20th century. Think about how to connect the story Willrich tells in such detail with the overall framework we’ve gotten from Rutkow: the rise of bacteriology, scientific thinking, public health, teaching hospitals, and other institutions of modern medicine. And notice, too, how race and class intersect with this story in perhaps unexpected ways.

For Mon 3/11 – Read Pox Prologue and Chapter 1

For Wed 3/13 – Read Pox Chapters 2-3

Over spring break, read Pox Chapters 4-5 for Mon 3/25

Reminder: the Disease Project poster and presentation day is Wed 3/27 of the week we come back from break.

I mentioned “radium girls” in class – here are a couple of links for more information.

Alan Bellows, “Undark and the Radium Girls,” Damn Interesting #241
Deborah Blum, “The Radium Girls,” Speakeasy Science 24 March 2011

There’s also a play based on their experiences, “These Shining Lives” (the photo is from a recent Minnesota production of the show).

See also this eyepopping post for more on the early 20th century fascination with radium and radiation in advertising and product names.

General News: I added some links in the sidebar regarding Chicago Style footnote citations. And/or – you should own Diana Hacker, A Writer’s Reference (it is available in the bookstore; I highly recommend owning it throughout your four years here) which has a whole section on Chicago Style citation. I will also demo Chicago Style in class.

Monday 1/28: We discussed the remainder of Porter’s book Blood and Guts (good discussion, everyone!) and selected books from this list you got in class today. If anyone hasn’t yet chosen a book, please email me ASAP with your choice. The ones already taken are:

Bown, Scurvy
Bristow, American Pandemic
Brown, The Pox
Cooter, In the Name of the Child
Crosby, The American Plague
Derickson, Black Lung
Gosling, Before Freud
Halliday, The Great Filth
Healy, Mania
Jones, Death in a Small Package
Oshinsky, Polio
Parascandola, Sex, Sin & Science
Pettit, A Cruel Wind
Reverby, Examining Tuskegee
Roe, A Plague of Corn
Swedlund, Shadows in the Valley
Warren, Brush With Death
Wolf, Deliver Me from Pain

Begin the process of borrowing and reading your chosen book, either from our WSU library, a local public library, or via inter-library loan request.

Wed 1/30: Please read (and bring) Rutkow, Seeking the Cure, Chapter 1. Bring a printed 2-3 page (double-spaced) response paper to class that considers one or more of these questions:

• Who were medical experts in colonial America, and what was their training?
• Why was medicine “just another colonial trade”? How does Rutkow’s description compare to Porter’s depiction of pre-twentieth century medical strategies as a “box of blanks” (p. 39)?
• How (and why) did John Morgan hope to transform the country’s medical education system? How successful were his efforts to professionalize medicine in the late 18th century?
• Characterize the field of medicine in colonial times. Can you extrapolate from this chapter what the prevailing theories were about disease in that era (i.e. physiological or ontological as explained in Porter p. 73, or something else entirely)?
• We might dismiss medicine in the colonial era as backward or primitive, but what were the benefits or strengths of colonial medical practices, if any?

Welcome to the all-honors course “Health and Healing in America” for Spring 2013. I have posted the syllabus for this term – just click on either of the links in the sidebar to the left.

You will need the following books for this course:

Porter, Roy. Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine. W.W. Norton, 2004. ISBN 039-332569-5
Ira Rutkow, Seeking the Cure: A History of Medicine in America (Scribner, 2010) ISBN-10: 1416538283
Michael Willrich, Pox: An American History (Penguin, 2012) ISBN-13: 9780143120780
Penney, Darby. The Lives they Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic. Bellevue Literary Press, 2009. ISBN 1-934137-147

PLEASE NOTE: the Rutkow book, Seeking the Cure will not be in the bookstore, so you are on your own for ordering it, but Amazon (or your favorite online new/used bookseller) can surely supply it or you can order it as a Kindle edition for viewing on a Kindle, smartphone, computer, or tablet.

Our class will meet on MW starting Wed 1/23 in Sullivan 107 at 12:30 pm. Since we are not meeting for almost a whole week at the start of the semester (due to a Thursday start followed by a 3-day weekend), please prepare for our first class by reading Porter, Blood and Guts Chapters 1 and 2 on “Disease” and “Doctors.” See you soon!

PS: I taught an earlier version of this course in Fall 2010, using this same website, and I’m leaving up the old information as an archive for those students. You can safely ignore any post tagged “Fall10” below this one.

[ Last post for Fall 2010 Semester]

Download these instructions as a PDF

Reflection Paper (due Wed 12/8) – 5% of final grade

In this paper, please reflect on some or all of the following questions, in about 2-4 pages.

One of the course’s main learning outcomes was for you to “make sense of the complex system of health care and medical services delivery that we have in the United States… by breaking it down into constituent parts and understanding where, when and how each developed.” Do you feel you accomplished this? Why or why not?

In what areas (or topics or time periods) did you most strengthen your knowledge about health and sickness in past times?

What was most new/surprising/difficult for you in this class?

What scholarly tools (practices, techniques, strategies) did you develop this term to approach people, events and ideas of the past?

Which readings, class activities, or assignments contributed the most to your learning this term?

Which readings, class activities, or assignments did not contribute as much to your learning this term?

Below is a list of the topics/units for this course. Are there topics you think should be added to or dropped from the list?

• History of Medicine since ancient times
• Defining Disease over Time
• Social Healers in 18th century America
• Health & Sickness in the Lewis and Clark Expedition
• Therapeutics
• Victorian Hospitals
• Social Impact of Epidemics
• Polio
• Health Care Reform
• Civil War Nursing
• Mental Institutions

Diseases already chosen: tuberculosis, schizophrenia, diabetes, black lung, scarlet fever, leukemia, 1918 “Spanish flu,” Hodgkins disease, alcoholism, syphilis, bubonic plague, yellow fever, cataracts, malaria, tetanus, smallpox, cholera, bipolar disorder, whooping cough, neurasthenia, gout, typhoid fever, dropsy, measles

…which means 7 of you still need to choose!

Hey, who’s doing smallpox? This link’s for you.

HI 450-06 (HI 450-H1 for Honors) MW 12:30 – 1:45 in ST 100
First class meeting: Wednesday, 9/8. Please bring Porter, Blood and Guts to class with you on Day 1.

This course will be taught in Fall 2010 by Dr. Tona Hangen, Assistant Professor of 19th and 20th century US History. It’s targeted to be of interest to majors in nursing and other allied health professions, but anyone is welcome – there is no prerequisite. The course will consider the history of medicine and medical education, nursing and nursing education, healing practices from colonial times to the present, and the growth of the American hospital and health care systems. More broadly, the course invites students to understand how views on disease and healing have changed over time in the United States, and to explore historically constructed meanings of sickness and health in our past and present.

*Don’t be confused by the HI 290 vs. HI 450 course listing. It is in the catalog as HI 290 but it went into the fall 2010 schedule as a HI 450, Special Topics in History. It’s all the same course, so no worries.