Health and Healing in America

I appreciated the lively discussion during our first in-person meeting last evening. Things are off to a great start! Here is what you will need for this next week.

Reading:

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “August 1787” from A Midwife’s Tale (PDF)

Rutkow, Seeking the Cure, Chapter 1. If you don’t yet have the book, click here to download the first chapter as a PDF document.

Journal Prompt #2. By class time on Wednesday, Feb 5th, please post a 500-word journal response that addresses some or all of these questions:

• Porter’s book, Blood and Guts vividly portrays ancient, pre-modern, and modern systems of medical knowledge. Describe each of these, using specific examples drawn from Porter’s account. In your description, locate each in time (in other words, when do these eras start and end?) and explain some of the major characteristics or innovations of medicine in ancient, pre-modern, and modern times.
• Trace the addition of functional medicine and research-based clinical science to the “box of blanks” that doctors essentially carried in the late 19th century. What happened, when, and why to give medical practitioners a possibility for curing disease and not merely alleviating its effects?
• Take a close look at the Bigelow article on “Insensibility During Surgical Operations Produced by Inhalation” (1846) I handed you in class. What is interesting, (shocking?), or historically useful that we can learn from this primary source?
• What is “the colonial context” of medical care and understanding of disease mechanisms? How does Ulrich’s research into the life of Martha Ballard agree or disagree with Rutkow’s assessment of “health care” around the time of the American revolution?
• Which of the time periods we have read about so far would you least like to have been born in, and why?

PS: Update – note that I switched out the link in the sidebar to APA Style. The link now takes you to the section of the website for Diana Hacker’s Writer’s Reference (the bigger spiral-bound book I had with me in class) with APA instructions, and even a sample paper written in APA style with references. Hope that helps! Remember I am always available for writing help, and so is the campus Writing Center.