Health and Healing in America

Update 10/18 – Please note I added the Disease Project guidelines as a new page, see the tab above. Or you can download the guidelines as a PDF here.

On Monday 10/18, we will talk about medicine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – summing up what happened to health care over that previous century & bringing together our learning from the several recently-assigned articles in Leavitt’s reader. What institutions, new scientific findings, and new cultural practices characterized medicine and health care by 1900? Steele’s essay helps us synthesize that knowledge; his book (from which this chapter is excerpted) concerns medicine on the American frontier, far from those growing urban hospitals that provided the statistical basis for Duffy and Leavitt’s research.

Link of the day: Typhoid Mary’s story

Your Article Abstract is also due Monday (along with the article, if it’s not from the Leavitt reader).

For Wednesday 10/20, we’ll begin to hone in how that system was tested–and changed–in the early decades of the 20th century by looking closely at two epidemics in the 1910s: polio, which had a significant outbreak in 1916 (the Rogers article = Leavitt #35); and the devastating 1918 flu pandemic (via an online article from Popular Mechanics in 2007 – written in light of recent flu scares but prior to the H1N1/Mexican swine flu outbreak).

Note: although it seems like the Popular Mechanics article has 3 pages, all the text is on the first one! The other 2, for some reason, repeat part of the article but have additional images.

Links for Wed: Alaska – Survivors – Rose Worth