Health and Healing in America

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

After the Thanksgiving break, we will look at the history of nursing with a close examination of one era (the Civil War) and how it was critical in the development of nursing in America.

For Monday, 11/29 I’d like you to look at Stephen Oates’s book about Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross. His biography of her is titled A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War, and parts of it are available online at Google Books. Please read 15-20 pages (of your choice) from Part Two, “The Field” (pp. 55-134). It describes Barton’s experiences at several battles in northern Virginia as a field nurse. The chapter has missing pages because it’s only a free preview, so you won’t get a complete story in any selected 15-20 pages, but read for the gist of what it was like for soldiers, nurses, and doctors in the heat of battle, and be ready to talk about some of Barton’s nursing strategies, her responses, and what we can learn about mid-19th century nursing from Oates’s account.

From now ’til Thanksgiving, we’ll be trying to figure out the very complex system of health care in the US. Our goals are to understand the origins and development of this system, figure out where we each fit in it, and to become familiar with the main issues in the debate over health care reform.

I’ve assigned a number of readings (and “listenings”) which I think will help us do this, but I am hoping that you each get interested in this topic on your own and seek out other sources of information also. As you do so, if you come across reliable (preferably nonpartisan) sources, please bring them up in class or mention them to me by email so I can pass along other good resources.

For Monday 11/8, your Disease Project paper is due. I have assigned some readings also, but I am planning to look at and listen to these in class. The first is a short (8-page) policy paper from the Kaiser Foundation that provides an overview of the system and its development, “Focus on Health Reform” . Second, the article by Numbers (#17) in the Leavitt book. And third, an 11-minute segment from the NPR program “This American Life” which aired almost exactly a year ago, looking at health care costs. You may not get to all three, but make a stab at it, and we will begin our discussion in class. What is “health care”? What falls into that category? How did our system develop? What might be wrong with it? And how can we fix it? Our discussion continues on Wed 11/9, adding in the article by Rosemary Stevens that identifies some of the policy and historical differences in the US and UK health systems (and with the help of the YouToons).

Monday 11/15 – in preparation, listen to This American Life, “More is Less” (online audio – about 60 minutes worth of listening) and we’ll discuss why health care in America is so darn expensive & confusing, and what are some policy ideas to deal with rising costs.

Link of the Day: Dartmouth Health Atlas

See you there for our poster session!

This week we have been deeply immersed in David Oshinsky‘s absorbing account of the polio epidemic in mid-20th century America and the political and scientific race for a viable vaccine. We’ll conclude our discussion of this book on Monday, November 1.

Oshkinsky’s big questions include:

Why and how did one vaccine come to dominate, when there were multiple pathways to polio vaccine and little consensus on which kind of vaccine might be best?
What was the interplay between science and politics in the development of the polio vaccine?
Was polio a raging epidemic deserving of such panic and resources, or was that fear fueled/created by a powerful & well-mobilized, well-connected organization?
What conditions in the 1930s-1950s nurtured polio’s growth?
What conditions in the 1930s-1950s nurtured the growth of polio research efforts?
How did the development of a vaccine change American culture?
What contributions did the race for polio make to the system of medical and scientific research in the US?

Also, remember to consider Oshinsky’s scholarly technique:

What sources is he using?
What’s his narrative strategy – i.e. HOW is he telling this story?
Why should we care about this story?

Meantime, you are continuing to research a disease of your choice in the past. On Wed 10/27 I handed out some additional guidelines clarifying what I mean when I say that you should go beyond “web resources” to find quality research sources.

On Wednesday, Nov 3, we will have our Poster Conference Session, held in the Admin Bldg, Room 101-B (ground floor conference room near the front entrance). I would like this to be a professional-quality event showcasing your very best efforts. There will be opportunity for discussion and peer review of your colleague’s research findings.

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.