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

On Monday 10/4, we discussed two scholarly articles on changing medical therapeutics and how the American medical system matured – which served as a workshop on becoming a more critical and discerning reader of scholarly articles. We also talked about how to find articles about the history of medicine and health care in the university’s e-Journal resources and using the (free) JSTOR database from the Boston Public Library’s electronic resources.

Our reading for Wednesday 10/6 is essays #19 and #20 in the Leavitt reader, and the pictorial essay found on pp. 295-305. We are talking along two parallel tracks –

• The content, i.e. what visual and source record we have for the institutions where people received medical care in the Victorian era, and how those institutions changed over time
• The scholarly work, i.e. HOW historians use visual and documentary evidence to convince us that their interpretation of the past is correct

Remember to keep in mind the suggestions and guideposts for being a “predatory reader” of scholarly material. Prepare thoughtful discussion questions for class – perhaps at least one for each “track” of our discussion = a question or two about the content of the article(s) AND a question or two about how these scholars approached the problem under consideration, their methods or sources, or how successful/persuasive the essays are.

Also, I posted the PDF of the Article Abstract assignment under the “Assignments and Due Dates” tab – click here to download a copy if you need it.

Leavitt mentions that nutrition and diet have been a major factor in the long-term trends about sickness and health in America. Here are a couple of places online to explore that idea.

Great site on food history in the US
http://www.foodtimeline.org

See also http://www.foodhistorynews.com

Historic Cookbooks at the Feeding America Digital Project
http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/

Breakfast in Sturbridge Village
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEZirBqUuUc (5 minute mark)

Portion sizes, then and now

Over the next four class periods, we will explore ideas and historical practices around sickness, health and healing in early America, using 2 case studies: the Martha Ballard diary from Maine (1780s-1810s) and the Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1803-1806).

For each case study, the first class period will discuss the writings of a  historian and give a general overview to the text, the time period, and the conclusions that scholars are able to draw from these sources. Then you’ll go to the original text and explore for yourself, and bring your findings, questions and conclusions to our second class discussion.

Wed 9/15 – read 2 articles about Ballard as a “social healer” by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich: “Martha Moore Ballard and the Medical Challenge to Midwifery” in the Leavitt reader (Chapter 4 in the big blue volume), AND an excerpt from her 1990 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Midwife’s Tale, titled “1787: Exceeding Dangerously Ill” (as a PDF).

Mon 9/20 – explore the diary itself at DoHistory.org

Wed 9/22 – read a chapter from Volney Steele’s 2005 book, Bleed, Blister and Purge: A History of Medicine on the American Frontier, titled “Lewis and Clark: Keelboat Physicians” (PDF)

Mon 9/27 – explore the journals themselves at the Online Lewis and Clark Journals Project (University of Nebraska Lincoln)

Monday 9/13 we will be discussing Roy Porter’s book, Blood and Guts, so be sure to bring it with you to class. You will have made flash cards out of one of the chapters or some part of it, and bring those also or make sure I get them via Digital Dropbox before class starts.

I’ll give each group a few minutes to “present” on their chapter – raising discussion questions or giving an overview of the major themes, and talking a bit about how you decided what to make flash cards about and what you think are the most important things to be learned from your chapter.

Links for today –

The 1910 Flexner Report NPR story (All Things Considered, 8/16/2008)

The Full Flexner Report (Google Books)

For next time – create flashcards from the chapter you were assigned today from Roy Porter, Blood and Guts. Bring them to share with your classmates (as a document, online, in card form, or whatever makes sense) as we discuss the book in its entirety. I’ll make the actual copies after the next class & distribute them on Wed 9/15.

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.