Health and Healing in America

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.