Seeking the Cure - A History of Medicine in America

Informationen zum Autor Ira Rutkow is a general surgeon and historian of American medicine. He also holds a doctorate of public health from Johns Hopkins University. Among Dr. Rutkow’s books are several encyclopedic works on surgical history: Surgery: An Illustrated History, named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; American Surgery: An Illustrated History; and a two-volume bibliography, The History of Surgery in the United States, 1775-1900. He is the author of three other books, Seeking the Cure, James A. Garfield, and Bleeding Blue and Gray. Dr. Rutkow and his wife divide their time between New York City and a farm in the Hudson Valley. Klappentext A timely, authoritative, and entertaining history of medicine in America by an eminent physician Despite all that has been written and said about American medicine, narrative accounts of its history are uncommon. Until Ira Rutkow’s Seeking the Cure, there have been no modern works, either for the lay reader or the physician, that convey the extraordinary story of medicine in the United States. Yet for more than three centuries, the flowering of medicine—its triumphal progress from ignorance to science—has proven crucial to Americans’ under-standing of their country and themselves. Seeking the Cure tells the tale of American medicine with a series of little-known anecdotes that bring to life the grand and unceasing struggle by physicians to shed unsound, if venerated, beliefs and practices and adopt new medicines and treatments, often in the face of controversy and scorn. Rutkow expertly weaves the stories of individual doctors—what they believed and how they practiced—with the economic, political, and social issues facing the nation. Among the book’s many historical personages are Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington (whose timely adoption of a controversial medical practice probably saved the Continental Army), Benjamin Rush, James Garfield (who was killed by his doctors, not by an assassin’s bullet), and Joseph Lister. The book touches such diverse topics as smallpox and the Revolutionary War, the establishment of the first medical schools, medicine during the Civil War, railroad medicine and the beginnings of specialization, the rise of the medical-industrial complex, and the thrilling yet costly advent of modern disease-curing technologies utterly unimaginable a generation ago, such as gene therapies, body scanners, and robotic surgeries. In our time of spirited national debate over the future of American health care amid a seemingly infinite flow of new medical discoveries and pharmaceutical products, Rutkow’s account provides readers with an essential historic, social, and even philosophical context. Working in the grand American literary tradition established by such eminent writer-doctors as Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Carlos Williams, Sherwin Nuland, and Oliver Sacks, he combines the historian’s perspective with the physician’s seasoned expertise. Capacious, learned, and gracefully told, Seeking the Cure will satisfy armchair historians and doctors alike, for, as Rutkow shows, the history of American medicine is a portrait of America itself. Leseprobe SEEKING THE CURE One C OLONIAL M EDICINE Inoculation at Any Cost Z ABDIEL BOYLSTON, ONE of Boston’s most distinguished physicians, cowered in a hidden passageway inside his home. Outside, a rabble of angry townspeople demanded that he be lynched. They had gathered there after searching for the doctor throughout the city for several days and nights while flaunting a hangman’s noose as their flag. It was midsummer 1721 and Boston, a city of almost twelve thousand people, was suff...

Product details

• Authors: Rutkow, Ira Rutkow, Ira M. Rutkow
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.09.2012
• EAN: 9781416538417
• ISBN: 978-1-4165-3841-7
• No. of pages: 368
• Subjects: Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Medicine > General; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous