Overview

Healthcare history is more than leeches and drilling holes in skulls. It is stories of scientific failures and triumphs. Exploring American Healthcare History through 50 Historic Treasures presents a visual and narrative history of health and medicine in the United States, tracing paradigm shifts such as the introduction of anesthesia, the adoption of germ theory, and advances in public health. The book provides windows into ordinary people’s experiences with different schools of thought about treatment, from patent medicines and faith healing to hospital-based clinical trials. Exploring American Healthcare History showcases little-known objects that illustrate the complexities of our relationship with health, like a set of teeth from a small town in Arkansas where the link between fluoride and dental health was first discovered. It also highlights famous moments in medicine, such as the discovery of penicillin, and puts them into social and cultural context. Exploring American Healthcare History through 50 Historic Treasures will discuss concepts that are key to history curricula and to using history as a lens to understand society. The concepts include healthcare’s intersection with race, law, and changing cultural attitudes in a society shaped by science, religion, and economic forces. The choice of “healthcare” as the focus reflects the fact that the book encompasses conventional medicine, surgery, nursing, alternative medicines, and public health. The book discusses some areas of healthcare history in which practitioners were led by bias or greed rather than evidence. Some patent medicines, for example, lived up to their reputation as get-rich-quick schemes for their inventors. A few of the historic artifacts in the book, such as eugenics medals awarded to families with “good” genes, are treasures in the sense that they are a vital connection to shameful episodes in our past. The book explores artifacts and historic sites as individual things or places with their own stories, and as objects and sites representative of larger trends. This full-color book with over 50 photographs of artifacts like a beer advertised as harnessing the health-giving power of the sun show how the advancing science of health touched people’s everyday lives as well as their doctor visits. Patent medicines and machines highlight ways that people avoided or reacted to mainstream medicine, like faith healing, commercial nostrums, and alternative medicine. Thermometers and mold-culturing pans provide a tour of developments such as professional nursing and the “miracle drug” penicillin, while offering insight into epidemics from tuberculosis, plague, and the 1918 flu to HIV and opioid misuse. Historical caregivers featured include Pedro Jaramillo, a Mexican-American curandero, Dr. Susan LaFlesche Picotte, a trailblazing Omaha medical doctor, and Mattie Donnell Hicks, a Black nurse who served with both segregated and integrated units in the Army Corps of Nurses. This book describes the days when surgeons worked on patients without anesthesia and wiped their scalpels on their coats, and the day that EMTs raced to provide help when the Twin Towers were attacked in 2001, providing insight relevant to today’s problems and colorful anecdotes along the way.

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9781538135464

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Reviews

"As the COVID-19 pandemic pushes public health and health care to the forefront of global concern, Kehoe offers great insight into how conceptualizations and treatments of disease and promotion of health have evolved over centuries through analysis of 50 medical artifacts. The collection would be a great supplement to George Rosen's canonical A History of Public Health though of course Kehoe's text brings readers closer to the present. The author's introduction notes that medicine has been variously conceived, whether as a progressive march forward of science or as a gruesome, macabre activity. The objects presented here include those representing both sides of the conceptual universe, from tools employed in developing vaccines and antibiotics, encapsulating the former, to some used in nefarious applications of eugenics and pesticide use, recalling the latter. The volume will be a great tool for students of public health history, presenting tangible evidence from the late 1700s to the present. Kehoe's text may also help contextualize current culture wars surrounding responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, including popular debates about masking, vaccinations, and lockdowns. This is a great resource for undergraduates, scholars of medical history, and medical antiquarians. Highly recommended. All readers. -- ""Choice Reviews"" Centered on the way tangible artifacts can encourage empathy with patients of the past, Kehoe's well-sourced and approachable primer to the history of the health sciences through its material culture could start curious budding history enthusiasts on a lifelong love affair with the subject. --Megan Rosenbloom, collection strategies librarian at UCLA Library and author of Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin Like visiting a museum without ever leaving your favorite reading chair. Kehoe offers a fascinating selection of objects with lively and engaging interpretations. --Elena Conis, professor, Graduate School of Journalism; Department of History; and Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society University of California, Berkeley Though much of medical practice is now conducted digitally and virtually, illness and healing still exist as they always have in the realm of bodies, substances, and objects. In this informative and visually fascinating book Tegan Kehoe explores the history of medicine through the physical. George Washington's toothbrush, an iron lung, a straitjacket, a nurse's uniform, and an ambulance crushed on 9/11 are among the 50 artifacts through which Kehoe expertly captures the ingenuity, heroism, cruelty, and even humor of medicine through the ages. --Suzanne Koven, primary care physician and Writer in Residence at Massachusetts General Hospital"

Though much of medical practice is now conducted digitally and virtually, illness and healing still exist as they always have in the realm of bodies, substances, and objects. In this informative and visually fascinating book Tegan Kehoe explores the history of medicine through the physical. George Washington's toothbrush, an iron lung, a straitjacket, a nurse's uniform, and an ambulance crushed on 9/11 are among the 50 artifacts through which Kehoe expertly captures the ingenuity, heroism, cruelty, and even humor of medicine through the ages.--Suzanne Koven, primary care physician and Writer in Residence at Massachusetts General Hospital Centered on the way tangible artifacts can encourage empathy with patients of the past, Kehoe's well-sourced and approachable primer to the history of the health sciences through its material culture could start curious budding history enthusiasts on a lifelong love affair with the subject.--Megan Rosenbloom, collection strategies librarian at UCLA Library and author of Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin Like visiting a museum without ever leaving your favorite reading chair. Kehoe offers a fascinating selection of objects with lively and engaging interpretations.--Elena Conis, professor, Graduate School of Journalism; Department of History; and Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society University of California, Berkeley

Author Information

Tegan Kehoe is a public historian who specializes in the history of healthcare and science. She is the exhibit and education specialist at the Paul S. Russell, MD Museum of Medical History and Innovation at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and received her MA in history and museum studies from Tufts University.

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