Revolutionary Medicine: The Founding Fathers and Mothers in Sickness and in Health [Hardcover]
Author: Jeanne E. Abrams | Language: English | ISBN: 0814789196 | Format: PDF, EPUB
Revolutionary Medicine: The Founding Fathers and Mothers in Sickness and in Health
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Posts about Download The Book Revolutionary Medicine: The Founding Fathers and Mothers in Sickness and in Health from 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror link
Before the advent of modern antibiotics, one’s life could be abruptly shattered by contagion and death, and debility from infectious diseases and epidemics was commonplace for early Americans, regardless of social status. Concerns over health affected the founding fathers and their families as it did slaves, merchants, immigrants, and everyone else in North America. As both victims of illness and national leaders, the Founders occupied a unique position regarding the development of public health in America. Revolutionary Medicine refocuses the study of the lives of George and Martha Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams, and James and Dolley Madison away from the usual lens of politics to the unique perspective of sickness, health, and medicine in their era.
For the founders, republican ideals fostered a reciprocal connection between individual health and the “health” of the nation. Studying the encounters of these American founders with illness and disease, as well as their viewpoints about good health, not only provides us with a richer and more nuanced insight into their lives, but also opens a window into the practice of medicine in the eighteenth century, which is at once intimate, personal, and first hand. Perhaps most importantly, today’s American public health initiatives have their roots in the work of America’s founders, for they recognized early on that government had compelling reasons to shoulder some new responsibilities with respect to ensuring the health and well-being of its citizenry.
The state of medicine and public healthcare today is still a work in progress, but these founders played a significant role in beginning the conversation that shaped the contours of its development.
Jeanne E. Abrams is Professor at Penrose Library and the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver. She is the author of Jewish Women Pioneering the Frontier Trail: A History in the American West (NYU Press 2006) and Dr. Charles David Spivak: A Jewish Immigrant and the American Tuberculosis Movement, as well as numerous articles in the fields of American, Jewish and medical history which have appeared in scholarly journals and popular magazines.
- Hardcover: 314 pages
- Publisher: NYU Press; 1 edition (September 13, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0814789196
- ISBN-13: 978-0814789193
- Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #282,674 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
“The founders recognized early on that government had compelling reasons to shoulder some new responsibility with respect to ensuring health and well-being of its citizenry”, this summarizes the theme this book, in which the author tries to tie this to ACA/Obamacare. Professor Abrams uses the vehicle of the medical history of the Founding Fathers upon which to piggyback her, not so subtle, support of governmental health care that she springs on the reader in Epilogue as “Evolutionary Medicine”.
The 300+ book is divided into five main chapters, an Introduction, an Epilogue and a section for multiple notes and bibliography; methodically organized as an academic treatise. After a brief description of the state of health care and (primitive) medicine in 18th and 19th century America, Abrams dedicates a chapter to each of the Founders where she describes the various ailments that beset the men and their families. However, since they shared most of the same diseases due to the environment, poor general hygiene, questionable nutritional habits, endemic maladies and treated by arbitrary, almost shamanistic, medicine; the description of each individual's illness and treatment was repetitive, redundant and boring.
We learn that Smallpox was common and almost always fatal. The Variola virus was brought to the New World by the Spanish through Hispaniola to Mexico and beyond. Settlement of the east coast of North America in 1633 in Plymouth, Massachusetts was also accompanied by devastating outbreaks of smallpox among Native American populations, and subsequently among the native-born colonists. Washington tried to protect his army from the ravages of Smallpox by exposing his soldiers to weak forms of the disease and enforcing strict hygienic practices.
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