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Seeking the Cure: A History of Medicine in America - Softcover

Rutkow, Ira

 
9781416538417: Seeking the Cure: A History of Medicine in America
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1416538410 ISBN 13: 9781416538417
Verlag: Scribner, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den 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.

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SEEKING THE CURE One

COLONIAL MEDICINE Inoculation at Any Cost
ZABDIEL 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 suffering a devastating smallpox epidemic. Nearly half of the city’s inhabitants would contract the illness and one in fourteen would die.

The mob had targeted Boylston for attempting the medical unknown. He had taken pus and scabs from the pocks of a patient with active smallpox and placed the putrid material beneath a small cut in the skin of healthy individuals, including several family slaves and his six-year-old son. Boylston intended to induce a mild form of smallpox in these patients, who would, he hoped, recover and be protected against the more severe attacks and possible death that resulted from contracting the illness naturally. “I resolv’d to carry it on for the saving of Lives,” he would later write, “not regarding any, or all the Menaces and Opposition that were made against it.”1 This rudimentary inoculation was untried and risky, even without the mob’s threats.

The physician and his family feared for their lives with good reason. Boylston’s neighbors believed that he was a killer who would expand the disease’s toll. “To spread a mortal Contagion, What is it but to cast abroad Arrows and Death?” stated one outraged citizen. “If a man should willfully bring infection from a person sick of a deadly and contagious Disease, into a place of Health; is not the mischief as great?”2 Secreted for fourteen days, the doctor and his kin survived not only the mob’s intimidations but a dud hand grenade thrown into the house’s parlor. So terrified was Boylston that for several weeks after the mob attack subsided he visited his patients only at night and in wigged disguise.

Boylston could do little to calm the raging fears but wait for the passage of time to prove his medical claims. The city’s selectmen scolded him, his fellow physicians labeled him unscrupulous, and vituperative journalists described him as a mass murderer. A weak-willed man might not have persevered, but the forty-one-year-old Boylston was no ordinary doctor, nor easily bullied. His earliest biographer said he possessed “a strong and reflecting mind, and acute discernment,” leading a life of “unimpeached integrity.”3 Unlike other practitioners who were less educated and poorly trained, the bold and stubborn Boylston never shied away from undertaking difficult medical cases. He had a reputation for performing virtuoso feats of surgery long before the inoculation crisis—in 1707, he had extracted an egg-sized stone from the urinary bladder of a thirteen-year-old boy, and a decade later, in the presence of clergy and other spectators, Boylston had removed a woman’s breast for the “repeated bleeding, growth & stench”4 of cancer.
Cotton Mather and Smallpox
Smallpox and other epidemics, such as diphtheria, dysentery, influenza, measles, scarlet fever, and yellow fever, were the colonialists’ persistent nightmare. Medical anthropologists believe that the small pox (or variola)—differentiated from the large pox (or syphilis)—was introduced into Europe around AD 500 by nomadic Saracen tribes from the east. Europeans subsequently brought it to the new world, where it ravaged native populations. Smallpox first reached New England in the early 1600s and continued to plague the colonialists every dozen or so years. The disease easily provoked panic due to its gruesome sequelae: “Purple spots, convulsion fits, bloody urine, violent inflammations in the eyes, throat, and other parts,” according to Boylston. “In some, the pock runs into blisters, and the skin stripping off, leaves the flesh raw, like creatures flea’d [flayed]. Some have a burning, others a smarting pain, as if in the fire, or scalded with boiling water.”5

With no knowledge of virology or pharmacology (smallpox is caused by the double-stranded, DNA-rich variola virus), the colonials could only curb smallpox’s spread with strict isolation procedures. A Massachusetts statute even stipulated that all smallpox sufferers should be separated from the healthy population in designated “pox” houses.

As the 1721 smallpox epidemic wore on, news of Boylston’s radical smallpox experiments panicked Bostonians, convinced that isolation was the only solution and that other approaches, especially inoculation, would worsen the plague. Then, the city’s renowned firebrand preacher, Cotton Mather, publicly declared his support of Boylston’s efforts, something few had anticipated.

The fifty-eight-year-old, Harvard-educated Mather, the controversial pastor of the city’s original Congregationalist North Church, was a prominent public figure and Boston’s “keeper of the Puritan conscience.”6 Mather influenced both spiritual and secular matters, from his youthful persecution of witches to a middle-aged enthusiasm for medical and public health improvements. He advocated Bible societies, the education of slaves, religious missionary work, and temperance. He also helped organize a college in New Haven, Connecticut, and suggested that it be named after the major benefactor, Elihu Yale. In addition to all of this, Mather was, according to one historian, “the most original medical thinker in the colonial period.”7 He was, among other things, one of the first to realize the cyclical nature of smallpox epidemics.

While Mather’s curiosity and intellect were rare, his interest in medicine was fairly common for a clergyman in the colonies. Minister-physicians, as they were known, continued a clerical tradition common to England and compounded by a paucity of decent healers in the new world. America’s preachers, the colonies’ best-educated and most well-read individuals, found that their book knowledge of medicine provided an effective way to establish rapport with congregants and the general public. Since religion and medicine had been interwoven for centuries, especially through the view that illness was the work of the devil and punishment for religious transgressions, it was de rigueur for colonial clergymen to attend to their flocks’ medical needs as part of pastoral care.

During the early 1720s, Mather had read a series of articles in the Royal Society of London’s Philosophical Transactions detailing a little-known Asian and Middle Eastern folk medicine practice of inoculation for smallpox. It appeared from eyewitness accounts that when a person acquired smallpox through inoculation, the resulting illness was less deadly than a natural case. In fact, inoculation, the eighteenth-century version of modern vaccination (there was no word for immunization or immunity in that era’s scientific lexicon), caused a case of genuine smallpox, but one considerably milder than smallpox contracted at random. Those who received inoculation were as resistant to subsequent smallpox outbreaks as those who had acquired it naturally, despite the attenuated nature of the induced illness.

The commonsense medical approach of this technique intrigued Mather, who, realizing the severity of the current smallpox epidemic, decided to recommend the immediate use of inoculation to Boston’s physicians. “The practice of conveying and suffering the Small-pox by Inoculation, has never been used in America,...

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Verlag
Scribner
Erscheinungsdatum
2012
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1416538410
ISBN 13 
9781416538417
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
368
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
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