Exploring American Healthcare Through 50 Historic Treasures
Healthcare history is more than leeches and drilling holes in skulls. It is stories of scientific failures and triumphs.
Exploring American Healthcare 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. In this book, museum artifacts are windows into both famous and ordinary people's experiences with healthcare throughout American history, from patent medicines and faith healing to laboratory science.
With 50 vignette-like chapters and 50 color photographs, Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures showcases little-known objects that illustrate the complexities of our relationship with health, such as a bottle from the short period when the Schlitz beer company sold lager that was supposed to be high in vitamin D during the first vitamin craze. It also highlights famous moments in medicine, such as the discovery of penicillin, as illustrated by a mold-culturing pan. Each artifact tells some piece of the story of how its creators or users approached fundamental questions in health. Some of these questions are, "What causes sickness, and what causes health?" and "How much can everyone master the principles of health, and how much do laypeople need to rely on outside authorities?"
Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures 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. The book discusses social and cultural influences that have shaped healthcare, providing insight relevant to today's problems and colorful anecdotes along the way.
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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
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
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"
