Product Description

In his new book, David Dary, one of our leading social historians, gives us a fascinating, informative account of American frontier medicine from our Indian past to the beginning of World War II, as the frontier moved steadily westward from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific Ocean.

He begins with the early arrivals to our shores and explains how their combined European-taught medical skills and the Indians’ well-developed knowledge of local herbal remedies and psychic healing formed the foundation of early American medicine.

We then follow white settlement west, learning how, in the 1720s, seventy-five years before Edward Jenner’s experiments with smallpox vaccine, a Boston doctor learned from an African slave how to vaccinate against the disease; how, in 1809, a backwoods Kentucky doctor performed the first successful abdominal surgery; how, around 1820, a Missouri doctor realized quinine could prevent as well as cure malaria and made a fortune from the resulting pills he invented.

Using diaries, journals, newspapers, letters, advertisements, medical records, and pharmacological writings, Dary gives us firsthand accounts of Indian cures; the ingenious self-healings of mountain men; home remedies settlers carried across the plains; an early “HMO” formed by Wyoming ranchers and cowboys to provide themselves with medical care; the indispensable role of country doctors and midwives; the fortunes made from patent medicines and quack cures; the contributions of army medicine; Chinese herbalists; the formation of the American Medical Association; the first black doctors; the first women doctors; and finally the early-twentieth-century shift to a formal scientific approach to medicine that by the postwar period had for the most part eliminated the trial-and-error practical methods that were at the center of frontier medicine.

A wonderful—often entertaining—overview of the complexity, energy, and inventiveness of the ways in which our forebears were doctored and how our medical system came into being.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #118026 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-04
• Released on: 2008-11-04
• Format: Deckle Edge
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780307263452
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Scurvy, contaminated water and challenging environments were among the medical problems faced by frontier settlers, who resorted to the rough-and-ready treatments of herbal and traditional medicines, quack concoctions and whatever worked. This is the story prolific western writer Dary (The Oregon Trail) provides in a deeply researched, anecdotal history. Fourteen chapters range from Indian Medicine and In Western Towns to Quacks and Midwives and Women Doctors. A skilled storyteller, Dary fills each chapter with tales of doctors (not always well trained) and patients, colorful events, important discoveries and a seemingly endless pharmacopeia of herbal recipes and drugs, beliefs and often gruesome medical procedures. Dary agrees with today's experts that doctors in that era who practiced heroic medicine—bleeding, purging, administering emetics and toxic metals such as mercury and arsenic—did more harm than good. Fortunately, even quacks were too expensive for most settlers, who preferred home remedies. Dary argues that traditional Native American treatments were less harmful and probably more effective. Readers looking for a more insightful history of medicine should choose one by Roy Porter, but this collection of stories of frontier healers will satisfy many readers. 81 illus. (Nov. 10)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Author of the excellent western histories The Santa Fe Trail (2000) and The Oregon Trail (2004), Dary here eclectically surveys the treatment of health in the days of explorers and settlers. Dary investigates how Indians remedied the injuries and ailments of life, citing forms as varied as handbooks imparting native knowledge of medicinal herbs, roots, and barks and the appropriation of tribal names to hawk medicine-show palliatives such as Cherokee Liniment. Proceeding chronologically as the line of settlement advanced, Dary introduces surgeons who accompanied expeditions of discovery and doctors whose presence lent instant status to rough new towns and summarizes their careers and any nonmedical distinctions (one composed the song “Home on the Range”). The book also covers medicine in the Civil War, pioneering female doctors and dentists, the work of midwives, and frauds such as Dr. John Brinkley (the subject of Pope Brock’s Charlatan! 2008). A wealth of historical discovery for readers drawn to the prescientific, preregulation era of American medical practice. --Gilbert Taylor

Review
“Bear attacks. Syphilis. Bullet wounds. Malaria. Scalpings. Cholera. Arrows shot into the skull. Scurvy. Rabies. Ax mishaps. Crushing by moving wagon on wheels. Outsize tumors. Snake bites. . . David Dary relates the story of Westward expansion while examining these misfortunes, and many others, from the point of view of men and women who tried to heal the often ruinously injured. The results are both a horror show and undeniably engrossing: “MASH” meets Edgar Allan Poe.
He knows his material cold, and his narrative accumulates authority and dignity as it rolls along. As he piles story upon story and anecdote upon anecdote, you’ll find yourself walking around the house reading horrific bits out loud to anyone who will listen, to the great distress of the squeamish.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Masterly . . . enthralling . . . [Dary] does an admirable job of pulling together stories about health care as practiced by the Native Americans, Lewis and Clark, Civil War doctors and even 20th-century quacks. Moving briskly from one episode to the next, Mr. Dary is particularly effective at showing us the strengths and foibles of early American doctors, an often suspect class of professionals who now and again did more harm than healing. It is entertaining, enlightening material.” —Ira Rutkow, The Wall Street Journal


From the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews

A look at medical care in the old west
"Frontier Medicine: from the Atlantic to the Pacific, 1492-1941" is a book which covers a much neglected part of the history of "the American West." It gives us a fascinating look at the earliest arrivals of Europeans to the shores of what later became the United States of America, and how the (often crude) medical skills of these pioneers, sometimes supplemented by herbal knowledge of the Indians, were used to treat injured or sick people.
Reading this history about frontier medicine one wonders, not just at the almost total lack in that era of any medical knowledge about diseases and how to cure them and/or the way the human body works, but that so many people still managed to survive their treatments, often more deadly than the sicknesses they were suffering from. Especially to modern eyes, one shivers to think being visited by such a "medical professional" at ones sickbed, and being "treated" by bleeding, purging either by emetic or by enema, blistering, and/or medicines (those last often with ingredients that we would consider poison today) to get the "humors" of the human body back in its proper balance. Or, for that matter, being wounded in battle because almost inevitably the wound would become infected (sanitation was almost unheard off) and the only "remedy" was amputation of that body-part - which most didn't survive.
Anyway, in "Frontier Medicine" we get an excellent overview of the very different groups of people who "came west". We start out with the Spanish, who arrived first in the Americas and who were later followed by the English and the French. The European medical knowledge of that time is covered, and how this was implemented by the pioneers and sometimes improved on by things learned from interactions with the Indians.
We learn how the fur traders and trappers, sometimes for weeks or months alone in a vast wilderness, treated themselves when they became injured. Sometimes showcasing their immense hardiness as in the case of Hugh Glass, who was mauled by a bear and left for dead by his fellow travelers when he went into a coma, but recovered and literally crawled his way to survival (having used maggots to eat out the infection out of the wound on his back). We get treated to the story of the immigrants on the Oregon Trail and how they treated those who became ill or injured during their travels to the Californian gold fields; how the soldiers who served at isolated outposts during the Indian Wars were taken care off; how on homesteads, ranches and in the early western towns the first doctors started practicing their medical profession and how they treated their patients (and how they were paid).
The Civil War is covered, and shows us the horrors of warfare and its impact on the swamped medical services of that time, which were overloaded with patients. We learn how soldiers who survived the shock of being wounded and only hours or even days later being taken to the army hospital, their wounds almost inevitably having become infected, had to suffer the amputations of their infected limbs with no anesthetics to speak off (except a drink of whisky to dull the pain as the medic sawed and hacked to cut off the limb).
We learn how midwives helped deliver babies in the colonial era and beyond, while more and more the medical profession worked to eliminate them by getting lawmakers in many states to require that anyone attending a woman in labor have formal medical training and be licensed (while females were denied medical training). And we are also told how the first women doctors started making their rounds; their struggle to become doctors immense, because they were often denied medical education and rejected at almost all the medical schools they applied to.
Strangely, the part after 1900 is only covered in just one chapter, the last one named: "Into the twentieth century". In this last chapter he mentions: "The evidence is strong that 1941 marked the end of medicine's frontier period in America". This is supposedly the reason this book covers the period of 1492-1941. Okay, that may be so, but then Dary all but neglects to give us the evidence on which this is based. A point could be made that ending this book around the 1900's would make more sense, because around the 1900's there was no more "frontier" to discover; Alaska, "the last American frontier" was purchased in 1867 and the Klondike Gold Rush took place in 1898, which was one of the last periods there was massive "immigration", although these were mainly people just after the gold, no settlers who decided to stick around as most of the '49-ers did during the California gold rush.
If for the sake of argument one extends the "frontier" period to 1941 like Dary does, then why is this not covered in much more detail? No mention is made of the Spanish-American war of 1898 in Cuba and the medical problems caused by treating injured and/or sick soldiers in an area know for its unhealthy climate and the many diseases. More soldiers were killed by diseases than by bullets or cannonballs. No mention is made of how, after the Spanish-American War, in 1900 major Walter Reed, M.D., headed the Yellow Fever Board which confirmed Cuban doctor Carlos Finley's theory that yellow fever is transmitted by mosquitoes.
And amazingly, for a book covering the period up to 1941, the First World War is not covered at all, which had a major impact on medical care to wounded and/or maimed soldiers (or those suffering from poison gas attacks) and neither is the great Influenza Epidemic of 1918/1919.
An argument could be made that he also should have covered the building of the Panama Canal, from the period the Americans took over. One of the major difficulties faced by the builders was that typhoid, dysentery, malaria, and yellow fever, among other diseases, often ravaged the workforce. It was not just the American mechanical and engineering technology that made it possible for it to finally be achieved, but most of all the amazing medical improvements (Dr. William Gorges!) that made it possible to continue building the Canal.
He makes note of some military medical personnel being awarded the Medal of Honor. Great that he pays attention for this; but then he makes the, for an historian, inexplicable mistake of calling it the Congressional Medal of Honor. This is not correct; it is called the Medal of Honor. Now, often the general public and lots of politicians call it mistakenly the "Congressional" Medal of Honor, but any serious student of American (military) history knows that this is incorrect, caused because of its award by the Department of Defense "in the name of Congress." As a historian, David Dary should not have made this mistake.
For the above mentioned reasons, I withdraw one star from this review; otherwise it is an excellent history on this much neglected part of America's frontier period that I recommend wholeheartedly to anyone interested in this subject.

Books about the history of medicine
Frontier Medicine: From the Atlantic to the Pacific, 1492-1941 This was a well written and researched book. Really fascinating to see how rudimentary early medicine was. Surprising the human race survived some of the barbaric practices. Interesting read!

early US medicine
Interesting for sure. Lots of information, but I was disappointed that some of the vignettes were not more thoroughly developed. The chapters about patent medicines were an eye opener! We have come a long way; maybe not as far as we think!