Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH OUR ARCHIVES!
Medical history
Of herbal medicine, a “doctor” named Samuel Thomson, and a sure cure for almost everything…
In the late 1820’s and 1830’s American physicians found themselves with a major rebellion on their hands.
It became apparent that this influenza was a first-rate killer.
In the last week of October, 1918, 2,700 Americans died “over there” in battle against the kaiser’s army. The same week 21,000 Americans died of influenza in the United States.
HOW A FARSIGHTED QUAKER MERCHANT AND FOUR GREAT DOCTORS BROUGHT FORTH, WITH MADDENING SLOWNESS, ONE OF THE FINEST MEDICAL CENTERS IN THE WORLD
In 1884, after he was offered an appointment to the medical faculty of the newly created Johns Hopkins University, Dr.
“ To spend and be spent for the Good of Mankind is what I chiefly aim at ”
One of Benjamin Rush’s biographers has compared him to quicksilver, the brilliant and elusive element mercury that changes so unpredictably yet so curiously reflects the images around it.
“Your body is a temple,” our ancestors told their pubescent youngsters. ‘Now go take a cold bath”
Standards of propriety were lofty indeed
Beset with ailments, Victorian women found solace, in more ways than one, in a new panacea—hydropathy
A century and a half ago American women faced a very different life prospect than today. Without dependable birth-control techniques they could expect to spend their prime years bearing children.
EQUIPMENT WAS HARD TO COME BY, RED TAPE WAS RAMPANT. BUT AMERICAN VOLUNTEERS IN FRANCE BUILT AN AMBULANCE CORPS THAT PERFORMED BRILLIANTLY IN THE EARLY YEARS OF WORLD WAR I
“Who knows?” Piatt Andrew wrote Isabella Stewart Gardner from shipboard on Christmas night of 1914, “we may spend the winter carting the groceries from Paris to Neuilly.” He had volunteered to drive an ambulance for the American Hospital in France, but beyond that his prospects
Attached to every city in America is at least one illustrious industrial name. In Detroit it is Ford. In Durham it is Duke.
Patent medicines were usually neither patented nor medicinal, which is not to say they didn’t (and don’t) have any effect
If you can identify the period when gentlemen wore genuine ormolu lobs attached to their watches and the butcher threw in a slice of liver for the eat when he wrapped up the meat order, then you are close to establishing the date of the Golden Age of Secret R
“Then how come they’re digging a grave behind the old corral, Luke?”
“Oh, Sam, what happened?”
“Nothing serious, Miss Sally—Luke just picked up a little bit of lead.”
“Oh no!”
Underschooled and ill-equipped, the men who attended the pioneers practiced a rugged brand of medicine—but they made some major advances all the same
At every step in the trek westward, America’s pioneers found an enemy more ubiquitous, more stealthy, and more deadly than the Indians, yet in our histories we tend to forget this dread opponent. It was, quite simply, disease.
Medicine was primitive and their knowledge of it limited, but in their hazardous journey to the Pacific, Lewis and Clark lost only one patient
Featured Authors
