Waubonsee Community College

Health care in America, a history, John C. Burnham

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

illustrations

index present

non fiction

Health care in America

bibliography

879642536

John C. Burnham

a history

In Health Care in America, historian John C. Burnham describes changes over four centuries of medicine and public health in America. Beginning with seventeenth-century concerns over personal and neighborhood illnesses, Burnham concludes with the arrival of a new epoch in American medicine and health care at the turn of the twenty-first century. From the 1600s through the 1990s, Americans turned to a variety of healers, practices, and institutions in their efforts to prevent and survive epidemics of smallpox, yellow fever, cholera, influenza, polio, and AIDS. Health care workers in all periods attended births and deaths and cared for people who had injuries, disabilities, and chronic diseases. Drawing on primary sources, classic scholarship, and a vast body of recent literature in the history of medicine and public health, Burnham finds that traditional healing, care, and medicine dominated the United States until the late nineteenth century, when antiseptic/aseptic surgery and germ theory initiated an intellectual, social, and technical transformation. He divides the age of modern medicine into several eras: physiological medicine (1910s-1930s), antibiotics (1930s-1950s), technology (1950s-1960s), environmental medicine (1970s-1980s), and, beginning around 1990, genetic medicine. The cumulating developments in each era led to today's radically altered doctor-patient relationship and the insistent questions that swirl around the financial cost of health care. Burnham's sweeping narrative makes sense of medical practice, medical research, and human frailties and foibles, opening the door to a new understanding of our current concerns. - PublisherThis comprehensive history of medicine and public health in America covers changes and developments over four centuries, from the arrival of the first Europeans to the twenty-first century

Health and disease in a land new to Europeans -- Traditional treatment and traditional healers -- The beginnings of change in traditional health care -- Setting the stage for modern medicine and health : the 1850s to the 1880s -- The age of surgery and germ theory : 1880s to 1910s -- Physiological medicine, 1910s to 1930s -- Physicians, public health, and Progressivism -- The era of antibiotics, 1930s to 1950s -- The age of technological medicine, 1940s to 1960s -- Doctors, patients, medical institutions, and society in the age of technological medicine -- Medicine in the environmental era, 1960s to 1980s -- Environmental-era health care in a hostile social climate -- The era of genetic medicine : the late 1980s and after -- The recent past as a new epoch