Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures

Tegan Kehoe

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Year: 2022
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781538135471
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Museum Administration

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.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Timeline of Objects
• Introduction
• 1 Unwashed Groins and Child Labor: Cancer in the Early Industrial Age
• 2 George Washington’s Toothbrush
• 3 The Age of the Vaccine
• 4 No Wrong Way to Eat
• 5 A Pioneering Operation
• 6 Healing by a Higher Power
• 7 Morton’s Ether Inhaler and the Advent of Anesthesia
• 8 Bitters and Irregulars: Alternative Healing in the Nineteenth Century
• 9 Blood Shed after the Battle: Bleeding Cups
• 10 Under the Surgeon’s Tent: The Physician in the Civil War
• 11 “Inflammatory Mischief” Meets Antiseptic Techniques
• 12 Answering the Milk Question
• 13 Skull Shape and Scientific Racism
• 14 “Health and Comfort of Body, with Grace and Beauty of Form”
• 15 East Meets West in the Medicine Cabinet: A Chinese Doctor in America
• 16 The “Cure” That Wasn’t
• 17 Cocaine the Medicine and the Drug
• 18 Don Pedrito, a Legendary Healer
• 19 A Wooden Leg in a Mechanized World
• 20 A Community Doctor’s Legacy
• 21 Carville, the “Louisiana Leper Home”
• 22 The Professional Nurse Only
• 23 The Pandemic of the Century: The 1918 Flu
• 24 The Bubonic Plague Meets Bacteriology
• 25 Safe, Simple, Sure? The Power of X-Rays
• 26 “Are You Playing the Health Game?”
• 27 The Problem with “Good” Genes
• 28 Machinery and Machinations
• 29 Diabetes: A Fatal Disease Becomes Chronic
• 30 The Tools of a Contested Trade: A Midwife’s Kit
• 31 Sipping on the Sunshine Vitamin
• 32 Preemie Care beyond the World’s Fair
• 33 The Penicillin Revolution
• 34 Blood Transfusion Comes of Age
• 35 Insuring and Ensuring Health
• 36 Nursing at War
• 37 The Science and Politics of Inhaling Dust
• 38 Health Uplifted, Health Upended
• 39 DDT: The Double-Edged Sword
• 40 The Iron Lung and the Polio Epidemics
• 41 Two Eras of Change in Pharmacy
• 42 More Than a Metaphor: The Straitjacket
• 43 Changing Ways of Looking at the Gut
• 44 The Pill’s New Era of Choice (For Some)
• 45 Smoking under Scrutiny
• 46 Ed Roberts and the Independent Living Movement
• 47 Bypassing the Heart
• 48 False Hopelessness or False Hope: The Early Years of AIDS
• 49 September 11 and Emergency Response
• 50 Saving Lives amid the Opioid Crisis
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Author