Medical Advances
For readable surveys of American medical history in the
19th and early 20th centuries, see:
Cassedy, James H. Medicine in America: A Short
History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1991.
Howell, Joel D. Technology in the Hospital: Transforming
Patient Care in the Early Twentieth Century. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Leavitt, Judith W., and Ronald L. Numbers, eds. Sickness
and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine
and Public Health. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1997.
McGrew, Roderick E. Encyclopedia of Medical History.
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985.
Rosenberg, Charles E. The Care of Strangers: The
Rise of America's Hospital System. New York: Basic
Books, 1987.
Starr, Paul. The Social Transformation of American
Medicine. New York: Basic Books, 1982.
Warner, John Harley, and Janet A. Tighe, eds., Major
Problems in the History of American Medicine and Public
Health: Documents and Essays (Houghton Mifflin,
2001).
These books provide more detail on the introduction
of ether and on Hinckley’s famous painting of
“Ether Day”:
Fenster, Julie M. Ether Day: The Strange Tale of
America's Greatest Medical Discovery and the Haunted
Men Who Made It. HarperCollins Publishers, 2001
Pernick, Martin S. A Calculus of Suffering: Pain,
Professionalism, and Anesthesia in Nineteenth-Century
America. Columbia University Press, 1985.
Wolfe, Richard J. Robert C. Hinckley and the Recreation
of the First Operation under Ether. Boston: Boston
Medical Library in the Frances A. Countway Library of
Medicine, 1993.
Bert Hansen, who wrote the essay you’ve just
read in History Now, has written two articles
you’ll be interested in if you have access to
the journals where they appeared:
"America's First Medical Breakthrough: How Popular
Excitement about a French Rabies Cure in 1885 Raised
New Expectations of Medical Progress," American
Historical Review 103(1998) 373-418.
"New Images of a New Medicine: Visual Evidence
for Widespread Popularity of Therapeutic Discoveries
in America after 1885," Bulletin of the History
of Medicine 73(1999): 629-678.
For Pasteur, a good introduction for yourself and your
students is this volume reprinted for the Oxford Portraits
in Science series:
Robbins, Louise E. Louis Pasteur and the Hidden
World of Microbes. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2001.
Internet materials for the history of medicine are
far scarcer than those for the history of politics or
government or labor unions. And they are especially
scarce for the 19th century. For a basic refresher course
in some of the common 19th century diseases discussed
in Dr. Hansen’s essay, Wikipedia’s entries
on “rabies,” “hydrophobia,”
“diphtheria” are a good starting point:
http://www.wikipedia.org/
For more sophisticated materials, there are several
websites that are still making substantial additions
to their offerings. Keep an eye on all of these:
The website of the Countway Library of Medicine at
Harvard University, especially its Center for the History
of Medicine, with its Exhibit Program and Online Gallery:
http://www.countway.med.harvard.edu/rarebooks/exhibits.shtml
The Countway’s Archives and Management section
posts an "image of the month" that provides
a lively variety of verbal and nonverbal documents of
medical history:
http://countway.med.harvard.edu/archives/iotm/index.shtml
including this photo of an early ether inhaler:
http://countway.med.harvard.edu/archives/iotm/iotm_2000-08.shtml
The website of the Institut Pasteur in Paris is available
in English as well as in French. Use the “Institut
Pasteur” tab to get to historical materials.
http://www.pasteur.fr/english.html
The Massachusetts General Hospital produced a useful
website in conjunction with the 150th anniversary of
the first use of ether as an anesthetic. At: "‘We
have conquered pain.’ A Celebration of Ether 1846-1996,”
you’ll find sections on the ether dome, the Hinckley
painting, a brief account of surgery before anesthesia,
and much more:
http://neurosurgery.mgh.harvard.edu/History/ether1.htm
New York University’s “Literature, Arts,
& Medicine Database” is an annotated multimedia
listing of prose, poetry, film, video and art that was
developed to be a dynamic, accessible, comprehensive
resource for teaching and research in medical humanities.
Keep an eye on this website as more materials are added,
and for now, be sure to look at the segment on Hinckley’s
painting of the 1846 surgery:
http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/Annotation?action=view&annid=10331
For wonderful raw materials, go to the United States
National Library of Medicine “Images from the
History of Medicine” database. It provides an
easily searchable collection of tens of thousands of
images from the Library’s collections -- portraits,
pictures of institutions, caricatures, genre scenes,
and graphic art in a variety of media, illustrating
the social and historical aspects of medicine.
http://wwwihm.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/gw_44_3/
chameleon?skin=nlm&lng=en
And don't miss the National Museum of Civil War Medicine,
which has a page of useful links about medical advances
made during the Civil War:
http://www.civilwarmed.org/links.cfm
So far, the National Library’s lesson plans for
K-12 are limited to a few dealing with physical health
and careers in medicine. Keep checking this site to
see if they ever expand their horizons to the history
of medicine:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine/
resources/lesson_k_2.html
The Discovery Channel’s “Medicine”
section for teachers holds promise, too. Not a great
deal there right now, but stay tuned to this channel’s
website:
http://education.discovery.com/teacherFeature/
050806medicine/feature.cfm
