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Homeopathy, as a medical system, presented a significant institutional and economic challenge to conventional medicine in the nineteenth century. Although contemporary critics portrayed homeopathic physicians as part of a sect whose treatment of disease was beyond the pale of acceptable medical practice, homeopathy was in many ways similar to established medicine. In this book, the author offers a new interpretation of women{19}s roles in both mainstream and alternative modern medicine. She strengthens and clarifies the history of homeopathic women physicians, and creates a framework of comparison to "regular," or orthodox, physicians. Linked to social reform movements in the nineteenth century, antimodernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and countercultural ideals of the 1960s and 1970s, women's advocacy of homeopathy has been intertwined with broad social and cultural issues in American society.
From grocery store to doctor's office, alternative medicine is everywhere. A recent survey found that more than two in five Americans uses some form of alternative medicine. The Politics of Healing brings together top scholars in the fields of American history, history of medicine, anthropology, sociology, and politics to counter the view that alternative medical therapies fell into disrepute in the decades after physicians established their institutional authority during the Progressive Era. From homeopathy to Navajo healing, this volume explores a variety of alternative therapies and political movements that have set the terms of debate over North American healing methods.
At a time when clinical care and biomedical research generate as much angst as they offer cures, this volume provides valuable insight into how the practice of medicine has evolved, where it is going, and how lessons from history can improve its prognosis.--Thomas S. Huddle, M.D., Ph.D. "Journal of the History of Medicine"
What do Mark Twain, David Beckham, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Mother Teresa have in common? All have been enthusiastic fans of homeopathy, the alternative medical tradition that treats “like with like.” Homeopathy has an incredible history of support by many of the most respected people of the past 200 years, and modern science is finally catching up. In The Homeopathic Revolution, Dana Ullman blends vivid personal stories and quotes from these and other luminaries from a variety of eras and fields with a new definition of homeopathy as “nanopharmacology”–one that will help people, including skeptics, start to understand its value. After explaining why conventional medicine is inade...
This book investigates how popular American literature and film transformed the poisonous woman from a misogynist figure used to exclude women and minorities from political power into a feminist hero used to justify the expansion of their public roles. Sara Crosby locates the origins of this metamorphosis in Uncle Tom’s Cabin where Harriet Beecher Stowe applied an alternative medical discourse to revise the poisonous Cassy into a doctor. The newly “medicalized” poisoner then served as a focal point for two competing narratives that envisioned the American nation as a multi-racial, egalitarian democracy or as a white and male supremacist ethno-state. Crosby tracks this battle from the heroic healers created by Stowe, Mary Webb, Oscar Micheaux, and Louisia May Alcott to the even more monstrous poisoners or “vampires” imagined by E. D. E. N. Southworth, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Theda Bara, Thomas Dixon, Jr., and D. W. Griffith.
In the late nineteenth century hundreds of clubs formed across the United States devoted to the reading of Shakespeare. From Pasadena, California, to the seaside town of Camden, Maine; from the isolated farm town of Ottumwa, Iowa, to Mobile, Alabama, on the Gulf coast, Americans were reading Shakespeare in astonishing numbers and in surprising places. Composed mainly of women, these clubs offered the opportunity for members not only to read and study Shakespeare but also to participate in public and civic activities outside the home. In She Hath Been Reading, Katherine West Scheil uncovers this hidden layer of intellectual activity that flourished in American society well into the twentieth ...
This book tells the surprising story of how complementary and alternative medicine, CAM, entered biomedical and evangelical Christian mainstreams despite its roots in non-Christian religions and the lack of scientific evidence of its efficacy and safety.
Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910) was the first woman awarded the MD degree in the United States. She opened up a small dispensary of her own in a slum district, and in 1859 the now greatly enlarged dispensary was incorporated as the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. By 1868, after consultation with Florence Nightingale, she was able to open up the Woman’s Medical College at the infirmary, which remained in operation for thirty-one years. During the American Civil War she performed valuable service by helping to organize the Woman’s Central Association of Relief, which selected and trained nurses for the war, and the U.S. Sanitary Commission. In 1869, Blackwell moved permanently t...
An entertaining introduction to the quacks, snake-oil salesmen, and charlatans, who often had a point Despite rampant scientific innovation in nineteenth-century America, traditional medicine still adhered to ancient healing methods, subjecting patients to bleeding, blistering, and induced vomiting and sweating. Facing such horrors, many patients ran with open arms to burgeoning practices that promised new ways to cure their ills. Hydropaths offered cures using “healing waters” and tight wet-sheet wraps. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby experimented with magnets and tried to replace “bad,” diseased thoughts with “good,” healthy thoughts, while Daniel David Palmer reportedly restored a ma...
How early British immigrants shaped Ohio? Because of their so similar linguistic, religious, and cultural backgrounds, the English, Scottish, and Welsh immigrants are often regarded as the invisible immigrants assimilating into early American society easily and quickly and often losing their ethnic identities. Yet, of all of Ohio's immigrants the British were the most influential in terms of shaping the state's politics and institutions. Also significant were their contributions of farming, mining, iron production, textiles, pottery, and engineering. Until British Buckeyes, historians have all but ignored and neglected these Industrious settlers. Author William E Van Vugt uses hundreds of biographies from county archives and histories, letters, Ohio and British census figures, and ship passenger lists to identify these immigrants; and draw a portrait of their occupations, settlement patterns, experiences and to underscore their role in Ohio history.