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Author: Visit Amazon's David Dary Page
ISBN : 0307263452
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From Publishers Weekly
Scurvy, contaminated water and challenging environments were among the medical problems faced by frontier settlers, who resorted to the rough-and-ready treatments of herbal and traditional medicines, quack concoctions and whatever worked. This is the story prolific western writer Dary (
The Oregon Trail) provides in a deeply researched, anecdotal history. Fourteen chapters range from Indian Medicine and In Western Towns to Quacks and Midwives and Women Doctors. A skilled storyteller, Dary fills each chapter with tales of doctors (not always well trained) and patients, colorful events, important discoveries and a seemingly endless pharmacopeia of herbal recipes and drugs, beliefs and often gruesome medical procedures. Dary agrees with today's experts that doctors in that era who practiced heroic medicine—bleeding, purging, administering emetics and toxic metals such as mercury and arsenic—did more harm than good. Fortunately, even quacks were too expensive for most settlers, who preferred home remedies. Dary argues that traditional Native American treatments were less harmful and probably more effective. Readers looking for a more insightful history of medicine should choose one by Roy Porter, but this collection of stories of frontier healers will satisfy many readers. 81 illus.
(Nov. 10)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Author of the excellent western histories The Santa Fe Trail (2000) and The Oregon Trail (2004), Dary here eclectically surveys the treatment of health in the days of explorers and settlers. Dary investigates how Indians remedied the injuries and ailments of life, citing forms as varied as handbooks imparting native knowledge of medicinal herbs, roots, and barks and the appropriation of tribal names to hawk medicine-show palliatives such as Cherokee Liniment. Proceeding chronologically as the line of settlement advanced, Dary introduces surgeons who accompanied expeditions of discovery and doctors whose presence lent instant status to rough new towns and summarizes their careers and any nonmedical distinctions (one composed the song “Home on the Range”). The book also covers medicine in the Civil War, pioneering female doctors and dentists, the work of midwives, and frauds such as Dr. John Brinkley (the subject of Pope Brock’s Charlatan! 2008). A wealth of historical discovery for readers drawn to the prescientific, preregulation era of American medical practice. --Gilbert Taylor
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Download latest books on mediafire and other links compilation Free Download Frontier Medicine: From the Atlantic to the Pacific, 1492-1941 Hardcover – Deckle Edge
- Hardcover: 400 pages
- Publisher: Knopf (November 4, 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0307263452
- ISBN-13: 978-0307263452
- Product Dimensions: 1.3 x 6.6 x 9.4 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
Free Download Frontier Medicine: From the Atlantic to the Pacific, 1492-1941 – Deckle Edge
"Frontier Medicine: from the Atlantic to the Pacific, 1492-1941" is a book which covers a much neglected part of the history of "the American West." It gives us a fascinating look at the earliest arrivals of Europeans to the shores of what later became the United States of America, and how the (often crude) medical skills of these pioneers, sometimes supplemented by herbal knowledge of the Indians, were used to treat injured or sick people.
Reading this history about frontier medicine one wonders, not just at the almost total lack in that era of any medical knowledge about diseases and how to cure them and/or the way the human body works, but that so many people still managed to survive their treatments, often more deadly than the sicknesses they were suffering from.
Especially to modern eyes, one shivers to think being visited by such a "medical professional" at ones sickbed, and being "treated" by bleeding, purging either by emetic or by enema, blistering, and/or medicines (those last often with ingredients that we would consider poison today) to get the "humors" of the human body back in its proper balance. Or, for that matter, being wounded in battle because almost inevitably the wound would become infected (sanitation was almost unheard off) and the only "remedy" was amputation of that body-part - which most didn't survive.
Anyway, in "Frontier Medicine" we get an excellent overview of the very different groups of people who "came west". We start out with the Spanish, who arrived first in the Americas and who were later followed by the English and the French. The European medical knowledge of that time is covered, and how this was implemented by the pioneers and sometimes improved on by things learned from interactions with the Indians.
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