In the first half of this century, Henry Ernest Sigerist was widely regarded as the world's leading historian of medicine. A brilliant teacher and lecturer, Sigerist made medical history exciting and relevant for a whole generation of young physicians, medical students, historians, and the general public. A Marxist sympathizer and advocate of socialized medicine, he also had an enormous and controversial influence on the medical politics of his time. In Making Medical History historians Elizabeth Fee and Theodore M. Brown bring together individuals from various disciplines, many of whom knew Henry Sigerist, all of whom help to illuminate why, thirty-five years after his death, he continues to be revered by many public health professionals and medical historians. Sigerist came to the Johns Hopkins Institute of the History of Medicine in 1932, arriving from Leipzig to succeed William Henry Welch as director. During Sigerist's tenure at Hopkins, his many accomplishments included founding the leading scholarly journal in the field, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine; transforming the American Association for the History of Medicine into a professional organization; and recruiting and mentoring such luminaries as Owsei Temkin, Ludwig Edelstein, and Erwin Ackerknecht. Organized into three main sections--biographical, historiographical, and political--Making Medical History includes discussions of Sigerist's influence on the history of medicine, medical sociology, and health policy. Today, as the American health care system undergoes tremendous structural changes, Sigerist's work and vision are newly relevant, and his dramatically effective presentation of medical history willcome as a revelation to a new generation of readers. Contributors: Nora Sigerist Beeson, Marcel H. Bickel, Theodore M. Brown, Leslie A. Falk, Elizabeth Fee, John F. Hutchinson, Ingrid Kstner, Walter J. Lear, Michael R. McVaugh, Genevieve Miller, Milton I. Roemer, Owsei Temkin, Ilza Veith, and Heinrich von Staden.

"With diverse constitutions, a multiplicity of approaches, styles, and aims is both expected and desired. This volume locates medical history within itself and within larger historiographic trends, providing a springboard for discussions about what the history of medicine should be, and what aims it should serve."--Jacket

An eye-opening exploration of the medical origins of gender in modern US history. Today, a world without “gender” is hard to imagine. Gender is at the center of contentious political and social debates, shapes policy decisions, and informs our everyday lives. Its formulation, however, is lesser known: Gender was first used in clinical practice. This book tells the story of the invention of gender in American medicine, detailing how it was shaped by mid-twentieth-century American notions of culture, personality, and social engineering. Sandra Eder shows how the concept of gender transformed from a pragmatic tool in the sex assignment of children with intersex traits in the 1950s to an essential category in clinics for transgender individuals in the 1960s. Following gender outside the clinic, she reconstructs the variable ways feminists integrated gender into their theories and practices in the 1970s. The process by which ideas about gender became medicalized, enforced, and popularized was messy, and the route by which gender came to be understood and applied through the treatment of patients with intersex traits was fraught and contested. In historicizing the emergence of the sex/gender binary, Eder reveals the role of medical practice in developing a transformative idea and the interdependence between practice and wider social norms that inform the attitudes of physicians and researchers. She shows that ideas like gender can take on a life of their own and may be used to question the normative perceptions they were based on. Illuminating and deeply researched, the book closes a notable gap in the history of gender and will inspire current debates on the relationship between social norms and medical practice.

The definitive evidence-based introduction to patient history-taking NOW IN FULL COLOR For medical students and other health professions students, an accurate differential diagnosis starts with The Patient History. The ideal companion to major textbooks on the physical examination, this trusted guide is widely acclaimed for its skill-building, and evidence based approach to the medical history. Now in full color, The Patient History defines best practices for the patient interview, explaining how to effectively elicit information from the patient in order to generate an accurate differential diagnosis. The second edition features all-new chapters, case scenarios, and a wealth of diagnostic algorithms. Introductory chapters articulate the fundamental principles of medical interviewing. The book employs a rigorous evidenced-based approach, reviewing and highlighting relevant citations from the literature throughout each chapter. Features NEW! Case scenarios introduce each chapter and place history-taking principles in clinical context NEW! Self-assessment multiple choice Q&A conclude each chapter—an ideal review for students seeking to assess their retention of chapter material NEW! Full-color presentation Essential chapter on red eye, pruritus, and hair loss Symptom-based chapters covering 59 common symptoms and clinical presentations Diagnostic approach section after each chapter featuring color algorithms and several multiple-choice questions Hundreds of practical, high-yield questions to guide the history, ranging from basic queries to those appropriate for more experienced clinicians

Winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize in American History, this is a landmark history of how the entire American health care system of doctors, hospitals, health plans, and government programs has evolved over the last two centuries. "The definitive social history of the medical profession in America....A monumental achievement."—H. Jack Geiger, M.D., New York Times Book Review

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, we have become accustomed to medical breakthroughs and conditioned to assume that, regardless of illnesses, doctors almost certainly will be able to help—not just by diagnosing us and alleviating our pain, but by actually treating or even curing diseases, and significantly improving our lives. For most of human history, however, that was far from the case, as veteran medical historian Michael Bliss explains in The Making of Modern Medicine. Focusing on a few key moments in the transformation of medical care, Bliss reveals the way that new discoveries and new approaches led doctors and patients alike to discard fatalism and their traditional religious acceptance of suffering in favor of a new faith in health care and in the capacity of doctors to treat disease. He takes readers in his account to three turning points—a devastating smallpox outbreak in Montreal in 1885, the founding of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Medical School, and the discovery of insulin—and recounts the lives of three crucial figures—researcher Frederick Banting, surgeon Harvey Cushing, and physician William Osler—turning medical history into a fascinating story of dedication and discovery. Compact and compelling, this searching history vividly depicts and explains the emergence of modern medicine—and, in a provocative epilogue, outlines the paradoxes and confusions underlying our contemporary understanding of disease, death, and life itself.

This book goes back to the origins of the transformation of health and medicine into a business, during the first part of the twentieth century, focusing on the example of Japan. In the past hundred years, medicine has gone from being a charitable activity to a large economic sector, amounting to 12–15% of the GDP in many developed countries, and one of the fastest-growing businesses around the world. Despite the mounting presence of the medical industry, there is a lack of academic work detailing this major transformation. The objective of this book is to fill this gap and address the following question: how did medicine become a business? Using over ten years of research in the field, Pierre-Yves Donzé argues that economic factors and business factors were decisive in transforming the way that medicine enters our lives. This book will be of interest to historians of medicine, business historians, health economists, scholars in medical humanities, and more.