First published in 1960, Richard Harrison Shryock's Medicine and Society in America: 1660-1860 remains a sweeping and informative introduction to the practice of medicine, the education of physicians, the understanding of health and disease, and the professionalization of medicine in the Colonial Era and the period of the Early Republic. Shryock details such developments as the founding of the first medical school in America (at the College of Philadelphia in 1765); the introduction of inoculation against smallpox in Boston in 1721; the creation of the Marine Hospital Service in 1799, under which all merchant marines were required to take out health insurance; and the state of medical knowledge on the eve of the Civil War.

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

These 12 essays reflect Dr. Bell's interests not only as a distinguished scholar of Benjamin Franklin & of the cultural & scientific life of early Amer., but also as Librarian & Exec. Officer of the APS. Contents: Remarks by Jonathan Rhoads; Biographical Sketch of Dr. Bell, with Selected Biblio.; Benjamin Franklin,"The Old England Man" by Esmond Wright; Frustration & Benjamin Franklin's Medical Books, by Edwin Wolf 2nd; William Byrd Reports on His Mission to the Cherokee in 1758, by W. W. Abbot; The Men of '68: Graduates of Amer's. First Medical School, by Randolph Klein; The Search for the State House Yard Observatory, by Silvio Bedini; Benjamin Henry Latrobe, "Learned Engineer," The APS, & the Promotion of Useful Knowledge & Works, 1798-1809, by Edward Carter II; The Phila. Soc. For Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, 1787-1829, by Marvin Wolfgang; Cotton Textiles & Industrialism, by Thomas Cochran; The Amer. Industrial Revolution Through its Survivals, by Brooke Hindle; A Catalog of Books Belonging to Benjamin Smith Barton, by Joseph Swan; Foreign Membership of Biological Scientists in the APS During the 18th & 19th Cent., by Bentley Glass; & Louis Agassiz as an Early Embryologist in Amer., by Jane Oppenheimer. Illus.

Students of the history of medicine and of American history in general will welcome this collection of thirty papers originally published in nineteenth-century medical journals and lay publications. Each highlights a specific problem or medical attitude of the period, and together they present an illuminating panorama of the medical profession and of public health in nineteenth-century America. Many of the problems faced by students, practitioners, and patients of the last century are surprisingly similar to those still being encountered today. Dr. Brieger has selected papers that illustrate the issues and developments in medical education, medical practice, surgery, hospitals, hygiene, and psychiatry. They range from Benjamin Rush's "On the Cause of Death in Diseases That Are Not Incurable," to a paper by Robert F. Weir "On the Antiseptic Treatment of Wounds, and Its Results" and an article by Stephen Smith, "New York the Unclean." The final selection, the Announcement of The Johns Hopkins Medical School, stands as a landmark that foretells the beginning of a new era.

Law and Medicine in Revolutionary America: Dissecting the Rush v. Cobbett Trial, 1799 offers the first deep analysis of the most important libel trial in post-revolutionary America and an approach to understanding a much-studied revolutionary figure, Benjamin Rush, in a new light as a legal subject. This libel trial faced off the new nation's most prestigious physician-patriot, Benjamin Rush, against its most popular journalist, William Cobbett, the editor of Porcupine's Gazette. Studied by means of a rare and substantial surviving transcript, the trial features six litigating counsel whose narrative of events and roles provides a unique view of how the revolutionary generation saw itself and the legacy it wished to leave to its progeny. The trial is structured by assaults against medical bleeding and its premier practitioner in yellow fever epidemics of the 1790s in Philadelphia, on the one hand, and castigates the licentiousness of the press in the nation's then-capital city, on the other. As it does so, it exemplifies the much-derided litigiousness of the new nation and the threat of sedition that characterized the development of political parties and the partisan press in late eighteenth-century America.

Divided Legacy (Vols. I-IV) is a history of Western medical philosophy from the time of Hippocrates to the twentieth century, treating it as a unified system of thought rather than a series of fortuitous discovers. Dr. Coulter interprets the development of medical ideas as the product of a conflict between two opposed systems of thought, Empiricism and Rationalism. This third volume of Divided Legacy continues the account of the conflict between the Empirical and the Rationalist approaches to therapeutics but introduces a socio-economic dimension which had earlier been lacking. In the early nineteenth century, Samuel Hahnemann’s formulation of the Empirical therapeutic doctrine, which he called homeopathy. It flourished especially in the United States. This volume traces the history of the rise and decline of this formulation of Empirical therapeutics in the nineteenth century United States. It analyzes the interaction between the homeopathic doctrines and those of the orthodox school and attempts to illustrate the influence of socio-economic constraints on the movement of medical thought during this period.