With a few notable exceptions, historians have tended to ignore the role that science and medicine played in the antebellum South. The fourteen essays in Science and Medicine in the Old South help to redress that neglect by considering scientific and medical developments in the early nineteenth-century South and by showing the ways in which the South’s scientific and medical activities differed from those of other regions. The book is divided into two sections. The essays in the first section examine the broad background of science in the South between 1830 and 1860; the second section addresses medicine specifically. The essays frequently counterpoint each other. In the first section, Ronald Numbers and Janet Numbers argue that he South’s failure to “keep pace” with the North in scientific areas resulted from demographic factors. William Scarborough asserts that slavery produced a social structure that encouraged agricultural and political careers rather than scientific and industrial ones. Charles Dew offers a strong indictment of slavery, suggesting that the conservative influence of the institution severely discouraged the adoption of modern technologies. Other essays examine institutions of higher learning in the South, southern scientific societies, and the relationship between science and theology. The section on medicine in the Old South also examines the ways in which the medical needs and practices of the Old South were both similar to and distinct from those of other regions. K. David Patterson argues that slavery in effect imported African diseases into the Southeast and created a “modified West African disease environment.” James H. Cassedy points out that land-management policies determined by slavery—land clearing, soil exhaustion—also helped created a distinctive disease environment. Other contributors discuss southern public health problems, domestic medicine, slave folk beliefs, and the special medical needs of blacks. Science and Medicine in the Old South is a long-overdue examination of these segments of the southern cultural milieu. These essays will do much to clarify misconceptions about the time and the region; moreover, they suggest directions for future research.

In The Scientific Intellectual, Lewis S. Feuer traces the evolution of this new human type, seeking to define what ethic inspired him and the underlying emotions that created him. Under the influence of Max Weber the rise of the scientific spirit has been viewed by sociologists as an offspring of the Protestant revolution, with its asceticism and sense of guilt acting as causative agents in the rise of capitalism and the growth of the scientific movement. Feuer takes strong issue with this view, pointing out how it is at odds with what we know of the psychological conditions of modern societies making for human curiosity and its expression in the observation of and experiment with nature.

In the decades before the Civil War, Charleston, South Carolina, enjoyed recognition as the center of scientific activity in the South. By 1850, only three other cities in the United States--Philadelphia, Boston, and New York--exceeded Charleston in natural history studies, and the city boasted an excellent museum of natural history. Examining the scientific activities and contributions of John Bachman, Edmund Ravenel, John Edwards Holbrook, Lewis R. Gibbes, Francis S. Holmes, and John McCrady, Lester Stephens uncovers the important achievements of Charleston's circle of naturalists in a region that has conventionally been dismissed as largely devoid of scientific interests. Stephens devotes particular attention to the special problems faced by the Charleston naturalists and to the ways in which their religious and racial beliefs interacted with and shaped their scientific pursuits. In the end, he shows, cultural commitments proved stronger than scientific principles. When the South seceded from the Union in 1861, the members of the Charleston circle placed regional patriotism above science and union and supported the Confederate cause. The ensuing war had a devastating impact on the Charleston naturalists--and on science in the South. The Charleston circle never fully recovered from the blow, and a century would elapse before the South took an equal role in the pursuit of mainstream scientific research.

Offering a new perspective on medical progress in the nineteenth century, Steven M. Stowe provides an in-depth study of the midcentury culture of everyday medicine in the South. Reading deeply in the personal letters, daybooks, diaries, bedside notes, and published writings of doctors, Stowe illuminates an entire world of sickness and remedy, suffering and hope, and the deep ties between medicine and regional culture. In a distinct American region where climate, race and slavery, and assumptions about "southernness" profoundly shaped illness and healing in the lives of ordinary people, Stowe argues that southern doctors inhabited a world of skills, medicines, and ideas about sickness that allowed them to play moral, as well as practical, roles in their communities. Looking closely at medical education, bedside encounters, and medicine's larger social aims, he describes a "country orthodoxy" of local, social medical practice that highly valued the "art" of medicine. While not modern in the sense of laboratory science a century later, this country orthodoxy was in its own way modern, Stowe argues, providing a style of caregiving deeply rooted in individual experience, moral values, and a consciousness of place and time.

This book is the trade edition of Volume VI of A History of The South, a ten-volume series designed to present a thoroughly balanced history of all the complex aspects of the South’s culture from 1607 to the present. Like its companion volumes, The Growth of Southern Nationalism is written by an outstanding student of Southern history. The growth of Southern nationalism was largely the product of relations of the South to other states and to the Federal government. Often what happened in the North and the reaction of Northern men to events determined Southern action and reaction. The sections were being drawn closer together and their interests more and more entwined. That was one of the great reasons for the increased friction and discord. The sectional quarrel developed largely around slavery—slavery as a thing in itself and then as a symbol of all differences and conflicts. The reduction of the struggle to the simple terms of Northern “rights” and Southern “rights” placed issues beyond the abilities of the democratic process and rendered the great masses in both sections helpless before the drift into war. The break could not have been avoided, according to Mr. Craven, unless either the North of the South had been willing to yield its position on an issue that involved matters of “right” or “rights.” Neither could do so because slavery and come to symbolize values in each of their social-economic structures for which men fight and die but which they do not give up or compromise.

Nine essays that provide detailed information about the early geological exploration of the southeastern United States Originally presented under the aegis of the Geological Society of America, these essays cover observations and studies made between 1796 and the 1850s. Each essay includes fascinating biographic sketches of the author, a bibliography, and an index.