In this intriguing narrative, David Dary charts how American medicine has evolved since 1492, when New World settlers first began combining European remedies with the traditional practices of the native populations. It’s a story filled with colorful characters, from quacks and con artists to heroic healers and ingenious medicine men, and Dary tells it with an engaging style and an eye for the telling detail. Dary also charts the evolution of American medicine from these trial-and-error roots to its contemporary high-tech, high-cost pharmaceutical and medical industry. Packed with fascinating facts about our medical past, Frontier Medicine is an engaging and illuminating history of how our modern medical system came into being.

Powder papers, booty balls, and sugar tits— Lotions, Potions, and Deadly Elixirs has a cure for whatever ails! These quaint names were given to popular medicinal forms during America's frontier era that were said to cure everything from fallen arches to a broken windmill. Grandmas, mommas, and even certified physicians treated the sick, lame, and unlucky with what was available: barbed wire and horseshoe nails, cactus, pokeweed, buckeyes, you name it. Ironically, a lot of these homespun treatments actually worked. In Lotions, Potions, and Deadly Elixirs, a practicing pharmacist takes a light-hearted look at the most popular medicines from the frontier days and how they were intended to work. An authoritative "Frontier Materia Medica" lists common drugs, the dates they were in use, customary doses, and idiosyncrasies. The author's outstanding collection of bottle labels, advertising art, and rare photographs of "medicine shows" rounds out this colorful survey of America's medicinal past.

From a headless burial to cocaine toothache drops, the true stories hidden in the Wild West's medical records are a match for its tallest tales. In the 19th century, when dying young was a fact of life, a routine bout of diarrhea could be fatal. No one had heard of viruses or bacteria, but they killed more soldiers on the frontier than hostile raiding parties. Physicians dispensed whiskey for TB, mercury for VD and arsenic for indigestion. Baseball injuries were considered to be in the line of duty and twice resulted in amputations at Fort Davis. Donna Gerstle Smith explains how an industrious laundress could earn more than a private, how a female army surgeon won the Medal of Honor and how a garrison illegally hung the local bartender.

In 1950, a diagnosis of cancer was all but a death sentence. Mortality rates only got worse, and as late as 1986, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine lamented: "We are losing the war against cancer." Cancer is one of humankind's oldest and most persistent enemies; it has been called the existential disease. But we are now entering a new, and more positive, phase in this long campaign. While cancer has not been cured -- and a cure may elude us for a long time yet -- there has been a revolution in our understanding of its nature. Years of brilliant science have revealed how this individualistic disease seizes control of the foundations of life -- our genes -- and produces guerrilla cells that can attack and elude treatments. Armed with those insights, scientists have been developing more effective weapons and producing better outcomes for patients. Paul A. Marks, MD, has been a leader in these efforts to finally control this devastating disease. Marks helped establish the strategy for the "war on cancer" in 1971 as a researcher and member of President Nixon's cancer panel. As the president and chief executive officer for nineteen years at the world's pre-eminent cancer hospital, the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, he was instrumental in ending the years of futility. He also developed better therapies that promise a new era of cancer containment. Some cancers, like childhood leukemia and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, that were once deadly conditions, are now survivable -- even curable. New steps in prevention and early diagnosis are giving patients even more hope. On the Cancer Frontier is Marks' account of the transformation in our understanding of cancer and why there is growing optimism in our ability to stop it.

Thisis an intimate look at the life of Andrew Taylor Still, the founder of osteopathic medicine. Still mistrusted the drugs that were routinely used during the nineteenth century, but his use of hands-on manipulation led to severe and very public criticism. After years of repeated success in treating patients, the validity of his methods was finally acknowledged.

Is there an innate healing system within the body, capable of facilitating the healing process? And if so, what is the mechanism that triggers this potential? Many scientists, philosophers, healers, and spiritually minded people have asked these very same questions, and Dr. Michael Wayne has begun to address the answers. Although billions of dollars fuel the modern healthcare system, people are not getting healthier-the contrary seems to be the case. Modern medicine does not have a good track record with chronic ailments because these are more complicated, diverse, and unpredictable, and do not fit in with modern medicine's more linear approach that requires patterns that follow set rules. For this reason our current form of medicine has problems with many illnesses, even those as commonplace as the common cold.