Phinizy Spalding traces the development of Georgia's oldest medical school from the initial plans of a small group of physicians to the five school complex found in Augusta in the late 1980s. Charting a course filled with great achievement and near-fatal adversity, Spalding shows how the life of the college has been intimately bound to the local community, state politics, and the national medical establishment. When the Medical Academy of Georgia opened its doors in 1828 to a class of seven students, the total number of degreed physicians in the state was fewer than one hundred. Spalding traces the history of the Academy through its early robust growth in the antebellum years; its slowed progress during the Civil War; its decline and hardships during the early half of the twentieth century; and finally its resurgence and a new era of optimism starting in the 1950s.

For teaching purposes In 19th-century American medical schools, anatomy professors and students were forced to obtain cadavers in secret. In 1989, a cache of some 9800 dissected and amputated human bones--the majority African American--was found in the basement of the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta. This book reveals a startling legacy of postmortem racism. 29 illustrations.

The accomplishments of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as “medical superbodies” highly suited for medical experimentation. In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white “ladies.” Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities. Medical Bondage moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. It also retells the story of black enslaved women and of Irish immigrant women from the perspective of these exploited groups and thus restores for us a picture of their lives.

In 1846 William Thomas Green Morton (1819-1868) performed the first publicly-witnessed surgery to use ether as an anesthetic when he removed a neck tumor from a patient at Massacusetts General Hospital. News of the dramatic event quickly spread and Morton was erroneously credited with discovering the procedure. Few people at the time knew that Crawford W. Long (1815-1878), a physician from Danielsville, Georgia, was the true pioneer of this important medical advancement. In 1950 Frank Kells Boland published The First Anesthetic, tracing the history of Long's first discoveries and uses of anesthesia and calling for wider recognition of his achievements.

A history of Georgia's oldest medical school (1828).

Extensvely researched fictionalized account of Grandison Harris' procurement of cadavers for the Medical College of Georgia.