Health and Healing in America

This week we have been deeply immersed in David Oshinsky‘s absorbing account of the polio epidemic in mid-20th century America and the political and scientific race for a viable vaccine. We’ll conclude our discussion of this book on Monday, November 1.

Oshkinsky’s big questions include:

Why and how did one vaccine come to dominate, when there were multiple pathways to polio vaccine and little consensus on which kind of vaccine might be best?
What was the interplay between science and politics in the development of the polio vaccine?
Was polio a raging epidemic deserving of such panic and resources, or was that fear fueled/created by a powerful & well-mobilized, well-connected organization?
What conditions in the 1930s-1950s nurtured polio’s growth?
What conditions in the 1930s-1950s nurtured the growth of polio research efforts?
How did the development of a vaccine change American culture?
What contributions did the race for polio make to the system of medical and scientific research in the US?

Also, remember to consider Oshinsky’s scholarly technique:

What sources is he using?
What’s his narrative strategy – i.e. HOW is he telling this story?
Why should we care about this story?

Meantime, you are continuing to research a disease of your choice in the past. On Wed 10/27 I handed out some additional guidelines clarifying what I mean when I say that you should go beyond “web resources” to find quality research sources.

On Wednesday, Nov 3, we will have our Poster Conference Session, held in the Admin Bldg, Room 101-B (ground floor conference room near the front entrance). I would like this to be a professional-quality event showcasing your very best efforts. There will be opportunity for discussion and peer review of your colleague’s research findings.

Diseases already chosen: tuberculosis, schizophrenia, diabetes, black lung, scarlet fever, leukemia, 1918 “Spanish flu,” Hodgkins disease, alcoholism, syphilis, bubonic plague, yellow fever, cataracts, malaria, tetanus, smallpox, cholera, bipolar disorder, whooping cough, neurasthenia, gout, typhoid fever, dropsy, measles

…which means 7 of you still need to choose!

Hey, who’s doing smallpox? This link’s for you.

Update 10/18 – Please note I added the Disease Project guidelines as a new page, see the tab above. Or you can download the guidelines as a PDF here.

On Monday 10/18, we will talk about medicine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – summing up what happened to health care over that previous century & bringing together our learning from the several recently-assigned articles in Leavitt’s reader. What institutions, new scientific findings, and new cultural practices characterized medicine and health care by 1900? Steele’s essay helps us synthesize that knowledge; his book (from which this chapter is excerpted) concerns medicine on the American frontier, far from those growing urban hospitals that provided the statistical basis for Duffy and Leavitt’s research.

Link of the day: Typhoid Mary’s story

Your Article Abstract is also due Monday (along with the article, if it’s not from the Leavitt reader).

For Wednesday 10/20, we’ll begin to hone in how that system was tested–and changed–in the early decades of the 20th century by looking closely at two epidemics in the 1910s: polio, which had a significant outbreak in 1916 (the Rogers article = Leavitt #35); and the devastating 1918 flu pandemic (via an online article from Popular Mechanics in 2007 – written in light of recent flu scares but prior to the H1N1/Mexican swine flu outbreak).

Note: although it seems like the Popular Mechanics article has 3 pages, all the text is on the first one! The other 2, for some reason, repeat part of the article but have additional images.

Links for Wed: Alaska – Survivors – Rose Worth

On Monday 10/4, we discussed two scholarly articles on changing medical therapeutics and how the American medical system matured – which served as a workshop on becoming a more critical and discerning reader of scholarly articles. We also talked about how to find articles about the history of medicine and health care in the university’s e-Journal resources and using the (free) JSTOR database from the Boston Public Library’s electronic resources.

Our reading for Wednesday 10/6 is essays #19 and #20 in the Leavitt reader, and the pictorial essay found on pp. 295-305. We are talking along two parallel tracks –

• The content, i.e. what visual and source record we have for the institutions where people received medical care in the Victorian era, and how those institutions changed over time
• The scholarly work, i.e. HOW historians use visual and documentary evidence to convince us that their interpretation of the past is correct

Remember to keep in mind the suggestions and guideposts for being a “predatory reader” of scholarly material. Prepare thoughtful discussion questions for class – perhaps at least one for each “track” of our discussion = a question or two about the content of the article(s) AND a question or two about how these scholars approached the problem under consideration, their methods or sources, or how successful/persuasive the essays are.

Also, I posted the PDF of the Article Abstract assignment under the “Assignments and Due Dates” tab – click here to download a copy if you need it.