Medicine/Behavioral Science

This exhibit, "From Quackery to Bacteriology: The Emergence of Modern Medicine in 19th Century America," traces the development of medicine through printed works: from heroic medicine at the beginning of the century to quackery movements, the experience of the Civil War, and ending with improvements in medical education and the formulation of the germ theory at century's end. Other topics covered in the exhibit include women's health, mental health, public health, and preventative medicine as advocated through physical fitness and nutrition.

Pellagra was first identified among Spanish peasants by Don Gaspar Casal in 1735. A loathsome skin disease, it was called mal de la rosa and often mistaken for leprosy. Although it was not conclusively identified in the United States until 1907, there are reports of illness that could be pellagra as far back as the 1820s. In the United States, pellagra has often been called the disease of the four D's -- dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia, and death. National data is sketchy, but by 1912, the state of South Carolina alone reported 30,000 cases and a mortality rate of 40 percent. While hardly confined to Southern states, the disease seemed especially rampant there. A worried Congress asked the Surgeon General to investigate the disease. In 1914, Joseph Goldberger was asked to head that investigation.

Increasingly, over the past three centuries, we have come to rely upon statistical reasoning as a powerful, impartial and accurate means of understanding the social world.

However, while statistics have been used to identify and formulate effective means of addressing a range of social problems, we have used statistics in very human ways.

In this module, you will encounter a range of materials and associated learning tasks illustrating how statistical reasoning came to be applied to human affairs by six prominent European social scientists between, roughly, 1860 and 1914.

  In May 1948 Sister Elizabeth Kenny went to Washington, D.C. for the first time. Kenny, an Australian nurse who had developed a new and controversial method of polio therapy, had been invited to appear as a witness before a Congressional committee investigating scientific research policy. Kenny praised a proposed National Medical Research Foundation to fund research into cancer, polio and degenerative diseases which would be directed by an advisory committee made up of physicians and lay people. And she thoroughly enjoyed her opportunity to challenge officials of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (or March of Dimes) who were lobbying against the inclusion of polio in any such agency.

Henry Solomon Wellcome was born half a world away from the Sudan in the American Midwest in 1853. His personal qualities and attitudes to life have been shaped in his early years. The Wellcome family was deeply religious , his father and two uncles were ministers of the Adventist sect. When Henry was eight, his family moved to Garden City, Minnesota where his other uncle, Jacob Wellcome was in medical practice.
In the 1860ies the Midwest was still frontier country. Shortly after the family settled in Garden City there was an Indian uprising in the area. Over 2000 settlers were killed and the towns were transformed to small fortresses defended by volunteers and troops. The young Henry helped his uncle in caring for the wounded and he was also appointed captain to a group of children casting rifle bullets for the settlers. The uprising ended in an Indian defeat and the public hanging of 38 Sioux Indian chiefs. This event created in Wellcome a life-long awareness of the suffering of the dispossessed peoples in whom he saw the suffering of mankind. Later in his life, for many years he supported missionary work among a group of American Indians.

"Highlights of Nursing in Virginia" was originally compiled by Mabel E. Montgomery, RN, Katherine R. Gary, RN and Marie Schmidt, RN members of the Special Anniversary Observances Committee of the Virginia Nurses' Association and published in 1975. Under the guidance of Evelyn C. Bacon, Chair of the VNA History Committee, revisions were begun to the "Highlights" in the 1990s. This edition was completed by the Joint History Committee of the Virginia Nurses' Association and the Virginia League of Nursing, under the leadership of Corinne F. Dorsey in November of 2000.

an on-line book by Bob Arnebeck with companion essays and primary documents

Plus
A Short History of Yellow Fever in the US
And, my thoughts on Fever 1793 Laurie Halse Anderson's, novel for young readers,

It is offered here as an historical and cultural appreciation of nursing somewhat after the Nightingale era of reform (approximately forty years after the Crimean War, during a prosperous phase of an ongoing Industrial Revolution with its attendant urbanization, rise of the middle class, smug self-, class-, and national-consciousness), but distinctly before the development of more modern attitudes regarding Woman's "Place" and Woman's Work, and the more fulsome professionalisation and empowerment of Nursing. The views expressed herein are in my opinion are transitional and as generally supportive of nursing as it was probably possible to be in its own era, however amusing or outrageous we might personally find some of the quaint and dated comments to be. We can be pleased, but I hope also inspired, by realisation of how far we have come as we try to continue our progress, or but maintain it in this era of "restructuring." We should spare some kindly and proud thoughts also at how nurses in the pre-modern era had themselves come so far from the truly hideous conditions of a past still within memory when this was written.