Train Wrecks to Typhoid Fever

The Development of Railroad Medicine Organizations, 1850 to World War I

Bibliographic Data

ID15024166
AuthorsMark Aldrich (corresponding author)
Year2001
Volume75
Issue2
Pages254-289
Publication date2001-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueBulletin of the history of medicine (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0007-5140 • E-ISSN: 1086-3176
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/bhm.2001.0053
PMID11423683
OpenAlexW2087053781
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited12

From their beginning American railroads developed medical arrangements to care for the large number of workers and passengers they killed or injured. After the Civil War, both labor unrest and liability concerns led them to expand and formalize these arrangements, and three forms of organization arose. Western roads, facing an almost complete lack of medical facilities, developed employee-funded hospital organizations. In the east, companies created medical organizations under a salaried chief surgeon and contracted with local physicians to provide care. A third model, pioneered by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in the 1880s, devised a beneficial society that provided medical care and compensation for injured workers. Although these organizations involved both contract practice and group hospitalization, the AMA seems to have ignored them. In the 1880s railroad physicians developed their own organizations, including the National Association of Railway Surgeons, in which they discussed problems of professionalization and such medical matters as "railway spine." Concern with costs and labor turnover also led the carriers into preventive medicine. Some roads provided smallpox and typhoid vaccinations, campaigned against malaria, improved passenger-car sanitation, required physical examinations of their employees, and trained them in first aid. By World War I, railroad medical organizations provided care to nearly two million employees and employment to about 10 percent of all physicians

Business · Economic growth · Economics · Liability · Malaria · Political science · Politics · Professionalization · Sanitation · Typhoid fever · Unrest · Law · Medical History and Innovations · Medicine

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