John C. Burnham. Healthcare in America

One of the more positive recent trends in academia is the more regular presence of historians of medicine, science, and technology in faculty ranks at universities and colleges across the country. The result is that course offerings in the study of disease identity, medicine, and science are not nearly as unusual as they might have been twenty years ago. As a result, there is an important need for scholarship (monographs, articles, and textbooks) that helps synthesize the broad and complex history of American medicine. John Burnham's Health Care in America: A History will become an important contribution to this scholarship. Burnham is a well-published scholar in the medical history field and certainly has the background to produce what was surely a monumental task of bringing the rich and complex threads of American medicine together in a single book. The book is broken down into four sections and thirteen chapters: Part I centers on the arrival of Europeans and their initial interactions with the environmental landscape and disease, as well as the depopulation of Native American groups, culminating in the era leading up to germ theory. Part II moves from the “Age of Surgery” and germ theory in the 1880s to the “Era of Antibiotics” after World War II, also focusing on the rise of physiological medicine and public health during the Progressive Era. Part III narrates healthcare in the age of technological medicine, the re-shaping of physician and patient roles by mid-century, and the slow emergence of environmental health. Part IV focuses briefly on the rise of disease identities like SARS and West Nile, and genetic medicine by the early twenty-first century.

Health care · Political science · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law

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