In Health Care in America, historian John C. Burnham describes
changes over four centuries of medicine and public health in
America. Beginning with seventeenth-century concerns over personal
and neighborhood illnesses, Burnham concludes with the arrival of a
new epoch in American medicine and health care at the turn of the
twenty-first century. From the 1600s through the 1990s, Americans
turned to a variety of healers, practices, and institutions in
their efforts to prevent and survive epidemics of smallpox, yellow
fever, cholera, influenza, polio, and AIDS. Health care workers in
all periods attended births and deaths and cared for people who had
injuries, disabilities, and chronic diseases. Drawing on primary
sources, classic scholarship, and a vast body of recent literature
in the history of medicine and public health, Burnham finds that
traditional healing, care, and medicine dominated the United States
until the late nineteenth century, when antiseptic/aseptic surgery
and germ theory initiated an intellectual, social, and technical
transformation. He divides the age of modern medicine into several
eras: physiological medicine (1910s-1930s), antibiotics
(1930s-1950s), technology (1950s-1960s), environmental medicine
(1970s-1980s), and, beginning around 1990, genetic medicine. The
cumulating developments in each era led to today's radically
altered doctor-patient relationship and the insistent questions
that swirl around the financial cost of health care. Burnham's
sweeping narrative makes sense of medical practice, medical
research, and human frailties and foibles, opening the door to a
new understanding of our current concerns.
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