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The vast majority of Americans have, at one point or another,
gotten drunk, smoked, dabbled with drugs, gambled, sworn, or
engaged in adultery. During the 1800s, "respectable" people
struggled to control these behaviors, labeling them "bad" and the
people who indulged in them unrespectable. In the twentieth
century, these minor vices were transformed into a societal complex
of enormous and pervasive influence. Yet the general belief
persists that these activities remain merely harmless "bad habits",
individual transgressions more than social problems. Not so, argues
distinguished historian John C. Burnham in this pioneering study.
In Bad Habits, Burnham traces the growth of a veritable minor
vice-industrial complex illustrating the special heritage shared by
these vices. As this vice complex grew, activities that might have
been harmless, natural, and sociable fun resulted in fundamental
social change. When Burnham set out to explore the influence of
these bad habits on American society, he sought to discover why so
many "good" people engaged in activities that many, including they
themselves, considered "bad". What he found, however, was a
coalition of economic and social interests in which the single
minded quest for profit allied with the values of the Victorian
saloon underworld and bohemian rebelliousness. This combination
radically inverted common American standards of personal conduct.
Bad Habits, then, describes, in words and pictures how more and
more Americans learned to value hedonism and self-gratification -
to smoke and swear during World War I, to admire cabaret night
life, and to reject schoolmarmish standards in the age of
Prohibition. Tracing the evolution of each ofthe bad habits,
Burnham tells how liquor control boards encouraged the consumption
of alcohol; how alcoholic beverage producers got their workers
deferred from the draft during World War II; how convenience stores
and accounting firms pursued profits by pushing legalized gambling;
how "swinging" Playboy bankrolled a drug advocacy group; how
advertising and television made the Marlboro man a national hero;
how drug paraphernalia were promoted by national advertisers; how a
practical joker/drug addict caused a shortage of kitty litter on
Long Island; and how the evolution of an entire sex therapy
industry helped turn sexual experience into a new kind of
commodity. Altogether, a lot of people made a lot of money. But
what, the author asks, did these changes cost American society?
This illustrated tour de force by one of the most distinctive and
important voices in social history reveals John C. Burnham at his
provocative and controversial best.
International Relations in Psychiatry: Britain, Germany, and the
United States to World War II addresses a crucial period in the
history of psychiatry by examining the transfer of conceptual,
institutional, and financial resources and the migration of
psychiatrists between Britain, the United States, and Germany. The
decades around 1900 were crucial in the evolution of modern medical
and social sciences, and in the formation of various national
health services systems. The modern fields of psychiatry and mental
health care are located at the intersection of these spheres. There
emerged concepts, practices, and institutions that marked responses
to challenges posed by urbanization, industrialization, and the
formation of the nation-state. These psychiatric responseswere
locally distinctive, and yet at the same time established
influential models with an international impact. In spite of rising
nationalism in Europe, the intellectual, institutional and material
resources that emerged in thevarious local and national contexts
were rapidly observed to have had an impact beyond any national
boundaries. In numerous ways, innovations were adopted and
refashioned for the needs and purposes of new national and local
systems. International Relations in Psychiatry: Britain, Germany,
and the United States to World War II brings together hitherto
separate approaches from the social, political, and cultural
history of medicine and health care and argues that modern
psychiatry developed in a constant, though not always continuous,
transfer of ideas, perceptions, and experts across national
borders. Contributors: John C. Burnham, Eric J. Engstrom, Rhodri
Hayward, Mark Jackson, Pamela Michael, Hans Pols, Volker Roelcke,
Heinz-Peter Schmiedebach, Mathew Thomson, Paul J. Weindling, Louise
Westwood Volker Roelcke is Professor and Director at the Institute
for the History of Medicine, Giessen University, Germany. Paul J.
Weindling is Professor in the History of Medicine, Oxford Brookes
University, UK. Louise Westwood is Honorary Research Reader,
University of Sussex, UK.
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.
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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