Before the advent of modern antibiotics, one’s life could beabruptly shattered by contagion and death, and debility from infectiousdiseases and epidemics was commonplace for early Americans, regardless ofsocial status. Concerns over health affected the founding fathers and theirfamilies as it did slaves, merchants, immigrants, and everyone else in NorthAmerica. As both victims of illness and … both victims of illness and national leaders, the Founders occupied
a unique position regarding the development of public health in America. Revolutionary Medicine refocuses the
study of the lives of George and Martha Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas
Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams, and James and Dolley Madison away from the
usual lens of politics to the unique perspective of sickness, health, and
medicine in their era.
connection between individual health and the “health” of the nation. Studying
the encounters of these American founders with illness and disease, as well as
their viewpoints about good health, not only provides us with a richer and more
nuanced insight into their lives, but also opens a window into the practice of
medicine in the eighteenth century, which is at once intimate, personal, and
first hand. Perhaps most importantly, today’s American public health
initiatives have their roots in the work of America’s founders, for they
recognized early on that government had compelling reasons to shoulder some new
responsibilities with respect to ensuring the health and well-being of its
citizenry.
work in progress, but these founders played a significant role in beginning the
conversation that shaped the contours of its development.
more
This is a terrific book! It’s historically accurate and gave me new information on how our founding fathers dealt with medical problems of their era. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were the most interesting to me because they actually invented items when they saw a need. Washington and Adams were forward thinkers in how they tried to protect their families and even troops from dangerous illnesses that were real killers during the 18th century. Protecting the poor, as well as the rich was an accepted idea for them all. It’s interesting to note that this is a very controversial topic today.
With today’s medicine and medical libraries is hard to believe anybody lived past the age of 5 in revolutionary times. Really opens your eyes,
The first three books I’ve read in 2014 have taken me to America amid the Civil War; Paris, circa 1880; and sixteenth century Venice. All were fictional stories incorporating varying degrees of fact. I needed a change of pace and have had Jeanne E. Abrams’ Revolutionary Medicine on my reading list for months. Despite the fact that I only just vowed to read less about disease and war and that Revolutionary Medicine is clearly chock full of both, I added it to my Nook before a long trip last week.
I’ll begin by saying that Abrams makes great use of her primary sources. This book is studded with journal entries, correspondence, and other first-rate material that make the characters – Benjamin Franklin, George and Martha Washington, John and Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James and Dolley Madison – come alive to the reader. Who knew that Martha Washington wrote Saturday as “satterday,” for example? It’s funny, it’s pitiable, but it’s also deeply humanizing.
Through volumes of research, Abrams has shown the extent to which these elite, early Americans were marked at every stage by death and disease. There is not one who hasn’t lost a child or spouse (or both) to what we look upon today as a highly treatable disease. Revolutionary Medicine is also a near constant reminder of the ways in which we have tamed our environment in the past 200 years. The denizens of Washington, DC, are laid low by malaria with alarming regularity in Washington’s time; today, such a diagnosis in the city would be regarded as singularly peculiar, among other adjectives.
Revolutionary Medicine also serves as portrait of how medicine has changed. In the time of days of the Founding Fathers, an educated person knew as much of medicine as, perhaps, their physician – who may or may not have ever studied medicine especially and may or may not rely on anymore than bleeding the patient no matter the symptoms. Indeed, more than one of the men and women profiled here administered such medical procedures as inoculation or bleeding on themselves, their children, or other family members.
This book is filled with fascinating tidbits (Boston once banned the smallpox inoculation, Philadelphia suffered through an unimaginable yellow fever epidemic, George Washington ordered and organized the vaccination of the Continental Army against smallpox) and trivia (the name laudanum is derived from the Latin laudere, “to praise” – and Jefferson and Franklin both needed it by the end).
If you’re a non-fiction or American history junkie, you’ll want to read Revolutionary Medicine. If not, if you know that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day and that George Washington died of a simple throat infection compounded by repeated bleedings (which he himself ordered), then you probably already know everything you really need to know about the sickness and health of our founding fathers.
(This review was originally published at http://www.thisyearinbooks.com/2014/01/revolutionary-medicine-founding-fathers.html)
This book reveals the overriding importance illnesses played in the lives of everyone in early America.. Superstitions drove much of the thinking, yet this became the age of discovery and challenge to medical knowledge.
Very interesting details of our early presidents, seems more appropriate for classroom studies. A touch too repetitive.