Frontier Doctor The Autobiography Of A Pioneer On The Frontier Of Public Health

This is a new release of the original 1948 edition.

The autobiography of a pioneer on the frontier of public health.

From sentimental stories about polio to the latest cherub in hospital commercials, sick children tug at the public’s heartstrings. However sick children have not always had adequate medical care or protection. The essays in Children’s Issues in Historical Perspective investigate the identification, prevention, and treatment of childhood diseases from the 1800s onwards, in areas ranging from French-colonial Vietnam to nineteenth-century northern British Columbia, from New Zealand fresh air camps to American health fairs. Themes include: the role of government and/or the private sector in initiating and underwriting child public health programs; the growth of the profession of pediatrics and its views on “proper” mothering techniques; the role of nationalism, as well as ethnic and racial dimensions in child-saving movements; normative behaviour, social control, and the treatment of “deviant” children and adolescents; poverty, wealth, and child health measures; and the development of the modern children’s hospital. This liberally illustrated collection reflects the growing academic interest in all aspects of childhood, especially child health, and originates from health care professionals and scholars across the disciplines. An introduction by the editors places the historical themes in context and offers an overview of the contemporary study of children’s health.

Organised chronologically and then by topic, this volume covers studies of women and health in the colonial and revolutionary periods through the Civil War. The remainder of the book focuses on the late 19th and 20th centuries.

The image of the female caregiver holding a midnight vigil at the bedside of a sick relative is so firmly rooted in our collective imagination we might assume that such caregiving would have attracted the scrutiny of numerous historians. As Emily Abel demonstrates in this groundbreaking study of caregiving in America across class and ethnic divides and over the course of ninety years, this has hardly been the case. While caring for sick and disabled family members was commonplace for women in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America, that caregiving, the caregivers' experience of it, and the medical profession's reaction to it took diverse and sometimes unexpected forms. A complex series of historical changes, Abel shows, has profoundly altered the content and cultural meaning of care. Hearts of Wisdom is an immersion into that "world of care." Drawing on antebellum slave narratives, white farm women's diaries, and public health records, Abel puts together a multifaceted picture of what caregiving meant to American women--and what it cost them--from the pre-Civil War years to the brink of America's entry into the Second World War. She shows that caregiving offered women an arena in which experience could be parlayed into expertise, while at the same time the revolution in bacteriology and the transformation of the formal health care system were weakening women's claim to that expertise. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments Introduction Part One: 1850-1890 1. "Hot Flannels, Hot Teas, and a Great Deal of Care": Emily Hawley Gillespie and Sarah Gillespie, 1858-1888 2. An Overview of Nineteenth-Century Caregiving 3. "Tried at the Quilting Bees": Con'icts between "Old Ladies" and Aspiring Professionals Part Two: 1890-1940 4. A "Terrible and Exhausting" Struggle: Martha Shaw Farnsworth, 1890-1924 5. "Just as You Direct": Caregiver Translations of Medical Authority 6. Negotiating Public Health Directives: Poor New Yorkers at the Turn of the Century Reviews of this book: This excellent historical review of female caregiving within families as a transformative experience identifies conditions that make this form of human connectedness rewarding and meaningful. --J.E. Thompson, Choice This is a breathtaking work in terms of its depth and its breadth. Emily Abel's research is impressive in its time frame, wide range of topics, and wonderful source material. What she has given us, for the first time, is a full-length study of the female support network, not only for childbirth but for a whole range of health issues. With her pleasing writing style and clear, readable prose, she gives us much more than mere glimpses of anonymous people--she provides the reader with a sense of the texture of human lives. --Susan L. Smith, University of Alberta The reader of Hearts of Wisdom is surprised by the topic and content, but is left with the sense that the most central story of human possibility has been left out of all other history books. The work offers a substantive contribution to history, feminist scholarship, caregiving professions, and informal caregivers. --Patricia Benner, R.N., Ph.D, University of California, San Francisco

Founded as a port at the confluence of two great rivers, Kansas City has the waters of the Missouri running through its bloodstream—threading expressways, delivering drinking water, carrying traffic and sewage, and emerging most visibly in the city’s celebrated fountains. Despite, or perhaps because of, the river’s ubiquity, the complex and critical nature of its presence can be hard to understand, which is precisely why Amahia Mallea’s enlightening book is so essential. Moving from the city’s center to the outer limits of the metropolitan area, A River in the City of Fountains offers a clear view of the reach and intricacies of the Missouri River’s connection to life in Kansas City. The history of this connection is one of science and industry working, sometimes at cross-purposes, to bend the river to the needs of commerce and public health. It is a story populated with heroes and villains, visionaries and robber barons, scientists and civil engineers, politicians and activists—all with schemes and plans and far-reaching ideas about what, and whose, demands the power of the Missouri should serve. And so, inevitably, it is a story of disparities: a story of, from one flood to the next, the haves staking out higher ground, leaving the have-nots to the perils of low-lying land. But what the book also shows us is a slow awakening to the ways in which all those vying for the river’s favor are inextricably connected by its course; here we see, finally, a growing awareness of the river’s essential role in the health and welfare of the whole urban environment. In the end, all citizens of Kansas City are both upstream and downstream; all are equally dependent on the health of the river. What this book helps us see is, at last, as much the city in the river as the river in the city.

Challenging assumptions about caregiving for those dying of chronic illness. What is it like to live with—and love—someone whose death, while delayed, is nevertheless foretold? In Living in Death’s Shadow, Emily K. Abel, an expert on the history of death and dying, examines memoirs written between 1965 and 2014 by family members of people who died from chronic disease. In earlier eras, death generally occurred quickly from acute illnesses, but as chronic disease became the major cause of mortality, many people continued to live with terminal diagnoses for months and even years. Illuminating the excruciatingly painful experience of coping with a family member’s extended fatal illness, Abel analyzes the political, personal, cultural, and medical dimensions of these struggles. The book focuses on three significant developments that transformed the experiences of those dying and their intimates: the passage of Medicare and Medicaid, the growing use of high-tech treatments at the end of life, and the rise of a movement to humanize the care of dying people. It questions the exalted value placed on acceptance of mortality as well as the notion that it is always better to die at home than in an institution. Ultimately, Living in Death’s Shadow emphasizes the need to shift attention from the drama of death to the entire course of a serious chronic disease. The chapters follow a common narrative of life-threatening disease: learning the diagnosis; deciding whether to enroll in a clinical trial; acknowledging or struggling against the limits of medicine; receiving care at home and in a hospital or nursing home; and obtaining palliative and hospice care. Living in Death’s Shadow is essential reading for everyone seeking to understand what it means to live with someone suffering from a chronic, fatal condition, including cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s, and heart disease.

A link to the past no one could ever imagine. When a great-grandson inherits two aging trunks and a stack of meticulously detailed journals penned by his great-grandfather, he sets out to fulfill his great-grandfather's last request: to tell the story of an incredible life replete with adventure, violence, and tragedy. The great-grandfather's name is Billy Battles--a man often trapped and overwhelmed by circumstances beyond his control. For much of his 100-year-long life, Billy is a man missing and largely unknown to his descendants. His great-grandson is about to change that. As he works his way through the aging journals and the other possessions he finds in the battered trunks he uncovers the truth about his mysterious great-grandfather--a man whose deeds and misdeeds propelled him on an extraordinary and perilous journey from the untamed American West to the inscrutable Far East, Latin America, and Europe. But most of all he learns that in finding Billy Battles he has also found a long lost and astonishing link to the past.