Medicine At Michigan

An insightful look at the University of Michigan's groundbreaking Medical School

Portrays the development of modern medicine through the lives and work of six pioneers

This illustrated volume presents information about medical developments in Michigan in the early and middle nineteenth century in loosely-organized chapters. The material is drawn from reminiscences, historical chronicles, anecdotes, scholarly journals, letters, and biographical as well as autobiographical accounts. Topics include Native American medicine; physicians who accompanied the European and early American explorers of the upper Northwest; the development of Michigan's medical education and public health resources; diseases and epidemics; insects; homeopathy; diagnostic aids; medical equipment; and therapeutic practice. Many physicians are remembered in short factual entries or sketches. A few, like the pioneer physiologist William Beaumont (who conducted digestive research by monitoring a patient's exposed entrails), receive entire articles. The emphasis in v. 2 is on the latter half of the nineteenth century, a time when Michigan physicians were developing a professional code of ethics, standards, and regulatory mechanisms. Topics include the re-organization of the State Medical Society, the controversy over homeopathy, and how hospitals became the preferred setting for major medical procedures. This second volume of Medical History of Michigan continues the format established in the first volume and includes an index for both (p. 83). The emphasis here is upon the latter half of the nineteenth century, a time when Michigan physicians were developing a professional code of ethics, standards, and regulatory mechanisms. Topics include the re-organization of the State Medical Society, the controversy over homeopathy, and how hospitals became the preferred setting for major medical procedures.

In the last two decades, the implosion of African economies under the burden of debt, the negative repercussions of the structural adjustment programs, the crisis of legitimacy, civil wars, and the collapse of some states resulted in a serious health crisis across the continent. Newly emerging diseases, such as Ebola virus and HIV / AIDS, killed and disabled millions. Some "old diseases" such as yellow fever, tuberculosis, and polio, have reappeared. Malaria, cholera, and meningitis continue to kill thousands. In many countries, the medical infrastructure has collapsed, while an increasing number of physicians and nurses have migrated to more hospitable places.

The Origins of Bioethics argues that what we remember from the history of medicine and how we remember it are consequential for the identities of doctors, researchers, and patients in the present day. Remembering when medicine went wrong calls people to account for the injustices inflicted on vulnerable communities across the twentieth century in the name of medicine, but the very groups empowered to create memorials to these events often have a vested interest in minimizing their culpability for them. Sometimes these groups bury this past and forget events when medical research harmed those it was supposed to help. The call to bioethical memory then conflicts with a desire for “minimal remembrance” on the part of institutions and governments. The Origins of Bioethics charts this tension between bioethical memory and minimal remembrance across three cases—the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook Hepatitis Study, and the Cincinnati Whole Body Radiation Study—that highlight the shift from robust bioethical memory to minimal remembrance to forgetting.