John C. Burnham

Health Care in America: A History John C. Burnham

Commendation Quotes: A synthetic work that enlightens a complex historical subject, "Health Care in America" is logical, coherent, and very well-written. There are many books that touch upon the American health care system, but none that provide a comprehensive overview that covers the span of American history. This book, which represents the thinking of a mature and distinguished intellectual, will be of interest to scholars, students, and laypeople in history, medicine, policy studies, and the social sciences. Biographical Note: John C. Burnham is a research professor of history at the Ohio State University, where he is also an associated scholar in the Medical Heritage Center. His most recent books include "What Is Medical History?" and "Accident Prone: A History of Technology, Psychology, and Misfits of the Machine Age."Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Publisher Marketing: 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.

Contributor Bio:  Burnham, John C John C. Burnham is professor of history at Ohio State University and the author of "Paths into American Culture, How Superstition Won and Science Lost, and "Jelliffe: American Psychoanalyst and Physician".