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Doctoring the South: Southern Physicians and Everyday Medicine in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Online ISBN:
9781469603629
Print ISBN:
9780807828854
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press
Book

Doctoring the South: Southern Physicians and Everyday Medicine in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Published online:
24 July 2014
Published in print:
18 October 2004
Online ISBN:
9781469603629
Print ISBN:
9780807828854
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press

Abstract

Offering a new perspective on medical progress in the nineteenth century, this book provides an in-depth study of the mid-century culture of everyday medicine in the South. Reading deeply in the personal letters, daybooks, diaries, bedside notes, and published writings of doctors, the author illuminates an entire world of sickness and remedy, suffering and hope, and the deep ties between medicine and regional culture. In a distinct American region where climate, race and slavery, and assumptions about “southernness” profoundly shaped illness and healing in the lives of ordinary people, he argues that southern doctors inhabited a world of skills, medicines, and ideas about sickness that allowed them to play moral, as well as practical, roles in their communities. Looking closely at medical education, bedside encounters, and medicine's larger social aims, he describes a “country orthodoxy” of local, social medical practice that highly valued the “art” of medicine. While not modern in the sense of laboratory science a century later, this country orthodoxy was in its own way modern, he argues, providing a style of caregiving deeply rooted in individual experience, moral values, and a consciousness of place and time.

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