Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History Hardcover – January 1, 1994
Author: Visit Amazon's Sheila M. Rothman Page | Language: English | ISBN: 0465030025 | Format: PDF, EPUB
Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History – January 1, 1994
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From Publishers Weekly
Rothman's involving social history of tuberculosis is built around patients' own narratives reconstructed from diaries, letters and memoirs. For example, we meet Deborah Fiske (1806-1844), a deeply religious Massachusetts teacher who submitted to God's will even as she desperately tried to prepare her two daughters for their future as orphans; she also joined a support group of tubercular women who read medical texts and pooled their knowledge. Testimonies by patients confined to sanatoriums seethe with shame and anger at being stigmatized. Other health-seekers migrated westward from the 1840s to the 1920s, lured by physicians in California or Colorado touting their region as a curative Eden. In an alarming epilogue, Rothman, a scholar at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons, notes that TB is again becoming a scourge with new strains proving resistant to drugs. Illustrated. First serial to Mirabella.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
While Frank Ryan's The Forgotten Plague ( LJ 5/1/93) described the history of the search for a cure of tuberculosis, Rothman, a scholar at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, recounts here the experiences of TB patients through 150 years of American medicine. As death rates soared in the early 19th century, men were frequently urged to abandon their in-door pursuits and travel to more salubrious climates. Women, however, were encouraged to carry on with daily responsibilities, to endure debilitating pregnancies, and to meet death with Christian fortitude. The latter 19th century saw entire communites, such as Colorado Springs, organized for invalids seeking new lives in more congenial climates. Following the discovery of the TB bacteria, minimizing contagion became the focus of public health, and hospitals became far more structured and confining institutions. Rothman has uncovered compelling original sources that she enhances with sensitive analysis. Her evenhandedness is ultimately frustrating, however, as she neglects to explore the implicit ethical conflict between early accounts of extended families ravaged by contagious disease and the later narratives of bored and rebellious infectious patients forcibly confined by public health authorities. Recommended, with reservation, for academic and larger public libraries.
- Kathy Arsenault, Univ. of South Florida-St. Petersburg Lib.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Kathy Arsenault, Univ. of South Florida-St. Petersburg Lib.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
See all Editorial Reviews
Books with free ebook downloads available Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History Hardcover – January 1, 1994
- Hardcover: 319 pages
- Publisher: Basic Books; First Edition edition (January 1994)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0465030025
- ISBN-13: 978-0465030026
- Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,334,504 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
As Rothman, ruefully notes in her book there have been studies of medicine from the perspective of the doctor and from the perspective of the disease but not from the perspective of the patient.
Thus, Dr. Rothman sets out to do "a history of patienthood" and how being a patient changed over the course of time with respect to one single disease, TB or Consumption.
The problem is that her original sources are diaries, mainly of women but not exclusively. That by and of itself limits her subjects overwhelmingly to upper crust and educated NE families by and large. Overwhelmingly these are the well-off, relatively speaking. Theretofore, all of Rothman's democratic impulses are naturally very limited. The whole thrust of thesis is thus quite silly. This is not a history truly of patienthood, but of patienthood of the wealthy - of a small well-to-do segment of society.
What was it truly like to a patient with TB among the indigent and the poor? Rothman cannot really say for these people kept no diaries and if they did they were certainly not preserved a hundred and fifty years later in some library archives waiting for her to come find them.
Rothman gives us only the narrowest slice of what it means to be a patient.
Furthermore, this is a telling of history through anecdote. So she takes one, two, maybe 3 dozen diaries and summarizes what the people say in them. Who cares! To say these 3 dozen people are a representative sample (even among the upper crust educated elite of society) is downright silly.
It would be like someone reading 3 dozen blogs today on the net and saying they have a general sense of what society was thinking of the Iraq war. Who actually spends their time writing a blog?
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