'Medicine in an Age of Revolution' is concerned with the interaction between religion, politics, and medicine in an age of revolutionary upheaval associated with the civil wars in Britain in the mid-seventeenth century. As medical and scientific thinking underwent radical revision, its impact was keenly felt in religious and political circles.

An engaging history of the role that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin played in the origins of public health in America. Before the advent of modern antibiotics, one’s life could be abruptly shattered by contagion and death, and debility from infectious diseases and epidemics was commonplace for early Americans, regardless of social status. Concerns over health affected the Founding Fathers and their families as it did slaves, merchants, immigrants, and everyone else in North America. As both victims of illness and national leaders, the Founders occupied a unique position regarding the development of public health in America. Historian Jeanne E. Abrams’s Revolutionary Medicine refocuses the study of the lives of George and Martha Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams, and James and Dolley Madison away from politics to the perspective of sickness, health, and medicine. For the Founders, republican ideals fostered a reciprocal connection between individual health and the “health” of the nation. Studying the encounters of these American Founders with illness and disease, as well as their viewpoints about good health, not only provides a richer and more nuanced insight into their lives, but also opens a window into the practice of medicine in the eighteenth century, which is at once intimate, personal, and first hand. Today’s American public health initiatives have their roots in the work of America’s Founders, for they recognized early on that government had compelling reasons to shoulder some new responsibilities with respect to ensuring the health and well-being of its citizenry—beginning the conversation about the country’s state of medicine and public healthcare that continues to be a work in progress.

Nearly nine times as many died from diseases during the American Revolution as did from wounds. Poor diet, inadequate sanitation and sometimes a lack of basic medical care caused such diseases as dysentery, scurvy, typhus, smallpox and others to decimate the ranks. Scurvy was a major problem for both the British and American navies, while venereal diseases proved to be a particularly vexing problem in New York. Respiratory diseases, scabies and other illnesses left nearly 4,000 colonial troops unable to fight when George Washington’s troops broke camp at Valley Forge in June 1778. From a physician’s perspective, this is a unique history of the American Revolution and how diseases impacted the execution of the war effort. The medical histories of Washington and King George III are also provided.

This consideration of the underlying forces which helped to produce a revolution in 17th century medicine sets out to show how, in the period between 1630 and 1730, medicine came to represent something more than a marginal activity and was influenced by the current developments of the day.

An unusual history of doctors - both male and female - trained in Britain in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

A professor of medicine reveals how technology like wireless internet, individual data, and personal genomics can be used to save lives.

The interpretation of eighteenth-century medicine has been much contested. Some have view it as a wilderness of rationalism and arid theories between the Scientific Revolution and the astonishing changes of the nineteenth-century. Other scholars have emphasized the close and fruitful links between medicine and the Enlightenment, suggesting that medical advance was the very embodiment of the philosphes’ ideal of a practical science that would improve mankind’s lot and foster human happiness. In a series of essays covering Great Britain, France, Germany and other parts of Europe, noted historians debate these issues through detailed examinations of major aspects of eighteenth-century medicine and medical controversy, including such topics as the introduction of smallpox inoculation, the transformation of medical education, and the treatment of the insane. The essays as a whole suggest a positive reading of the transformations in eighteenth-century medicine, while stressing local diversity and uneven development.