Seeking The Cure, A History of Medicine in America, by Ira Rutkow, Scribner 2010 Each cataclysmic human event – war, epidemics, new war machines, and discoveries like Roentgen’s x-ray machine, have provided another big step up for medical history. The Civil War’s tragic losses, for example, says Rutkow, pushed medicine forward in areas that we take for granted now – dissection and physiology, pioneering brain studies, hygiene, nursing care, even post traumatic stress disorder. The huge battlefield losses – Gettysburg, Antietam, etc. - followed by even higher losses resulting from wounds and infections gave surgeons and other medical personnel unlimited opportunities to learn and experiment. It was the American Civil War that gave us the modern military hospital, and our earliest nursing professionals.
Seeking the Cure, however, covers more than the development of medical practices during the Civil War; the book actually covers amazing events dating back three hundred years to Colonial times. Although the author lists important technology advances along the way, he chooses to highlight particular moments through the stories of individual doctors – what they believed and how they practiced – against a backdrop of the economic, political and social issues around them. The book opens with the story of Zabdiel Boylston, a Boston physician who worked with Puritan minister Cotton Mather to champion inoculation during the 1721 smallpox epidemic.
Did you know that President James Garfield, who survived an assassination attempt, was unwittingly killed by his own team of doctors and their ignorance of antisepsis? By the time the US had entered World War II, however, the medical community had developed rigorous antiseptic routines that were supplanted by discovery of new medicines and procedures – blood plasma storage, orthopedic procedures, operating rooms techniques, and penicillin. It almost seems that the post-war boom fueled even bigger pharmaceutical and medical discoveries such as open-heart surgery, organ transplants. And the beginnings of pharmaceuticals designed to treat mental health issues.
Surprisingly, the author highlights other initiatives that now occupy a great deal of our national budgetary concerns: specialization and its costs, the rise of what Rutkow calls the medical-industrial complex, the national healthcare debates, and breakthrough technologies such as genetics, body scanners and robotic surgeries.
Why would a business professional open a copy of Seeking the Cure? Rutkow believes that the history of American medicine is a portrait of America itself. The personal stories of innovators and victims are enough to persuade the business reader that although healthcare may be classified as science, when delivered and examined, it is more than that – healthcare in the US has developed over its 300-year history into a business dotted with human stories accompanied by impressive technology, all of which means, to the business professional, that it’s not getting cheaper, or simpler.
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