From Snake Oil to Medicine: Pioneering Public Health (Healing Society: Disease, Medicine, and History) - Hardcover

Lee, R. Alton

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0275994678 ISBN 13: 9780275994679

Publisher: Praeger, 2007

Synopsis

Without Samuel J. Crumbine and his Kansas Department of Health, diseases festering in water sources, food and the common towel would have caused thousands of deaths in the United States. Crumbine and his associates paved the way to better treatment of tuberculosis. This well-written account leads the reader down a path of crucial medical advancements.

Samuel J. Crumbine was a medical educator without peer, who used his department of health to disseminate the latest developments he and others throughout the world were achieving in public health. He found it necessary to propagandize a skeptical and sometimes hostile public to accept the germ theory, the idea that invisible microbes were making them ill and that they should clean up their environment and their food and water sources. He had to convince the public to rely on modern medicine, not snake oil and other miracle cures for a healthy living. R. Alton Lee's historical account might offer insight in today's threat of Bird Flu and other recent medical threats for any reader.

About this title

Book Description:

By the turn of the Twentieth Century, the emergence of modern public health was in its pioneering state and Samuel J. Crumbine and his Kansas Department of Health was on the cutting edge of this development.

About the Author:

R. Alton Lee is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Dakota. He taught American history for the last thirty years of his career, specializing in American labor and constitutional history. After retiring in 1996, he moved to Kansas where he has been researching Kansas history.

About this edition

• Publisher: Praeger
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0275994678
• ISBN 13: 9780275994679
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 248