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

Studies in Social Medicine

by Steven M. Stowe

Offering a new perspective on medical progress in the nineteenth century, Steven M. Stowe provides an in-depth study of the midcentury culture of everyday medicine in the South. Reading deeply in the personal letters, daybooks, diaries, bedside notes, and published writings of doctors, Stowe 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, Stowe 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, Stowe argues, providing a style of caregiving deeply rooted in individual experience, moral values, and a consciousness of place and time.

Genres: History

392 pages, Hardcover

First published October 18, 2004

Reviews

[Lionel Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book uses first-hand accounts from physicians and medical students throughout the south in the pre-civil war period. The author's argument is that during this period physicians developed a style unique to the region regarding practices and treatment. Stowe identifies this as a unique "southern style" of administering medicine created by a combination of the isolation of the physicians and their practice, their education in southern schools and the mores of the community in which they serve. Most of the book is primary sources backing up the author's arguments.

While the accounts can get a little repetitive in some chapters and seem to run together, this book would be useful to anyone interested in southern history or medical history and would make an excellent secondary source for research.

[Belle Blackburn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very well researched and presented look into the thought process and practices of doctors in the mid 1800s. It was taken from the daybooks of physicians and included their thoughts, prices, treatment, etc. I had planned to just check out a bit of it but ended up reading every page. I liked it so much I bought a copy to keep.