Medicine in the New World: New Spain, New France, and New England

by Ronald L. Numbers (Editor)

At least since Frederick Jackson Turner’s day, historians have debated the extent to which frontier conditions forced Americans to forsake the supposedly rigid intellectual systems and social arrangements of the Old World in favor of a freer, more individualistic way of life. In this book, three eminent medical historians --Toby Gelfand, Guenter B. Risse, and Eric H. Christianson —test the validity of the environmentalist interpretation by tracing the transit of medical institutions and practices from the Old World to New Spain (Mexico), New France (Quebec), and New England. Environmentalist scholars have suggested that New World conditions not only fused the traditional specialities of medicine, surgery, and pharmacy into a new profession - that of the general practitioner - but freed colonial doctors from the bondage of academic medicine, allowing them to treat their patients more effectively. The authors of this work demonstrate instead the basic similarity between European and American colonial medical arrangements. The medical histories of New Spain and New France show that European institutions—regulatory agencies, hospitals, and medical schools — could survive in the New World and suggest that their absence in New England resulted more from cultural than environmental factors. If general practice prevailed in the colonies, it also dominated in the provincial Old World regions that supplied most of the immigrants. And while colonists may have borrowed from indigenous healers and used native remedies in treating their patients, their theoretical framework and therapeutic practices remained virtually unchanged.

175 pages, Hardcover

First published December 12, 1987