Medicine
Medical
history is really for the specialist, but there is a significant
Connecticut-focused literature on the subject, so that it deserves
a place in this bibliography. By way of introduction, you might
read the essay in the New England Quarterly 40(March,
1967)2:123-26, in which Gerald Grob clarifies the problems inherent
in writing
the history of medicine and outlines the relevant historiography.
Grob says that the best introduction to the field is Richard H.
Shryock’s forty-eight-page essay on the medical history of the
American people in his Medicine in America: Historical Essays
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966). A general overview
of medicine in Connecticut is Walter R. Steiner’s “History of
Medicine” [in Connecticut] in Morris Galpin Osborn’s History
of Connecticut in Monographic Form, vol. 3 (New York: States
History Company, 1925), pages 363-96. Steiner, a Hartford physician,
includes a bibliography of twenty-seven items which is well worth
perusing. A fuller bibliographic discussion, however, is in Steiner’s
article in the collection of articles from the Heritage of
Connecticut Medicine, listed below. Steiner’s The Evolution
of Medicine in Connecticut …. (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1915) is the thirty-nine-page text of an address he gave
at the centennial celebration of Yale Medical School in 1914.
N. E. Worden did a piece, “Connecticut Medical Societies,” for The New England States, edited
by William L. Davis (Boston: D. H. Hurd, 1897), vol 2, pp. 683-94. “The
Connecticut Medical Society:
A
Historical Sketch of its First Century,” Proceedings of
the Connecticut Medical Society (1892): 177-206, by Frances Bacon,
tells that story. The Connecticut State Medical Journal
publishes historical pieces, nineteen of which were collected
in The Heritage of Connecticut Medicine, edited by Herbert
Thorns (New Haven: Whaples-Bullis Co., 1942), which also includes
citations and a bibliography. The articles, listed as they appear,
are as follows:
“The
Origin of the Connecticut State Medical Society,” Creighton Barker
“Some
remarks on ‘Cases and Observations’; By the Medical Society of
New Haven County,” George Blumer
“The
Connecticut State Medical Society and The Medical Institution
of Yale College,” Harold S. Burr
“Some
Early Medical Teachers in Connecticut,” Harry B. Ferris
“Early
Medical Practice in Hartford County,” Stanley B. Weld
“Early
Medical Doctors of Windham County,” Ralph L. Gilman
“Medicine
in New London One Hundred Years Ago,” Charles B. Graves
“Connecticut
Doctors in Other Fields,” Herbert Thorns
“William
Beaumont,” Russell H. Chittenden
“The
Discoverer of Anesthesia: Doctor Horace Wells of Hartford,” Henry
W. Erving (This was also published as Tercentenary pamphlet IX
[1933].)
“Samuel
Holden Parsons Lee and Yellow Fever in New London,” Alfred Labensky
“The
Doctors Welch of Norfolk,” Harvey Gushing
“Medical
Licensure in Connecticut,” Charles J. Bartlett
“The
Background of Public Health in Connecticut,” Ira V. Hiscock
“Connecticut’s
Part in the Development of Psychiatry in America,” Charles C.
Burlingame
“The
Development of Physiology in Connecticut,” John F. Fulton and
Hebbel E. Hoff
“Surgery
in the Past in Connecticut,” Samuel C. Harvey
“From
Consumption to Tuberculosis in Connecticut,” David R. Lyman
“Connecticut
Medical Bibliography,” Walter R. Steiner
Other works:
Bronson,
Henry. “Medical History and Biography.” Papers of NHCHS
2(1877):239-388. Focus is on the history of the New Haven Medical
Society, established in 1784. Biographies, ranging in
length from one short paragraph to three pages, of forty-six
late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century physicians. Stephen G. Hubbard wrote
a “Biographical Sketch of the Life and Writings of the late Professor
Bronson, M.D.,” Papers of the NHCHS 6(1900): 1-100. Bronson
(1804-1893), one of the state’s leading physicians and president
of the Connecticut Medical Society, was a proponent of the scientific
breeding of people. Hubbard’s essay includes a full discussion
of Bronson’s medical and social views.
Braceland, Francis J. The Institute of Living: The Hartford
Retreat, 1822-1972. Hartford, 1972. "The first hospital
of any kind in Connecticut, it was one of the earliest psychiatric
hospitals in the United States.
Carini, Esta, et al. The Mentally Ill in Connecticut: Changing
Patterns of Care and the Evolution of Psychiatric Nursing, 1636-1972. Hartford:
Connecticut State Department of Mental Health, 1974.
Dain, Norman. Clifford W. Beers: advocate for the insane. Pittsburgh:
Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1980, xxix, 392 p.
Eaton,
Leonard K. “Eli Todd and the Hartford Retreat.” New
England Quarterly 26(December, 1953)4:435-53. The story of
the founding of a mental hospital in 1822, the forerunner of
today’s
Institute of Living. See also Eaton’s New England Hospitals,
1790-1833 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957.)
Hoadley,
Frederick H. “A Review of the History of the Epidemic
of Yellow Fever in New Haven, Connecticut in the Year 1794.” Papers
of the NHCHS 6(1900):223-63. Sixty-six people of all ages
died; eighty-six caught the disease and recovered. In the same
period, fifty-two died of scarlet fever. In all, 5 percent of
the 3,471 in the city died of disease that year.
Johnson,
Alvin D. “A Brief History of the Connecticut State Hospital.” This
thirty-one-page mimeographed paper deals largely with the period
1868 to 1876. Despite its limited compass, it is quite
useful, for it is based on reports of the superintendent and
includes lots of data. It was written about 1957, and there
is a copy at
the State Library.
Kingsbury,
Frederick J. “The First Apothecary Shops in Connecticut.”
Connecticut Magazine 8(1903)4:738-41. Shops were established
in Waterbury and New Haven in the 1770s. This article describes
them and the drugs they sold.
Kuslan, Louis I. Connecticut Science, Technology and Medicine
in the Era of the American Revolution. Bicentennial pamphlet
XXVII (1978). Kuslan finds three women and a black man among practicing
physicians during the Revolution.
Lipson,
Dorothy Ann. “More Proof, More Doubt: The Social Context
of a Trial in Connecticut in 1800.” Yale Law Report 19(1972):9-12.
Deals with millponds, yellow fever, and epidemiology. See index
for location of additional annotation.
McKee,
Linda Ann. “Health and Medicine in Connecticut, 1785-1810.”
Doctoral dissertation. University of New Mexico, 1971. Derived
largely from newspapers and church records, this study “is concerned
with illnesses, including the frequency or infrequency with which
they appeared in the state and the treatments used to combat
them.
“The
quarter century was not one of magnificent medical achievements,
but in its awakening interest in public health and scientific
research, it laid the foundation for the great discoveries of
the succeeding decades.” (from the abstract)
McManus,
James. “The History of Anaesthesia.” Connecticut Quarterly
1 (January, 1895)1:56-66. McManus was a dentist. This is a useful
piece, with interesting illustrations. But see the articles above
by Erving.
Sharp, Jacob. A History of the Connecticut State Dental Association. New
Haven: Connecticut State Dental Association, 1956. Written to
arrange “A series of events in chronological and comprehensive
form” in order to give “the reader a complete story of the development”
of the CSDA and also “to preserve the memory and perpetuate the
names of the men who worked so strenuously and devotedly” to
improve dentistry in Connecticut. It is more sophisticated than
it sounds, despite such gems as “it would take in 1953 280 million
fillings to correct present tooth decay in children 6-18....” (p.
182)
Steiner,
Walter R. “Dr. Elisha North of New London, Connecticut,
the Founder of the First Eye Infirmary in the United States.”
Proceedings of the Beaumont Medical Club, 1932-33.
—“Dr.
Nathan Strong, Jr. of Hartford, Connecticut, a Pioneer in the
Early History of Epidemic Cerebrospinal Meningitis.” Transactions
of the American Climatological and Clinical Association 37(1921):254-65.
—“Governor
John Winthrop, Jr. of Connecticut as a Physician.” Bulletin
of the Johns Hopkins Hospital 14(November, 1903): 152-60.
Steiner has an article of the same title in Connecticut Magazine 11(1907)1:25-42
which includes transcripts of eleven Winthrop
family letters. Steiner was House Medical Officer at Johns Hopkins
Hospital early in the twentieth century. In the Sterling Memorial
Library card catalog under his name are many items relating to
medicine in Connecticut.
Thorns, Herbert. Jared Eliot: Minister, Doctor, Scientist and
His Connecticut. Hamden: The Shoestring Press, 1967. Eliot
(1685-1763) preached in Killingworth, but is best known as a
pioneer
of scientific agriculture. Thorns was Professor of Obstetrics
and Gynecology at Yale and later Curator of Memorabilia at the
medical library there. Ernest Caulfield called him “one of the
foremost medical historians of the present day.” (New England
Quarterly 341961, p. 401) In the same journal Edwin Gaustad
commented that Thorns’ book had much information and good scholarship,
but “little of art in weaving a life out of these miscellaneous
materials.” (41 June, 1968, p. 313)
—The
Doctors of Yale College, 1702-1815, and the Founding of the Medical
Institution. Hamden: Shoestring Press, 1960. After forty years
of collecting data. Thorns deals with twenty-three of the most
important of the Yale graduates who had become physicians by 1815.
Though the Medical Department of Yale dates from 1813, nearly
350 earlier graduates went into medicine.
—”The
Doctor in Colonial Connecticut.” Connecticut Medical Journal
20(1956)12:986+.
Winslow,
Charles E. A. “Development of the public health Movement
in Connecticut.” In History of Connecticut in Monographic
Form. Edited by Norris Galpin Osbom. New York, 1925, 4:477-504.
Winslow’s occupation is given as “sanitarian.” He held a doctorate
in Public Health and was a professor of bacteriology, sanitary
biology, and related subjects at M.I.T., the University of Chicago,
and other institutions. He was an authority on the “bacteriology
of water and ice and air, purification of sewage and ventilation.”
Where is he now when we really need him? This piece includes,
on page 488, an interesting chart of death rates in Connecticut
from typhoid fever, diphtheria, and tuberculosis, 1790-1820.
—”The
Epidemiology of Noah Webster.” Transactions of the
Connecticut Society of Arts and Sciences 32(January, 1934):21-109.
Comments
on Noah Webster’s A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential
Diseases, which Winslow calls “the best general summary of
epidemiological opinion at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century....” (p.
63)
Greenwood Press in Westport is currently preparing a Dictionary
of Medical Biography, edited by Martin Kaufman et al. Fifteen
men who practiced prominently in Connecticut are biographed by
John Ifkovic, and many Connecticut-born physicians who practiced
elsewhere are included, as well. Ifkovic’s fifteen are:
Clifford Whittington Beers (1876-1943)
George Blumer (1872-1962)
William Henry Carmalt (1836-1929)
Mason Fitch Cogswell (1761 -1830)
John Farquhar Fulton (1899-1960)
Lemuel Hopkins (1750-1801)
Jonathan Knight (1789-1864)
Aeneas Munson (1734-1826)
Elisha North(177l-1843)
Thomas Pell (1616-1669)
Benjamin Silliman (1779-1864)
Nathan Smith (1762-1829)
Horace Wells (1815-1848)
Charles-Edward Winslow (1877-1957)
Milton
C. Winterhitz (1885-1959)
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