San Antonio College Library

An entertaining and intelligent history of the development of medicine in America by an award-winning physician.

"Herbert Leibowitz's "Something Urgent I Have to Say to You" provides a new perspective on the life and poetry of the doctor poet William Carlos Williams, a key American writer who led one of the more eventful literary lives of the twentieth century. Friends with most of the contemporary innovators of his era--Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and Louis Zukofsky, among others--Williams made a radical break with the modernist tradition by seeking...

"Bleed, Blister, and Purge" traces the fits and starts of medical progress on the western frontier. With the authority of a scholar and the sparkle of an old-time storyteller, Dr. Volney Steele takes the reader from rotgut whiskey to modern anesthetics, from castor oil to antibiotics, and from barroom surgery to modern hospital operations. Citing everything from government reports to first-person remembrances, combined with his own sensitive interpretations,...

Essays on the lies of doctors such as John S. "Rip" Ford, George C. Cupples, Frank Paschal and Anson Jones, during the era when epidemic diseases such as yellow fever, malaria and typhoid ravaged the populations and when people sought far more from their doctors than mere formal training and medical degrees, provide a framework for a fascinating view of Texas history.

"In this comprehensive account, Thomas J. Ward examines the development of the African American medical profession in the South. Under segregation, the white medical profession provided inadequate service at best to African American patients. Paradoxically, African Americans could gain financial success and upward mobility by becoming doctors themselves. Ward tracks the rise of African American medical schools, professional organizations, and hospitals....

For enslaved and newly freed African Americans, attaining freedom and citizenship without health for themselves and their families would have been an empty victory. Even before emancipation, African Americans recognized that control of their bodies was a critical battleground in their struggle for autonomy, and they devised strategies to retain at least some of that control. In Doctoring Freedom, Gretchen Long tells the stories of African Americans...