A study of physiology in America, this places the development of American physiology in the cultural context of the period. Divided into three parts, the book covers social and institutional history; physiology in relation to other fields; and instruments, materials and techniques.

Celebrating the centennial of the American Physiological Society, this new book reviews the activities during the Society's first hundred years. The first section covers materials from the Society's founding in 1887 and a review of each of the first 25 year periods of the Society's existence. The second section includes a chronological account of the Presidents and the Executive Secretary-Treasurers. Also included are chapters on membership, publications, meetings, financial affairs, educational activities, organization of the Society, neurophysiology, relations with IUPS, women in physiology, use and care of laboratory animals, awards and honors, and the centennial celebration

Progressive nineteenth-century Americans believed firmly that human perfection could be achieved with the aid of modern science. To many, the science of that turbulent age appeared to offer bright new answers to life's age-old questions. Such a climate, not surprisingly, fostered the growth of what we now view as "pseudo-sciences"—disciplines delicately balancing a dubious inductive methodology with moral and spiritual concerns, disseminated with a combination of aggressive entrepreneurship and sheer entertainment. Such "sciences" as mesmerism, spiritualism, homoeopathy, hydropathy, and phrenology were warmly received not only by the uninformed and credulous but also by the respectable and educated. Rationalistic, egalitarian, and utilitarian, they struck familiar and reassuring chords in American ears and gave credence to the message of reformers that health and happiness are accessible to all. As the contributors to this volume show, the diffusion and practice of these pseudo-sciences intertwined with all the major medical, cultural, religious, and philosophical revolutions in nineteenth-century America. Hydropathy and particularly homoeopathy, for example, enjoyed sufficient respectability for a time to challenge orthodox medicine. The claims of mesmerists and spiritualists appeared to offer hope for a new moral social order. Daring flights of pseudo-scientific thought even ventured into such areas as art and human sexuality. And all the pseudo-sciences resonated with the communitarian and women's rights movements. This important exploration of the major nineteenth-century pseudo-sciences provides fresh perspectives on the American society of that era and on the history of the orthodox sciences, a number of which grew out of the fertile soil plowed by the pseudo-scientists.

During the twentieth century, medicine has been radically transformed and powerfully transformative. In 1900, western medicine was important to philanthropy and public health, but it was marginal to the state, the industrial economy and the welfare of most individuals. It is now central to these aspects of life. Our prospects seem increasingly depe

In the late nineteenth century, as Americans debated the "woman question," a battle over the meaning of biology arose in the medical profession. Some medical men claimed that women were naturally weak, that education would make them physically ill, and that women physicians endangered the profession. Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842-1906), a physician from New York, worked to prove them wrong and argued that social restrictions, not biology, threatened female health. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America is the first full-length biography of Mary Putnam Jacobi, the most significant woman physician of her era and an outspoken advocate for women's rights. Jacobi rose to national prominence in the 1870s and went on to practice medicine, teach, and conduct research for over three decades. She campaigned for co-education, professional opportunities, labor reform, and suffrage--the most important women's rights issues of her day. Downplaying gender differences, she used the laboratory to prove that women were biologically capable of working, learning, and voting. Science, she believed, held the key to promoting and producing gender equality. Carla Bittel's biography of Jacobi offers a piercing view of the role of science in nineteenth-century women's rights movements and provides historical perspective on continuing debates about gender and science today.

Edgar Holden, M.D., of Newark: Provincial Physician on a National Stage is a study of medicine and health in Essex County, New Jersey, and its largest city, Newark, in the decades following the Civil War. Th e book is structured around the multifaceted career of Edgar Holden, a Newark physician who transcended the provinciality that characterized Essex Countys medical community and institutions. Th e author demonstrates how institution building and new paradigms of medical authority funneled from burgeoning urban medical centers into the provincial and sluggish medical landscape of northern New Jersey. Th e lack of a medical school within the state stymied the intellectual and professional ferment that the best nineteenth-century American medical schools attracted and fostered. New York City, with its medical institutions and elite practitioners cast a giant shadow over northern New Jersey, which consequently has been somewhat neglected by historians of medicine. An exploration of this lively community of welltrained practitioners, fl edgling institutions, and ailing citizens sheds light on similar medical communities that found themselves importingbut rarely exportingmedical knowledge and expertise.

During the twentieth century, medicine has been radically transformed and powerfully transformative. In 1900, western medicine was important to philanthropy and public health, but it was marginal to the state, the industrial economy and the welfare of most individuals. It is now central to these aspects of life. Our prospects seem increasingly dependent on the progress of bio-medical sciences and genetic technologies which promise to reshape future generations. The editors of Medicine in the Twentieth Century have commissioned over forty authoritative essays, written by historical specialists but intended for general audiences. Some concentrate on the political economy of medicine and health as it changed from period to period and varied between countries, others focus on understandings of the body, and a third set of essays explores transformations in some of the theatres of medicine and the changing experiences of different categories of practitioners and patients.