Revolutionary Medicine: The Founding Fathers and Mothers in Sickness and in Health

The first three books I've read in 2014 have taken me to America amid the Civil War; Paris, circa 1880; and sixteenth century Venice. All were fictional stories incorporating varying degrees of fact. I needed a change of pace and have had Jeanne E. Abrams' Revolutionary Medicine on my reading list for months. Despite the fact that I only just vowed to read less about disease and war and that Revolutionary Medicine is clearly chock full of both, I added it to my Nook before a long trip last week.

I'll begin by saying that Abrams makes great use of her primary sources. This book is studded with journal entries, correspondence, and other first-rate material that make the characters - Benjamin Franklin, George and Martha Washington, John and Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James and Dolley Madison - come alive to the reader. Who knew that Martha Washington wrote Saturday as "satterday," for example? It's funny, it's pitiable, but it's also deeply humanizing.

Through volumes of research, Abrams has shown the extent to which these elite, early Americans were marked at every stage by death and disease. There is not one who hasn't lost a child or spouse (or both) to what we look upon today as a highly treatable disease. Revolutionary Medicine is also a near constant reminder of the ways in which we have tamed our environment in the past 200 years. The denizens of Washington, DC, are laid low by malaria with alarming regularity in Washington's time; today, such a diagnosis in the city would be regarded as singularly peculiar, among other adjectives.

Revolutionary Medicine also serves as portrait of how medicine has changed. In the time of days of the Founding Fathers, an educated person knew as much of medicine as, perhaps, their physician - who may or may not have ever studied medicine especially and may or may not rely on anymore than bleeding the patient no matter the symptoms. Indeed, more than one of the men and women profiled here administered such medical procedures as inoculation or bleeding on themselves, their children, or other family members.

This book is filled with fascinating tidbits (Boston once banned the smallpox inoculation, Philadelphia suffered through an unimaginable yellow fever epidemic, George Washington ordered and organized the vaccination of the Continental Army against smallpox) and trivia (the name laudanum is derived from the Latin laudere, "to praise" - and Jefferson and Franklin both needed it by the end).

If you're a non-fiction or American history junkie, you'll want to read Revolutionary Medicine. If not, if you know that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day and that George Washington died of a simple throat infection compounded by repeated bleedings (which he himself ordered), then you probably already know everything you really need to know about the sickness and health of our founding fathers.