Medical Pluralism in 19th Century America

The new American republic began as 13 states perched on the Atlantic and grew in 100 years to a nation spanning the continent, with a population swelling from five million to 76 million. This included 31 million immigrants, each of whom arrived with their own social structures, cultural values, religious beliefs, and health practices. The goal of this course is to understand how America reforged, enriched, and tailored European medicine to meet the health needs and beliefs of its diverse, ballooning, and geographically sprawling population. These needs created a medically pluralistic environment of diverse healers, therapeutics, and institutions.

This course addresses how traditional 19th-century European medicine, which relied on painful and less than efficacious treatments of purgatives and bleeding, was challenged by new American healing systems such as osteopathy, homeopathy, naturopathy, Adventism, and others. Medicinal botanicals and healing therapies from Asia, Africa, and Native America expanded therapeutic choices available to Americans in the 19th century. America became the world leader in developing patented medicines. We will look at how women and Black medical schools and hospitals provided education and specialized care for excluded Americans, as well as the role of Johns Hopkins in standardizing medical education. Throughout the course we discuss how politics and economic power limited access to care and how the legacy of 19th-century medical pluralism impacts our present-day system of care.