Charles E. Rosenberg

Charles E. Rosenberg Charles Ernest Rosenberg (born November 11, 1936) is an American historian of medicine and medical science. He was the 1982 Fielding H. Garrison Lecturer for the American Association for the History of Medicine and the 1988 Benjamin Rush Lecturer for the American Psychiatric Association. He received in 1969 the William H. Welch Medal and in 1997 the George Sarton Medal. In 2002 he was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society. Quotes Cholera was the classic epidemic disease of the nineteenth century, as Plague (disease) plague had been of the 14th century fourteenth. When cholera first appeared in the United States in 1832, yellow fever and smallpox, the great epidemic diseases of the previous two centuries, were no longer truly national problems. Yellow fever had disappeared from the Northern United States North, and Smallpox vaccine vaccination had deprived smallpox of much of it menace. Cholera, on the other hand, appeared in almost every part of the country in the course of the century. ...Before 1817, there had probably never been a cholera epidemic outside the Far East; during the nineteenth century, it spread through almost the entire world ... The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (with a new afterword) University of Chicago Press 2024 9780226726762 https://books.google.com/books?id=k2pL9c00rl4C&pg=PA1 1 (278 pages; 1st edition 1962) Far into the nineteenth century, Washington remained a small, rather provincial city. Life was seasonal. Oppressed by heat and malaria during the summer, the capital did not awake to its foreshortened and unnaturally frenetic life until fall and the convening of Congress. The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and the Law in the Gilded Age University of Chicago Press 1968 9780226727172 https://books.google.com/books?id=ZLLawwEACAAJ&pg=PA1 1 (289 pages) Medicine has always had its History of medicine historians, but until recently it was a history written by and for practitioners. Until the early nineteenth century, in fact, history and practice could hardly be distinguished. Galen and Hippocrates could be and were used to bolster arguments about the nature of fever or the logic of a particular therapeutic choice. A learned physician read Latin and Ancient Greek Greek, not simply to mystify the laity but to work with those master texts that still figured meaningfully in his intellectual life.By the late nineteenth century, of course, the writings of Classical antiquity classical and Hellenistic period Hellenistic antiquity were no longer alive in the thought and practice of even educated practitioners. History had become quite clearly history — something in the past. This is not to suggest that interest in the medicine of previous eras disappeared. It remained was to become gradually — if even today incompletely — an academic field. But the history of medicine was still populated almost entirely by scholars trained in medical schools, the great majority of whom made their living as physicians. Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine Cambridge University Press 1992 9780521395694 https://books.google.com/books/about/Explaining_Epidemics.html?id=fPKwBbrNGUgC&pg=PA1 1 (375 pages) Even the most optimistic advocate of innovation in medicine cannot ignore ever-increasing Health care#Financing health-care costs, costs associated in some measure with that Health technology technology we so much admire. And, as we are equally well aware, access to clinical services is far from universal or equitable. As I write this introduction, more than forty million Americans lack health insurance and medical expenses remain a major cause of bankruptcy. Still another paradox complicates the relationship between society and medicine. Though expectations of therapeutic efficacy have never been more euphoric and patients appear to trust their own physicians, respect for the medical profession has declined ... The pharmaceutical industry is trusted even less. Our Present Complaint: American Medicine, Then and Now Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 2007 9780801887154 https://books.google.com/books?id=tq9uDF2Xyu8C&pg=PA2 2 (214 pages) No Other Gods (1976) Physicians and Social theory social thinkers since the days of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush have criticized the peculiar tensions of American life. The speculative pathologies which explain precisely how these tensions injured the mind and body have changed in form since the days of Rush, but the ambivalent attitudes which they express toward American life have not.Yet neither Benjamin Rush nor his successors later in the century—Silas Weir Mitchell (physician) Weir Mitchell, Isaac Ray, and George Miller Beard G. M. Beard, among others—were willing, warn as they might of the psychic perils of American life, to exchange its liberties for the placid tyranny of the Russian or Turkish empires (or, most Americans felt, their Protestantism for the formalistic reassurances of Catholicism). No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought revised & expanded Johns Hopkins University Press 1997 9780801855986 https://books.google.com/books?id=D4WBwmOBAOwC&pg=PA8 7–8 (311 pages) Just as naturalists and Outline of physical science physical scientists assumed that their research illuminated the glory of God in His works, so did most nineteenth-century American physicians assume that there could be no conflict between their findings and the truths of morality. The human organism was a thing both material and divine, and offenses both physical and moral were necessarily punished with disease. Drinking, overeating, sexual excess, all carried with them inevitable retribution, not because the Lord deigned to intercede directly in human affairs, but because He had created man's body so that infringing on God's moral law meant disobeying the laws of physiology. Moralism thus drew upon the prestige of science, while medicine was pleased that its findings supported the dictates of morality. pp. 10–11 ... Charles Delucena Meigs Charles D. Meigs and Hugh Hodge, Philadelphia's leading teachers of obstetrics in the 1840s and 1850s were vociferous in rejecting the suggestion that Postpartum infections puerperal fever might be contagious, indeed often spread by the obstetrician himself ... The intensity of their response suggests that something more than mere intellectual difference was involved; one of the roots of their hostility to a contagionist point of view lay in the threat it implied for the physician's status, especially in relation to female patients. p. 14 Quotes about Charles E. Rosenberg In an account that both travels over explored territory and covers new ground, Charles Rosenberg provides a vivid and complex history of a key Health care health-care institution. Rosenberg divides The Care of Strangers into two periods: the pre-Civil War era, before the advent of modern medicine, and from the war to the 1920s, by which time the hospital had assumed modern form.The underlying theme of the book is that hospitals are a product of the interaction of Reformism (historical) social reformers (bent on solving general social problems) and physicians. Hospitals were dominated by reformers as long as medical science was weak. But with its rise and the subsequent power of physicians, reformers and their social welfare goals faded. Beth Stevens, review of The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America's Hospital System by Charles E. Rosenberg American Journal of Sociology 94 5 1213–1214 March 1989 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/229123 10.1086/229123 External links Charles E. Rosenberg Department of the History of Science, Harvard University https://histsci.fas.harvard.edu/charles-rosenberg (with link to C.V.) Category:1936 births Category:Living people Category:Academics from the United States Category:Columbia University alumni Category:Harvard University faculty Category:Historians from the United States Category:Historians of science Category:Members of the American Philosophical Society Category:Non-fiction authors from the United States Category:University of Pennsylvania faculty