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James H. Cassedy, a prolific and widely respected medical historian, died at his home in Bethesda, Maryland, on 14 September 2007, aged 87. Famous for warmly welcoming historians to the National Library of Medicine, he also gained renown among Americanists and medical historians for his erudition and gracefully written monographs, articles, and reviews. Having taken his Ph.D. in American Civilization at Brown University in 1959, he traversed the medical history subdiscipline before and after the embattled 1960s.
Jim began a series of five monographs with Charles V. Chapin and the Public Health Movement (1962), which charted Gilded Age and Progressive Era public health history, using Chapin's long career and wide influence as a guide. The middle three works, Demography in Early America: Beginnings of the Statistical Mind, 1600–1800 (1969), American Medicine and Statistical Thinking, 1800–1860 (1984), and Medicine and American Growth, 1800–1860 (1986) formed a trilogy, covering more than 250 years of history and displaying Jim's rich and wide erudition. His final book, Medicine in America: A Short History (1991), summarized key developments incisively and insightfully, in a form accessible to students and neophyte historians alike.
Besides monographs, Jim published more than thirty articles on a dazzling array of subjects: anticontagionism, muckraking, microscopy, meat inspection, diplomacy, learned societies, journalism, intemperence, and homiletics. Innovative in subject matter and gracefully and lucidly written, the essays displayed a rarely equaled knowledge of nineteenth-century medical literature. Rarely cannibalized for subsequent monographs, his essays still point out fruitful directions for research.
Writing as many as sixty book reviews, Jim interpreted general works of American history for medical historians and medical-historical works for Americanists. With other historians, including David L. Cowen, James Harvey Young, and John Duffy, he bridged the isthmus between the mainland of American history and the island of medical history. (It was the next generation's social and cultural historians—activated by 1960s conflicts [End Page 188] over civil rights and the Vietnam War—that rushed across the bridge, mightily offending the islanders.) Jim's historiographical commitments emerged most clearly in this genre, as they do for most historians. Generous but restrained in praise, diplomatic but determined in criticism, he was preoccupied with historical craftsmanship: harmony, balance, coherence, lucidity, and language appropriate to subject and audience. Jousting over the various "grand theories" employed by his contemporaries interested him not at all.
Although his career focused on historical writing, Jim also anchored two institutions central to medical history. For the American Association for the History of Medicine, he was a regular participant at its annual meetings for almost fifty years, delivered the Garrison Lecture in 1978, served as president during 1982–83, won the William H. Welch Medal in 1987, and was celebrated with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. Serving on or chairing many AAHM committees, including three Local Arrangement Committees, he edited the Association's Research in Progress from 1973–1981. For the National Library of Medicine, he compiled and edited the Bibliography of the History of Medicine and its electronic offspring from 1968 until 2006, serving at the same time as an informal welcoming committee to generations of visiting graduate students and historians.
Assaying the history of demography, public health, and medicine, bridging American history and medical history, and a long association with two of medical history's principal institutions all define Jim's place as a twentieth-century historian. With his smooth, rich voice, he left a large legacy for those who will listen. [End Page 189]
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR
THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE
Eighty-first Annual Meeting
10–13 April 2008
Rochester, N.Y.
For further information, contact Co-Chairs, Local Arrangements Committee:
Theodore M. Brown, Ph.D.
Department of History
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY 14627-0070
tel: 585-275-2051; fax: 585-756-4425
e-mail: theodore_brown@urmc.rochester.edu
and
Stephanie B. Clark, M.D., Ph.D.
Division of Medical Humanities
University of Rochester School of Medicine, Box 676
Rochester, NY 14642-0676
tel.: 585-275-5800; fax: 585-506-0152
e-mail: stephanie_brownclark@urmc.rochester.edu
