No One Ailing Except a Physician: Medicine in the Mining West, 1848-1919 (review)

Though histories of medicine for individual western states contain chapters on mining, No One Ailing Except a Physician is the first to offer a systematic treatment of the topic. It takes us from the California Gold Rush of the late 1840s, through the mineral rushes of the mid- and late nineteenth centuries in Nevada, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, and other western states, to Alaska in the early twentieth century, and from above-ground placer mining to hard-rock deep-shaft mining. Because in most places mining continued for many years, and because the authors devote a chapter or two to each state or area of the West, readers will find some repetition of information—as when, for example, the same medical behaviors or practices occurred in different states. The book's scope is quite broad, looking at physicians, patients, diseases, industrial medicine, occupational health, public health, home and folk practices, ethnicity issues, hospitals, accidents, water supplies, living conditions, and diet, among other topics.

With so much information to convey and with a difficult organizational scheme, this is not a tightly written book. It is, however, a labor of love. The authors clearly enjoyed researching and writing this volume. It derives from an annual Colorado Endowment for the Humanities prize awarded to support the publication of nonfiction works that make an area of humanities research more available to the Colorado public. Thus the book has a somewhat informal style, with many exclamation points at the end of sentences and with authors' observations on past medical practices and human behaviors.

Medical historians can glean good information from No One Ailing. They will have to stumble over some presentist statements, occasional factual and interpretive errors, and some drawing of conclusions based on weak or sparse evidence, primarily in the discussions of medical rather than mining history. Duane A. Smith, professor of history at Fort Lewis College, and Ronald C. Brown, professor of history at Southwest Texas State University, are at their best when they discuss mining history and past practices. Readers will learn how the health problems of miners changed depending on the mineral mined, the mining technique used, and the living conditions at a particular mining camp or mining town. For example, pulmonary problems became much more common as miners began using machines to drill into and break up hard rock, creating fine dust particles that were then inhaled with each breath. The kind of medical care that physicians provided changed as well, not just because of the growth of medical knowledge, but also because mining developed from an individual endeavor in the early years to a corporate enterprise.

No One Ailing has some flaws, but it provides a good introduction for historians of medicine to the world of mining and to the kinds of health issues that miners, physicians, public health officials, and mine owners faced in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American West.