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Epilogue
- University of Massachusetts Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
107 EPILOGUE This study examines the dynamic relationship between popular print and popular medicine in pre–Civil War America. This relationship, of course, did not begin with the founding of the American colonies nor was it derailed by the carnage and economic disruption brought about by the Civil War. The tradition that dates to the invention of the printing press is as vibrant today as it was during the period covered here. Scores of health publications for the laity—many in multiple editions—continued to be published in the United States in great numbers during the second half of the nineteenth century, and the trend continues to the present. In pre–Civil War America, most health care took place in the home. Today, doctors’ offices, outpatient clinics, and hospitals play central roles in the management and treatment of illness. Yet, despite the many advances in medicine and the evolution of hospitals into mega-complexes that treat every disease and engage in cutting-edge research, the desire of twenty-first-century Americans to participate in their own health care is as strong as it was among their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century counterparts. The latter, living in a time when trained physicians were financially inaccessible or geographically unavailable, had few choices in the treatment of illness. If they did not treat themselves, they turned to other family members, neighbors, or a local midwife. And the lay practitioner , whoever it might be, would have possessed as much authority in the eyes of the patient as a trained physician. The medical knowledge they brought to the patient’s bedside would have been derived from several sources: oral culture, folk tradition, and print. Moreover, this medical knowledge would have been based on the same assumptions concerning the body, health, and disease held by trained physicians. Advances in medical science, medical education, and health care in the late nineteenth century, however, began to create a divide between the laity and the profession that has continued to expand, leaving twenty- 108 EPILOGUE first-century Americans with a bewildering array of choices regarding health care and often little understanding of a health care system that has become extremely expensive, bureaucratic, and complex. Navigating this complicated system of primary care physicians, specialists, insurance companies, HMOs, and drug companies can be formidable even for the most sophisticated patient. Today, scores of publications are available to help Americans navigate the system, seek alternative care, or treat themselves. The tradition of popular health publications is as strong as it was during the period covered by this book, but now print sources are complemented, as well as threatened, by television infomercials and an ever-growing number of Internet sites.1 Except for their role as outlets for the growing proprietary medicine industry, almanacs exerted little influence in the expanding post–Civil War market in popular health publications. The “age of almanacs” cited by Arthur Prynne had passed. The almanac, once the leading secular publication in America, was, by the outbreak of that war, one among many genres vying for the attention of a rapidly expanding population of readers. As the American book trade became increasingly competitive and diverse, the Poor Richards, Poor Robins, and Poor Wills of the almanac trade—once honored guests at every fireside—were replaced by publishers and entrepreneurs who seemed less interested in forging a relationship with their readers. By the late nineteenth century the almanac had drifted to the margins of the American book trade, its image tarnished by the perception among many that it had become a handmaiden of the proprietary medicine industry and that its readership was made up primarily of the gullible and the ignorant. In his 1878 study of American literature, Moses Coit Tyler sums up the current opinion of the genre by referring to the almanac as the “very quack, clown, pack-horse, and pariah of modern literature.”2 Almanacs, of course, did not completely disappear by the midnineteenth century. The genre persisted and has survived to this day, as any reader of the Old Farmer’s Almanac can attest or a visit to a reference section of a modern chain bookstore will confirm. Political almanacs and sports almanacs are just two categories that come readily to mind in a genre that covers a plethora of subjects. Persistence, however, has brought significant change. This change is strikingly evident as one compares the content of today’s almanacs with that of their popular forerunners. Except for the Old Farmer’s...