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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74.3 (2000) 620-623



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Book Review

A Saw, Pocket Instruments, and Two Ounces of Whiskey: Frontier Military Medicine in the Great Basin

The Healers of Nineteenth-Century Nevada

Disease and Medical Care in the Mountain West: Essays on Region, History, and Practice


Anton Paul Sohn. A Saw, Pocket Instruments, and Two Ounces of Whiskey: Frontier Military Medicine in the Great Basin. Frontier Military Series, no. 20. Spokane, Wash.: Arthur H. Clarke, 1998. 237 pp. Ill. $32.50.

Anton P. Sohn. The Healers of Nineteenth-Century Nevada. Biographies of Medical Practitioners Series. Reno, Nev.: Greasewood Press, 1997. 202 pp. Ill. $24.95.

Martha L. Hildreth and Bruce T. Moran, eds. Disease and Medical Care in the Mountain West: Essays on Region, History, and Practice. Wilbur S. Shepperson Series in History and Humanities. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1998. xix + 154 pp. Ill. $39.95.

The appearance of these three books signifies an active center of work in the history of medicine of the American West located, interestingly enough, in Nevada--one of the most remote and least populated of western states. The past two decades have brought a body of revisionist work on the history of the American West, creating a subdiscipline that combines environmental history, studies in gender relations, minority history, and urban and labor history with more traditional political and economic studies. The appearance of Richard White's lively overview, "It's Your Misfortune and None of Mine Own": A New History of the American West (1991), and of the revised New Encyclopedia of the American West edited by Howard Roberts Lamar (1998), marks a point of maturation in the field of western history. Yet, for all their attention to the demography and social conditions of settlers and indigenous peoples, the new western historians pay little specific close attention to the intricacies of disease and the practice of medicine on the frontier. Readers interested in learning some of the particulars of medicine in the American West have until now been limited to pictorial histories and a host of autobiographical memoirs of individual physicians fighting the odds to deliver care. Another genre, the official medical society or hospital history, is constrained by the perspective of the book's fiscal sponsors, and usually presents an uncontextualized subscription history artificially limited by state or institutional boundaries.

The work reviewed here reveals significant improvement in writing the history of medicine of the American West. The first two of these three books demonstrate the problems of doing self-contained local history, but they also transcend some of the pitfalls. Despite its anecdotal title, A Saw, Pocket Instruments, and Two Ounces of Whiskey is a thoroughly researched study that provides a useful treatment of nineteenth-century military medicine in the Great Basin region. Anton Paul Sohn combines the use of local primary materials with research in the national archives, and characterizes military incursions into a region that overlaps state boundaries. The reader gains an overview of the sixteen U.S. military forts organized in the Great Basin for a variety of purposes, including exploration, the consolidation of Union strength, control of Indian uprisings, and ensuring the loyalty of the Mormon settlements. The book provides considerable [End Page 620] detail on the forts and hospitals, including photographs and architectural details; the appendixes list service data on physicians and diagnosis data for two fort hospitals; and there is a complete bibliography of published and unpublished sources on the subject. Rather than pursuing a clear argument, the author poses questions about the "quality of health care" (p. 76) and considers actual practice utilizing records of the post hospitals. The best of these chapters deal with testing requirements for military physicians, and with nonmilitary activities of the army surgeons who brought medical and hospital care to neighboring Indians and civilians.

The next work, also by Sohn, grew out of...

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