History of Medicine
The following are a series of lectures about the history of medicine in America
Episodes
14 episodes
Lecture Fourteen: Where are We Now?
The first half of American Medical History ends at the Flexner Report, which entirely morphed American Healthcare into a monolithic corporate entity under the complete control of the AMA. Every aspect of healthcare transformed, from educa...
Lecture Thirteen: The Flexner Report and African American Physicians
Two pages of the Flexner Report condemned African American medial providers, hospitals, and patients to decades of struggle. Relying on the AMA's medical-racial script, and playing into the atmosphere of Progressive eugenics, Flexner's ch...
Lecture Twelve: The Flexner Report
Once the AMA and William Welch orchestrated an alliance of Progressive reformers, corporate interests, and state medical licensing agencies, it was time to sanctify the cogs of a new medical system. That is what the Flexner Report is all ...
Lecture Eleven: The Battle of the Williams, Welch vs. Osler
Two of American medicine's pioneers, and co-founders of Johns Hopkins Medical School, represented a fork in the road. William Osler, whose scientific humanism pushed back against a healthcare system teetering between commercialism and qua...
Lecture Ten: The Cogs of AMA Reform
The AMA grew up in a libertarian America, but chose to change its nature during a top-down Progressive America, where experts and scientifically based rules were determined to be crucial to any viable reforms. Working with corporate found...
Lecture Nine: Eugenics and Medical Progressivism
As the AMA gained power and scripted a plan to commandeer the medical system, it used its medical-racial script to leap on the progressive train, including an embrace of eugenics. Eugenics flowed from the medical racial script, and according to...
Lecture Eight: The AMA's Progressive Pivot
Born in Republican America, with its emphasis on democratic decentralization, the AMA was floundering in the late 1800's, with few doctors latching their sails to its agenda. Most orthodox doctors remained fully independent, many graduate...
Lecture Seven: The African American Medical Experience 1800's
Excluded from the AMA and from orthodox medicine, African American doctors had to find their own way in the late 1800's. Virtually no African American doctors existed in the early century, but that changed in the Civil War, especially wit...
Lecture Six: Alternative Medicine in the 1800's
While we view traditional medical care as the norm, it was not always that way. Throughout most of the 1800's Americans chose alternative providers more frequently than orthodox doctors; their outcomes were better, their ideas based on co...
Lecture Five: The Origins of the AMA
With orthodox medicine in disarray, with no standards of education, and with alternative medical philosophies ruling the roost, several prominent orthodox doctors came together to forma national organization to represent the needs of orthodoxy,...
Lecture Four: Republican Medicine
After the Revolution, American was severed from the European seat of orthodox medical power. American orthodox doctors were forced to establish their own schools, their own dogma, and their own leaders. Much of what glued orthodox d...
Lecture Three: The Medical Racial Script
Starting in the colonial period and crystalizing during the Republican Period, American doctors differentiated themselves from their European colleagues and from non-traditional healers by instituting a medical-racial script. We'll discus...