"Bulletin of the History of Medicine" Reviews "Years of Change and Suffering"!

I'm pleased to announce that The Bulletin of the History of Medicine - the official journal of the American Association for the History of Medicine - published a very kind review of my second book (co-edited with Guy R. Hasegawa, Pharm.D.), Years of Change and Suffering: Modern Perspectives on Civil War Medicine (Edinborough Press, 2009)!

The review - in the Fall 2010 issue - was penned by Margaret Humphreys, MD, PhD, Josiah Charles Trent Professor of the History of Medicine, Professor of History, and Associate Professor of Medicine at Duke University. Dr. Humphreys is a distinguished historian and a specialist in the history of science and medicine; she has focused her research and publications primarily on infectious disease in the U.S. and the American south, while her current research explores the history of medicine during the American Civil War.

Dr. Humphreys is author of several books, including Yellow Fever and the South, Malaria: Poverty, Race, and Public Health in the United States, and Intensely Human: The Health of Black Soldiers in the American Civil War. You can read my interviews with Dr. Humphreys about her interesting research on typhus and the Civil War and Intensely Human here and here.

My two books - (Lincoln's Labels: America's Best Known Brands and the Civil War (Edinborough Press, 2008) and Years of Change have received wonderful support in the Civil War blogosphere and from popular history publications such as America's Civil War, Civil War Times, and Civil War News, and I am so appreciative and humbled by that support. The reviews of Years of Change in the Bulletin and in JAMA are special in their own way because they are professional and/or academic publications.

REMEMBER THAT ALL ROYALTIES FROM YEARS OF CHANGE ARE BEING DONATED TO CIVIL WAR MEDICAL HERITAGE PRESERVATION!

Excerpts:

Taking their title from Emily Bronte's poem, "Remembrance," James Schmidt and Guy Hasegawa have collected eight essays that indeed recall the horrors and the triumphs that characterized medicine in the American Civil War...

Jodi Koste leads off, with a useful and informative paper on Richmond's Medical College of Virginia (MCV) and its extraordinary growth during the war. With all other southern medical schools either closed or in cities under Union control, MCV remained the only school producing the physicians so urgently needed by the Confederate army...

James Schmidt's essay offers something completely different, a look at Yankee [medical] ingenuity as reflected in the pages of the Scientific American during the war...

Jay Bollet takes up the subject of Civil War amputations and refutes the charge that surgeons were too quick to amputate...

Terry Hambrecht explicates two newly. discovered letter books written by major Confederate surgeon J.J. Chisolm. In addition to providing much detail regarding Confederate medical practice, these letters reveal that Chisolm acquired much of his knowledge from observations of European military surgeons in the decade leading up to the Civil War...

Harry Herr describes the horror of urological injuries...while admitting that surgeons at the time had little to offer such men, he does find that [more] men recovered from gunshot wounds to the pelvis in the last two years of the war...and attributes this to surgeons learning the proper use of catheters...

Guy Hasegawa explores the southern fascination with indigenous remedies...[and] points out the tension in promoting such botanic drugs at a time when regular medicine was waging sectarian fights against botanical practitioners...

D.J. Canale reviews the story of neurology and the war, one specialty that clearly benefited from a specialized hospital and an unfortunately large number of cases with every imaginable nerve injury available for study...

The last essay, by Judith Andersen, adds to the growing literature on the emotional toll the war took on some men...

A useful bibliography ends the text, revealing how rich the body of literature about the war and medicine has become.

Thanks, Bulletin of the History of Medicine and Dr. Humphreys!

Read more reviews of Years of Change here:

*JAMA - Journal of the American Medical Association
*Civil War News
*America's Civil War Magazine!
*Featured on "Civil War Talk Radio"
*Review by Drew Wagenhoffer at "Civil War Books and Authors"
*Review by James Durney at "TOCWOC"
*Review by Robert Redd at "Confederate Book Review" *Reviews (here and here) by Rea Andrew Redd at "Civil War Librarian"
*Advance Praise

The hardcover and softcover are still available!