Right Living: An Anglo-American Tradition of Self-Help Medicine and Hygiene

Abstract

Right Living: An Anglo-American Tradition of Self-Help Medicine and Hygiene Edited by Charles E. Rosenberg (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) (236 pages; $40.00 cloth) Is the focus of historical research of the healing arts changing? History of science scholar Charles Rosenberg may be suggesting just that. In the introduction to his latest book, Right Living: An Anglo-American Tradition of Self-Help Medicine and Hygiene, Rosenberg writes, Younger scholars have cultivated a vigorous interest in the perspective and experience of patients and everyday practitioners-lay people and alternative providers as well as mainstream physicians(p. vii). Perhaps one of the largest gaps today in the history of the healing arts-medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and complementary therapies-is the dearth of organized descriptive data on the experience of the American patient. Right Living explores the self-help practices of nineteenth-century Americans through the lens of the popular health publications of the period that guided self-help The publications included are advice books, almanacs, pamphlets, receipt books, and broadsides. Nineteenth-century America, in particular the antebellum period, is often considered the peak of the American advice book movement. Advice books and self-help were not new to Anglo-Americans, however. They brought their cultural tradition of self-care networking through personal interaction and print from Europe. It is the American expression of this cultural tradition that is the focus of Right Living, and this is what readers may find to be the most intriguing. Rosenberg identifies early American self-help sources written for the public as a relatively neglected if richly diverse body of printed materials (p. vii). Although there are numerous historical almanacs, self-help books, and sickroom management guides to be explored, Right Living provides the best evidence for the historian interested in exploring American self-help practices in print literature, since the 1981 text by Anita and Michael Fellman, Making Sense of Self: Medical Advice Literature in Late Nineteenth-Century America.1 Rosenberg organizes the nine chapters of Right Living Into three themes of self-help publications: the shaping and transmission of older English and continental tradition, the persistent interest of the public in health issues related to sexual relations, childbearing, and child rearing, and practice. Though all three areas are significant to the understanding of the social and health-care history of early American culture, the chapters of most importance to scholars of nursing history may be those on domestic practice, in particular the chapter by Kathleen Brown. The subject of Brown's chapter is The Maternal Physician,2 written by Mary Hunt Palmer Tyler in 1811, which is a vivid description of Tyler's work as a nineteenth-century woman healer (nurse?). It provides insight into women's self-care practices, such as healing networks and the receipt book tradition of sharing healing remedies. In addition, it offers recommendations for nursing care and cleanliness. Brown also includes in her analysis an exceptional example of American women's healing culture in the receipt book of Philadelphia community healer Elizabeth Paschall. This chapter is an exciting read for any historian interested in women healers' contributions to the health-care culture of the period. …