Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic: Health Care in Early America By Elaine G. Breslaw. (New York: New York University Press, 2012. Pp. 237. Cloth, $35.00.)Elaine Breslaw's book provides a synthesis of scholarship on health care from the contact to the 1890s. Through ten chapters, the book integrates scholarship on such topics as the demographic disaster of the early European-Indian contact, the treatment of and changing concepts of disease, childbirth practices, the training of medical nel, food and nutrition, military medicine, alternative medical practices, and public health problems (6).Breslaw claims that her study also tackles the fall of American medicine, and particularly how the medical profession failed to incorporate scientific advances made in France and Germany when such knowledge contradicted American doctors' theories of disease (4-5). In doing so, the medical profession not only failed to improve health, claims Breslaw, but often became a stumbling block to advances in (4).As a synthesis, Breslaw's book succeeds in its aims. Although Lotions, Potions, Pills and Magic does not contain much new material for historians of medicine (and offers bibliographic essays for each chapter rather than endnotes), it does serve as a helpful starting place for historians unfamiliar with medicine and health in early America. For example, chapter 1, Columbian Exchange, offers an interesting portrayal of health challenges for both Native and European populations, offering an array of academic opinions on why so many Native Americans suffered and died upon contact with European diseases. Chapter 7, Giving Birth, begins with the ubiquitous story of Martha Ballard but also supplies interesting material on Native American birthing practices (114).As to Breslaw's tale of an American profession that fell from grace, I have several concerns. Two characterizations populate the text, one that depicts early American therapeutics as brutal and ineffective and the other that describes the medical profession as unable to organize, retarded by a vast army of illiterate and incompetent medical personnel, stymied by American exceptionalism and superiority that precluded learning from European developments (185). In Breslaw's portrait of medical practice, patients endured brutal treatments (heroic therapeutics such as calomel and bloodletting) for decades because of their respect for physicians, only to lose that respect and reject traditional medical treatment by the early nineteenth century. Thus, in this story, people found little benefit, yet continued to consult with traditional physicians, as many surviving physicians' daybooks can attest.Certainly, Breslaw's emphasis on epidemics highlights the inadequacies of medical treatment in early America, but what of the day-to-day practice of medicine? …