Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 2010
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly 30:3 (Spring 2010).
Abstract
This survey of medicine in the U.S. from European contact to World War II rambles from generalities to anecdotes in a manner much like the cowboy Dary describes in his preface, who "started up one canyon and came out another." While the premise of the book might seem self-evident (that the practice of "frontier medicine" began long before the Oregon Trail), it offers little insight into the idea of the frontier, omitting Turner's Frontier Thesis entirely, and relies more on chronology than context for its narrative. For these reasons, Frontier Medicine will be more useful to casual readers than to scholars as an accessible summary of U.S. medical history with some major gaps. The author has accurately characterized it as a "broad outline."
Comments
Copyright © 2010 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.