Please join The New York Academy of Medicine (1216 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street, New York, NY 10029) on Tuesday, February 21, 2017 at 6:00PM-7:30PM for Margaret Humphreys’ John K. Lattimer Lecture.
Health care in the U.S. Civil War is often depicted as gruesome, with amputations (sans anesthesia) as the centerpiece of horror. In actuality, hospitals could be sites of healing, although there were significant differences between North and South. In this lecture, Margaret Humphreys highlights the variations among medical loci during the war, an analysis that illustrates the aspects of “good health care” that made a difference in the survival of Civil War patients.
Margaret Humphreys is the Josiah Charles Trent Professor in the History of Medicine at Duke University. She received her PhD in the History of Science (1983) and MD (1987) from Harvard University. She is the author of Yellow Fever and the South (Rutgers, 1992) and Malaria: Poverty, Race and Public Health in the United States (Johns Hopkins, 2001), Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in American Civil War (2008) and Marrow of Tragedy: The Health Crisis of the American Civil War (2013). She teaches the history of medicine, public health, global health, food, and biology to undergraduates at Duke University, and is editor emeritus of the Journal of the History of Medicine. (For more information, see www.mehumphreys.com.)
The event is part of the Library’s Legacies of War: Medical Innovations and Impacts Series.
The profound physical and mental destruction left in the wake of war has by necessity accelerated innovation in medicine that often led to benefits for society as a whole. The conditions of war have brought advances in surgical care, prosthetics, blood banking, antibiotics and trauma care. This series commemorates the American entry into World War I in 1917 by exploring the often-intertwined history of conflict and medical innovation, as well as the devastating and ongoing impact of war on the minds and bodies of soldiers and civilian populations.
($12 General Public | $8 Friends, Fellows, Members, Seniors | Free to Students with ID)