The Book in the Sickroom: A Tradition of Print and Practice

Charles E. Rosenberg

Harvard University

This essay was originally published in the Library Company of Philadelphia exhibition Every Man His Own Doctor.

A revised version was published as “Health in the Home: A Tradition of Print and Practice” in Charles Rosenberg, ed., Right Living: An Anglo-American Tradition of Self-Help Medicine and Hygiene, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, published in cooperation with the Library Company of Philadelphia and the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 2003, pp. 1-20. 

When I walk into my local mega-bookstore, I am always struck by the diversely abundant section called health. It includes advice on every aspect of the human condition from diet to incontinence - with titles devoted to an impressive variety of diseases, from depression to breast cancer, from eating disorders to lower back pain. Separate areas are organized around sexuality and addiction. In a medical era dominated by intensive specialization and complex technical procedures, this proliferation of do-it-yourself health books might seem a perverse novelty.

But it is far from that. Books and pamphlets aimed at helping men and women manage their bodies in health and disease have long been a marketable commodity. Since the beginnings of printing, readers have used the printed page to guide themselves in the preservation of physical and emotional health and in the management of their ills. The practice of popular medicine is an ancient, culturally central, and still vital reality - one that bears a complex and shifting relationship to the formal medicine of its generation. Many of us will, for example, have had our own lives touched by books as familiar as "Dr. Spock" or Our Bodies Ourselves. Of the making of such books there is no foreseeable end.

A Golden Age of Popular Medicine

Nevertheless, America's late-colonial and antebellum years constitute a kind of golden age for such guides. It was a period when formally trained physicians could not begin to treat all the ills and anxieties Americans experienced - and when a great many were too poor or geographically isolated to routinely employ a trained physician. In these decades it was still assumed - as it had been since antiquity - that the bulk of medical practice would remain in uncredentialed hands. And it was assumed as well that those hands would often be guided by advice from a printed page.

The American history of such self-improving works begins with colonization itself. And it might be said to have arrived at a novel stage in the Civil War era of cheaper paper, printing, and binding, and with the related development of increasingly national markets. One of the characteristic aspects of popular medicine in this earlier period was the original dominance of British ideas and texts, a dominance displaced in the first third of the nineteenth century by the growing prominence and diversity of American authors and the elaboration of reader-specific genres - books crafted for particular segments of a literate yet economically and socially diverse market: inexpensive pamphlets simply listing remedies, longer more discursive guides to regimen and therapeutics, almanacs and other advertising designed to sell particular products, manuals crafted for women and focused on midwifery and children, and books aimed at understanding and managing the emotions, including a novel subgenre of books addressed in the 1840s, 50s, and 60s to the sexual needs and anxieties of a growing middle class. And the authors were as varied as their literary products; although the majority were written by male physicians, some were compiled by women, others by sectarian opponents of regular medicine.