Revolutionary Medicine: The Founding Fathers and Mothers in Sickness and in Health Paperback – September 4, 2015

I am almost finished with this outstanding book. It is written extremely well and holds my interest. I have only bought a few books to read since my retirement,but this caught my eye. It is so good that I asked my wife who was a librarian to read it. I rarely review a book,but this Jeanne.Abrams is great. I hope all of you reading my review enjoy this book as much as I do. I can't put it down.That is Extremely rare for a person like me!!! Thankyou.

Abrams has done the hard work of digging into an incredible number of sources to find the pearls of wisdom the American founders expressed about medical practice. The book lays the foundation for understanding the origins of the medical enlightenment.

This study provides a great deal of useful information about the role of medicine and how it has changed since the Revolutionary period and circa 50 years following. I almost felt as if I knew Washington, Adams, Franklin, Madison and Jefferson. However, there were so many places where the writing needs to be tightened up. There were numerous what I call "repetitious redundancies" within sections. In spite of this, if you can skim the book as you're reading it, thus bypassing the redundancies, you will learn a lot.

I had to read this for a college class and it was very eye-opening to the history of the development of medical practices in this country. You will most likely find that you did not know most of the information presented in this book which makes it a fascinating read. I would highly recommend it.

These men were ahead of their time, especially Franklin & Jefferson in terms of health and medicine. An interesting read for someone like myself who does living history demonstrations focusing specifically on nursing and medicinal herbs in the mid to late 18th century. Glad I bought it.

Written in a bland textbook style, this book has no real "voice." I've read clinical papers that were more entertaining. If all you're looking for is facts about the founding families and what ailed them, then this might work for you, but if you're looking to really lose yourself in an interesting story about the private lives of the founders, you'd be better off reading something along the lines of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin or John Adams by David McCullough. I found Revolutionary Medicine to be deadly boring.

I find Dr. Abrams' book well written and very interesting. The conditions of health, disease and medicine during the times of the founding of our nation quite instructive to our understanding of the period. Our founders' attitudes to the general well being of the population, both for the defense of the country (Washington's directives concerning hygiene and smallpox inoculations for the army) and Franklin's and Jefferson's concerns about the need for a healthy and robust citizenry for economic and political progress should inform our public policy today. I highly recommend reading this book

This had some interesting details about medicine in the late 18th and early 19th century. It centered around a few the first families of American politics--plus Benjamin Franklin--and their experiences with and attitudes toward physicians, diseases and treatments available to them. It was interesting to see how forward thinking Jefferson and Franklin were about harsh treatments and also smallpox vaccinations. Toward the end of the book it became very repetitive, which I believe was inevitable considering the subject. There were, after all, the same health issues for each person and a limited number of options. Death seemed to look over every shoulder, even in the happier moments and reading this reinforced my gratitude for living in a time when antibiotics are commonplace and so many diseases have either been wiped out or can be treat successfully and relatively painlessly with surgery.