This new paperback edition makes available John Harley Warner's highly influential, revisionary history of nineteenth-century American medicine. Deftly integrating social and intellectual perspectives, Warner explores a crucial shift in medical history, when physicians no longer took for granted such established therapies as bloodletting, alcohol, "[Warner] pursues a sophisticated argument with extraordinary diligence, thus producing a carefully crafted book. . . . Judged by its methodology, insights, presentation, and prose, this book ranks as a model of American scholarship."---Dora B. Weiner, Social History of Medicine