| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Doctoring the South: Southern Physicians and Everyday Medicine in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. By Steven M. Stowe. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xii, 373 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2885-8.)

The central thesis of Steven M. Stowe's book is that mid-nineteenth-century physicians in rural communities in the South were experientially situated in a conflictual world entailing, on the one hand, their commitment to an incipiently developed profession and, on the other, meeting the challenges of the communities where they practiced. In response to this dilemma, physicians developed what Stowe terms "a country orthodox style" (p. 2) as an adaptive strategy. There were many challenges confronting physicians such as competition with established physicians when first setting up practice, a mounting awareness of the ineffectiveness and harmfulness of their therapeutics, patients' notions about what constituted correct medicine, the action orientation of many patients versus the "expectancy" stance (p. 43) of some physicians, and the more pragmatic problem of inducing patients to pay for services rendered.

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