| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Health Culture in the Heartland, 1880–1980: An Oral History. By Lucinda McCray Beier. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. xviii, 242 pp. Cloth, $75.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03348-3. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 978-0-252-07554-4.)

This is a valuable local history with large implications. Lucinda McCray Beier, who has published two scholarly books on the history of medicine and public health in England, has now turned her attention to McLean County, her home county in northeast Illinois; Bloomington and Normal are the county's two major cities. The book grew out of a museum exhibit and an oral history project with a number of absorbing interviews (although Beier had plenty of documents to sort through as well). The result is an interesting portrait of the shift from rural and traditional nineteenth-century medical care to modernized, scientific, professional medical care and public health rules and regulations as seen from the perspectives of doctors, nurses, patients, and other community members. Because McLean County was settled in the 1830s, made the transition to a railroad works and agricultural center in the later nineteenth century and then to an educational and insurance economy after World War II, and remained a typical prosperous midwestern county with urban and rural populations, Beier asserts that her study has implications for national history.

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