Medicine by the People: How Ordinary People Changed American Healthcare (A Norton Short)

A grassroots history of American medicine that shows how regular people were architects of medical knowledge and care.

Most histories of medicine center doctors: the standard-bearers of expertise and innovation. Yet these narratives underplay the role that ordinary people have, and always have had, on medicine and public health.

In colonial America, Black people's knowledge led to smallpox inoculations, stymying that epidemic. Midwives, more plentiful than doctors, also delivered babies more ...