Description
Book SynopsisHow did beliefs about syphilis shape the kinds of treatment people with this disease received? The story of how a town in the Ozark hinterlands played a key role in determining standards of medical care around syphilis. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, the central Arkansas city of Hot Springs enjoyed a reputation as one of the United States' premier health resorts. Throughout this period, the vast majority of Americans who traveled there did so because they had (or thought they had) syphilisa disease whose incidence was said to be dramatically on the rise all across the country. Boasting an impressive medical infrastructure that included private clinics, a military hospital, and a venereal disease clinic operated by the United States Public Health Service, Hot Springs extended a variety of treatment options. Until the antibiotic revolution of the 1940s, Hot Springs occupied a central position in the country's struggle with sexually transmitted disease. Drawing upon health-see
Trade ReviewHistorically, Hot Springs is known for visits by famous gangsters and baseball players, but the town's history of being a nationwide destination for syphilitics seeking hydrotherapy is uncovered in historian Elliott Bowen's book
In Search of Sexual Health: Diagnosing and Treating Syphilis in Hot Springs, Arkansas, 1890-1940.—
The Hot Springs Sentinel-RecordBowen contributes important insight into the course of medical tourism in the United States, developments in medical understandings of the "venereal peril," transitions in the concept of syphilis as a moral or medical condition, recognition of the chronic and late-stage complications of the disease, and the experience of ethnic and gender discrimination among syphilis patients in a southern treatment center.
—Tricia Starks, University of Arkansas,
Arkansas Historical QuarterlyTable of ContentsList of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Emergence of Hot Springs as a Haven for the American Syphilitic, 1880-1910
2. "Administering to Minds Diseased": Treating Syphilis in Turn-of-the-Century Hot Springs
3. Diagnosing Syphilis at Army and Navy General Hospital, 1890-1912
4. The Hot Springs VD Clinic, 1920-1937
5. From Hygiene to Hydrotherapy: Private Practitioners in Hot Springs, 1910-1940
Epilogue
Notes
Index
