Contents -- Introduction: “Healthy Country� -- “Is it thriving & healthy?� -- Sources -- Making American Territory -- I. “New Country� -- “Wild� Land and “New� -- Acclimation -- The Literature of Settlement -- “Movers� and “Improvers� -- Early Arkansas and Missouri -- Native Peoples -- Emigration Stories, Black and White -- II. Body -- Medicine and the Demands of Health -- Force and Flow -- Blood -- Intake and Outgo -- “Risings� and Release -- Derangement and Proper Management -- Change -- Chills and Fevers
III. Places“Place� -- Telling the “Health of the Country� -- Indoors and Out -- Climate and Constitution -- Movement -- IV. Airs -- Reading the Air -- Miasma -- Smell -- Counteraction -- Disgust -- Expertise and Common Knowledge -- Change and the Perils of Human Action -- Blurred Boundaries -- V. Waters -- Conduit -- Blessing -- Threat -- Flood -- Swamp -- Sloughs of the Spirit -- Wondrous Waters: Healing Springs -- VI. Local Knowledge: Medical Geography and the Intellectual Hinterland
€œOn the Medical Topography of Saint Charles County, Mo.â€?Science of the Local -- The Politics of Local Knowledge -- Professional Anxieties of the Periphery -- Regional Boosterism and Southern Medicine -- The Uses of History -- Models for Hinterland Practice -- VII. Cultivation -- Agriculture as Material and Moral Imperative -- Farm Work -- Cultivation and Sense of Self -- Fertility and Generation -- Changes Wrought by Cultivation -- Crisis -- VIII. Racial Anxiety -- Peoples and Places -- Environmental Belonging -- Vulnerability of the Racial Self
Blurred BoundariesProper Place: Free Black Identity -- Mixedness and the Problem of Color -- The Failure of Order -- IX. Conclusion -- Afterword -- Archival Information and Abbreviations -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Permissions -- Index
Summary
"The Health of the Country is the first book to show how settlers made sense of uncharted land. Their primary concern was to save themselves from the painful, fatal, disabling ailments that are as much a part of American history as cowboys and wagon trains." "Primary sources from this tumultuous period show settlers using science, intuition, observation and popular wisdom to evaluate whether a particular locale would sicken them."--Jacket
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 339-372) and index
