Medicine by the People: How Ordinary People Changed American Healthcare

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.

Throughout early American history, everyday people—from enslaved individuals to village midwives to cowboys—have been caring for their communities. In colonial Boston, Black people’s knowledge led to smallpox inoculations, stymieing that epidemic. Midwives, more plentiful than doctors, also delivered babies more successfully. During the Civil War, women served, taking care of the wounded, making nutritious food, and keeping hospitals clean.

Once doctors professionalized in the later 1800s, they protected their domain. Still, the Black community of the early 1900s created a public campaign to prevent tuberculosis. In the last half of the twentieth century, the Young Lords fought for better sanitation and increased medical infrastructure in their East Harlem neighborhood. In the face of HIV/AIDS, queer people pushed the federal government for research with their activism.

Grassroots community care has always been at the cutting edge of medicine, a hidden tradition of meeting need with dignity. Medicine by the People reveals that the history of American healthcare is, at its heart, a struggle over who gets to tell the story of illness.