This publication is a collection of papers presented in June of 1990. The purpose of the conference was to bring early American healers out of obscurity, addressing traditional, nonacademic, and popular cures and medical practices in New England and contiguous portions of the American Northeast before 1850.
The following is a list of the title and author of each paper: Childbirth Practices among Native American Women of New England and Canada, 1600-1800 by Ann Marie Plane, The “Hidden Ones”: Women and Healing in Colonial New England by Patricia A. Watson, Traditional Folk Medicine in Vermont by Jane C. Beck, Medicine and Disease in the Diary of Benjamin Walker, Shopkeeper of Boston by Barbara McLean Ward, Sir William Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Medicine in the New York Colony by Wanda Burch, A Household and Its Doctor: A Case Study of Medical Account Books in Colonial America by Robert I. Goler, The Trials of Dr. Phillip Reade, Seventeenth-Century Itinerant Physician by Andrew V. Raposa, Itinerant Physicians, Healers, and Surgeon-Dentists in New England and New York, 1720-1825 by Peter Benes, Samuel Thomson Rewrites Hippocrates by J. Worth Estes, The Democratic Medicine of Dr. Elias Smith by Michael G. Kenny, Medicine and Healing among the Maine Shakers, 1784-1854 by David Richards, Blood, Sweat, and Herbs: Health and Medicine at the Harvard Shaker Community, 1820-1855 by Margaret Moody Stier, Derangement in the Family: The Story of Mary Sewall, 1824-1825 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Obstetrical Practice in South Central Massachusetts from 1834 to 1845 by Paul Berman, A Bibliography of Early American Medicine by J. Worth Estes.