In Search of Sexual Health

"Elliott Bowen elegantly and concisely uses the history of Hot Springs, Arkansas, to reveal tensions over federal institutions and authority, the continued role of patient histories even in an era of laboratory testing, and the sharp racism that shaped white practitioners' responses to their patients and to African American doctors. This readable and well-organized book will be of great use to historians of medicine, environmental historians, and all those interested in how place and race have shaped the experience of sickness in America."—Conevery Bolton Valenčius, Boston College, author of The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land

"Bowen has chosen a fresh context in which to examine doctors, patients, and disease identity. By looking at these variables configured in the Hot Springs story, he has chosen to also examine notions of race and gender, as well as aspects of health policy. This solidly researched book illuminates the lived experience of a segment of patients in (mostly) early twentieth-century America."—Charles E. Rosenberg, Harvard University, author of Our Present Complaint: American Medicine, Then and Now

"In Search of Sexual Health is a vital addition to the history of sexual health in the United States. It pushes beyond traditional narratives of sin and stigma, offering a nuanced study of the experiences of VD sufferers, their determined search for effective treatments, and the personal relationships that shaped their care."—Anne Hanley, Birkbeck, University of London, author of Medicine, Knowledge and Venereal Diseases in England, 1886-1916

"Bowen decenters our understanding of the cultural/medical response to syphilis by exploring the importance of local patients, doctors, and communities in seeking health cures. A well-written, sophisticated, and important historical contribution that redeploys our attention outward from the local to tell a critical national story. I would teach this book in a heartbeat."—Susan M. Reverby, Professor Emerita, Wellesley College, author of Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and its Legacy

"Skillfully blending attentive scholarship with compassionate prose, Bowen guides readers on an unforgettable journey. This wonderful book foregrounds considerations of race, place, class, and gender to uncover the wide-ranging experiences of everyday men and women—and their doctors, healers, and care attendants—grappling with sexually transmitted infections in the pre-penicillin era."—Richard A. McKay, University of Cambridge, author of Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic

"Bowen 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 Quarterly