Karol K. Weaver. Medical Caregiving and Identity in Pennsylvania's Anthracite Region, 1880-2000. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011. 187 pp. $67.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-271-04878-9; $30.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-271-04879-6.
Reviewed by Annette L. Varcoe (SUNY-Binghamton)
Published on H-Pennsylvania (December, 2015)
Commissioned by Allen J. Dieterich-Ward (Shippensburg University)
In Karol K. Weaver’s work, Medical Caregiving and Identity in Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Region, 1880-2000, the central theme is transcultural medicine in the immigrant communities that shaped a specific region of Pennsylvania. She contributes to the field of medical culture by developing a diverse source base from which to examine cultural interactions and transformations. Weaver looks at the ways that gender and ethnic identities changed when confronted with medical choices across the century. She utilizes an impressive array of sources, including oral histories, newspapers, medical journals, and official reports from miners’ hospitals. This wide range of voices enables Weaver to connect disparate ideas and introduce readers to a more complete view of medical culture in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania. The author approaches a regional study using the techniques of a biographer, resulting in a nuanced examination of ethnicity that links identity formation to medical experiences.
A fascinating example of how Weaver applies her unique sources to study the transformation of culture is in a chapter devoted to powwowers, a distinctly Pennsylvania German traditional medical practice that focused on natural healing. Powwowing was originally called braucher until these immigrants relabeled the practice out of respect for Native American medical contributions and the Americanization of traditional German medical practices. Weaver demonstrates how the practice unified disparate ethnic groups of immigrants; it continues to exist, although transformed, in pockets of the anthracite region today. This chapter points to the interconnections of medicine as a shaper of culture, as well as the way that culture continues to shape medical practices today.
Because Weaver’s work ranges from 1880 to 2000, one of the greatest challenges to reading this text is navigating the chronology of events that are generally linked thematically. An illustration of one such challenge is in her portrayal of the impact of nurses across the century. In chapter 2, Weaver describes how women had limited access to miners’ hospitals until the early twentieth century when Pennsylvania regulations required nurses to become trained in obstetrics. Later in the same chapter, Weaver notes the cultural tension between anthracite communities and nurses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She explains that the majority of these early nurses were Protestant and transmitted condescending ideas about poverty and cultural traditions while serving the needs of Catholic immigrant women. In the next chapter, “Mothering through Medicine: The Neighborhood Women,” Weaver explores the cultural impact of regional immigrant women who were herbalists, midwives, and passers. These women found their roles profoundly transformed across the twentieth century with the growing professionalization of medical care. This transformation changed where care was given, how advice was shared, and what mothering looked like to these women and the generations who followed them. Although Weaver does discuss the growth of female physicians, at no point in this chapter does she examine how the roles of nurses shaped, or were shaped by, these changes.
The final chapter of the book, “Moving from Traditional Medicine to Biomedicine,” also includes some research on the subject of nurses. She points out that all of the anthracite miners’ hospitals enacted nursing programs between 1892 and 1914. Graduates from these programs would predominately stay in the area to serve their local community, suggesting that a growing portion of these nurses were of similar cultural background as their patients. Weaver teases this idea further by stating that “the history of nursing in the anthracite region shows how coal country women linked the tradition of caregiving with careers in a field that offered professional respect” (p. 139). This final picture of the growth and the desire of local women to become nurses leads the reader to wonder how the work of nurses was connected or disconnected from the ideas of the neighborhood medical women, as well as what happened to the cultural tensions that characterized the training and practice of the nursing profession. With such a lengthy period of time to cover, Weaver could have better connected her points about the experiences of ethnic neighborhood medical women to the growth and support of local professional nurses, in order to clarify how nursing affected the transformation of the region’s culture.
Another challenge to reading this work stems from the use of fictional sources. For example, in chapter 2, Weaver uses the fictional 1895 work The Company Doctor by Henry Edward Rood, which disparages unrestricted immigration by new groups as endangering the “subordinate” position of established Irish immigrants (p. 34). Weaver argues that this work illustrates how the cultural tensions between miners and company owners can be seen in the relationship between miners and company physicians. In particular, she explains that the hiring of the fictional doctor, Malcolm Curtis, came at the expense of the miners’ choice due to the intercession of “the imposing and overbearing wife of the mine boss, Mrs. Payne.” Weaver explains that the “irony of the miners’ lack of decision making shows when the company paymaster” interacted with Dr. Curtis, who explained that he was hired immediately by Mrs. Payne (p. 35). The question of how this is ironic is left to the reader to decide, but a clearer analysis of the power of the wife of a mine boss to make medical decisions that directly affected miners and their families would have been an excellent follow-up to the use of this fictional passage. Did the wives of mine bosses often hire and fire physicians? Does this work tell us something about gendered ideas regarding medicine and mining? Analyzing this fictional source with more secondary source connections, if they exist, could have furthered our understanding of gender and ethnicity in mining regions.
Finally, there are some editing errors that distract from the quality of Weaver’s analysis and should be fixed by the publisher in a future edition. One example is in her chapter on powwowers where she cites the work of “ethnographer David W. Kriebel” and then, in the next paragraph, uses an example from “anthropologist David Kriebel” (pp. 95-96). These editing errors do build up over the work, occasionally interrupting the flow of her arguments. In spite of this minor criticism, Weaver fills in some interesting spaces for investigating transcultural medicine. This work would be a good choice for a graduate-level seminar on the history of medicine or an undergraduate elective on local history.
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Citation:
Annette L. Varcoe. Review of Weaver, Karol K., Medical Caregiving and Identity in Pennsylvania's Anthracite Region, 1880-2000.
H-Pennsylvania, H-Net Reviews.
December, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=44714
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |