Simon Baruch: Rebel in the Ranks of Medicine, 1840-1921.

Larson, Edward J.

In the labor of a lifetime, Patricia Spain Ward has written a delightful biography of an iconoclastic family physician and public health reformer, Simon Baruch. Baruch contributed little to the advance of either medicine or public health, but by placing his wide-ranging professional activities firmly in the context of his time, Ward reveals much about disease treatment and prevention during the period from 1860 to 1920. This alone makes it a tale well worth telling, especially to modern readers unfamiliar with how dramatically medicine and public health have changed since 1920.

Baruch was a young Polish Jew who immigrated to Camden, South Carolina, in the 1850s with the driving ambition of becoming a physician. That profession was closed to him in his native land but quickly opened for him in the antebellum South with the help of local Jewish physicians. The onset of war disrupted his medical education only slightly. It profoundly affected his practice, however, when he joined the Confederate army's medical corp following his graduation from medical school in 1862. "South Carolina gave me all I have," he said at the time. "I'll go with my state" (p. 25).

Ward provides a graphic picture of Civil War medical practices as she traces Baruch's service as a Confederate surgeon from the killing fields of Second Manassas, through Sharpsburg, Fredricksburg, and Gettysburg, to the desperate defense of Georgia and South Carolina. Baruch followed the conventional therapeutic practices of heroic medicine throughout this period, despite the appalling impact that it had on his parents. Only slowly did he begin to rebel against accepted practices, and move toward his later preference for helping the body to heal itself through spas and water baths. Of course, by the time Baruch adopted these non-intrusive practices, medical science was beginning to develop better therapeutic drugs and techniques. In the meantime, Baruch's war experience gave him invaluable hands-on training in the healing arts and a thrilling adventure that he clearly enjoyed.

Baruch returned to Camden following the war. The local economy was moribund and professional organizations were totally disrupted. His drive for financial success and professional status was such, however, that he built a remunerative practice while playing a central role in reestablishing regional medical associations and journals. During this time, he also entered into a life-long marriage that produced little love but lots of children. In recounting this period of Baruch's life, Ward clearly presents the crude state of medical practice in the postbellum South, and the rise of alternative healers, such as chiropractors, osteopaths, and patent medicine vendors.

Driven by his ambition for professional recognition and financial rewards, Baruch moved to New York in 1880. There, during the Gilded Age of that great city, he developed a lucrative practice through hard work and self-promotion. He gained his greated recognition as a champion of water curers for the rich and public showers for the poor - both of which gained popularity by the turn of the century, only to become quickly outmoded. A vain and obstinate man, Baruch lived to see his causes fall from favor and his marriage become a hollow formality. Capitalizing on his residual fame and feeding his enormous ego, Baruch spent his final years writing bitter columns as the medical editor for a second-rate New York newspaper.

Ward ably recounts Baruch's complex professional life and times. Her final product reflects years of research and reflection, begun nearly four decades ago under the guidance of the greatest of all historians of medicine, Richard H. Shryock, and continued under the supervision of two fine Southern historians, C. Vann Woodward and Ronald L. Numbers. Yet it is not so much a book for historians as for physicians and other educated readers curious about medical history, especially from a Southern perspective. The University of Alabama Press and its History of American Science and Technology Series deserve credit for allowing this grand, traditional biography finally to appear in print.

EDWARD J. LARSON University of Georgia