New Orleans--born Stanhope Bayne-Jones was one of the pivotal figures in the modernization of American medicine. Through his life story Albert E. Cowdrey's War and Healing dramatizes the growth of American medicine from a provincial and amateurish state into a major national endeavor.

Cowdrey shows the diversity and wide-ranging impact of Bayne-Jones's career. A brilliant student at Johns Hopkins, and a protege of William Welch, bayne-Jones became in turn dean of Yale Medical School, a foundation head, a general in the army's Medical Corps, president of the New York Hospital--Cornell...

Here is the story of the long interaction between humans, land, and climate in the American South. It is a tale of exploitation and erosion, of destruction, disease, and defeat, but also of the persistent search for knowledge and wisdom. It is a story whose villains were also its victims and sometimes its heroes. Ancient forces created the southern landscape, but, as Albert E. Cowdrey shows, humankind from the time of earliest habitation has been at work reshaping it. The southern Indians, far from being the "natural ecologists" of myth, radically transformed their environment by hunting...