Medicine by the People
How Ordinary People Changed American Healthcare
24 November 2026
Territory Rights — Worldwide.
Description
A grassroots history of American medicine that shows how regular people were architects of medical knowledge and care
Most histories of medicine centre doctors. Yet these narratives underplay the role that ordinary people have on medicine and public health. In colonial America, Black people’s knowledge led to smallpox inoculations, stymying that epidemic. Midwives, more plentiful than doctors, delivered babies more successfully. The Black community of the early 1900s educated the public on preventing tuberculosis. In the last half of the twentieth century, the Young Lords fought for better sanitation and increased medical infrastructure in their East Harlem neighbourhood and queer people’s activism pushed the federal government for HIV/AIDS research.
Grassroots community care has always been a hidden tradition at the cutting edge of medicine.Medicine by the People reveals that the history of American healthcare is, at its heart, a struggle over who gets to tell the story of illness.
Reviews
"Deeply-researched, with detail that brings the people of the past alive, each chapter shows how everyday people innovated medical science, public health, and the response to epidemic crises. Downs is at his finest as a powerful public intellectual, and Medicine by the People is a historical guidebook for navigating the future of American health care." — Jacob Steere-Williams, author of The Filth Disease
"A breath of fresh air. Part medical narrative and part cultural history, Medicine by the People heralds the foresight and courage of marginalized people who demanded that American medical care be rooted in cultural competency, compassion, and harm reduction. This is a critically important book." — Deirdre Cooper Owens, author of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology
Ebook
9781324086611
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£16.99
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