Reviews of Books The Midwest Pioneer: His Ills, Cures, & • Doctors. By MADGE E. PICKARD

Anyone who still views American pioneer life through a rainbow haze of romance would do well to read this account of health and medicine on the frontier a hundred years and more ago. It begins with a recital of the Uls the land was heir to. So many, frequent, and severe were they that a man who could say he was feeling "tolerable, just tolerable " was con-sidered to be in good health. "Things seldom got better than that." Among the plagues, endemic and epidemic, that made life uncommonly hard the familiar ague was the most widespread; the yellowish pallor it produced became a distinguishing mark of the Westerner. But sharing it with all one's neighbors made it no more pleasant. Those who had settled where it was prevalent longed to flee and warned others to stay away: Don't go to Michigan, that land of ills; The word means ague, fever and chills. To combat the hazards of sickness the frontier settlers had their tradi-tional folk remedies, compounded of about equal parts of herbal lore and superstition; their choice of half a hundred "patent' ' medicines, so called to take advantage of the plain man's faith in the patent as a sign of government approval; and as a last resort the doctor, any doctor. It didn't much matter which of the eighteen or so varieties he belonged to. It was said "the patients of the homeopaths died of the disease, and the patients of the allopaths died of the cure. " Those were the days when theoretical systems instead of science dictated medical practice, and the heroic bleeding, blistering, and purging to which "regular " doctors sub-scribed justify the dedication of this book "to the Pioneer who bravely faced the Doctor." Here, too, is the story in brief of the first Midwestern medical schools, proprietary all, and of the acrimonious rivalry among them; of outstand-ing personalities and classics, such as Dr. Daniel Drake and his famous treatise, Diseases of the Interior Valley of North America; of the early hospitals, to which the patient went to die, not to get well; of the medica