Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements and Preface
- Introduction: Healthscapes: Health and Place among and between Disciplines
- 1 Placing Maternal Health in India
- 2 Putting Medicine in its Place: The Importance of Historical Geography to the History of Health Care
- 3 Finding Place in The Big-Little World of Doc Pritham: Telling Medical Tales about Northwoods Maine, 1920s–70s
- 4 Putting Hyperactivity in its Place: Cold War Politics, the Brain Race and the Origins of Hyperactivity in the United States, 1957–68
- 5 Why Canada Has a Universal Medical Insurance Programme and the United States Does Not: Accounting for Historical Differences in American and Canadian Social Policies
- 6 Alberta Advantage: A Canadian Proving Ground for American Medical Research on Mustard Gas and Polio in the 1940s and 50s
- 7 Placing Illness in its Cultural Territory in Veracruz, Nicaragua
- 8 Chronic Disease in the Yukon River Basin, 1890–1960
- 9 An Ideal Home for the Consumptive: Place, Race and Tuberculosis in the Canadian West
- 10 Serbian Landscapes of Dreamtime and Healing: Clear Streams, Stones of Prophesy, St Sava's Ribs, and the Wooden City of Oz
- Notes
- Index
3 - Finding Place in The Big-Little World of Doc Pritham: Telling Medical Tales about Northwoods Maine, 1920s–70s
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements and Preface
- Introduction: Healthscapes: Health and Place among and between Disciplines
- 1 Placing Maternal Health in India
- 2 Putting Medicine in its Place: The Importance of Historical Geography to the History of Health Care
- 3 Finding Place in The Big-Little World of Doc Pritham: Telling Medical Tales about Northwoods Maine, 1920s–70s
- 4 Putting Hyperactivity in its Place: Cold War Politics, the Brain Race and the Origins of Hyperactivity in the United States, 1957–68
- 5 Why Canada Has a Universal Medical Insurance Programme and the United States Does Not: Accounting for Historical Differences in American and Canadian Social Policies
- 6 Alberta Advantage: A Canadian Proving Ground for American Medical Research on Mustard Gas and Polio in the 1940s and 50s
- 7 Placing Illness in its Cultural Territory in Veracruz, Nicaragua
- 8 Chronic Disease in the Yukon River Basin, 1890–1960
- 9 An Ideal Home for the Consumptive: Place, Race and Tuberculosis in the Canadian West
- 10 Serbian Landscapes of Dreamtime and Healing: Clear Streams, Stones of Prophesy, St Sava's Ribs, and the Wooden City of Oz
- Notes
- Index
Summary
In The Big-Little World of Doc Pritham, readers are treated to a rousing tale of the life of an intrepid country doctor. Frederick John Pritham of Greenville Junction, Maine, is a practitioner firmly ensconced in the northwoods of his home state. The dust jacket tells how the doctor
has traveled thousands of miles through the Maine wilderness on horseback and on foot; ridden cars, boats, planes, buggies, snowmobiles, lumber trucks, trains, and railroad handcars; gone on skates and snowshoes; jumped trains; swum rivers; waded through mud and snow and slush; skated over thin ice; plunged his car to the bottom of Moosehead [Lake] – all to provide medical service to an area of some five thousand square miles.
It's small wonder that he pronounced ‘getting there and back was the biggest obstacle to my medical practice’.
This chapter explores the intersections of region and place in the medical life-writing by and about Dr Fred Pritham, who, by the late twentieth century, became very well-known in the rural and remote communities and towns of the Maine's northern counties. At the heart of his local celebrity is a biography, cited above, written by well-known Maine author Dorothy Clarke Wilson and published in 1971 when she was at the height of her career. Within the genre of physician auto/biography, ‘country doctor tales’ comprise a small but distinct body of literature.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Locating HealthHistorical and Anthropological Investigations of Place and Health, pp. 43 - 56Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014