EDGAR HOLDEN, M.D. OF NEWARK, NEW JERSEY: PROVINCIAL PHYSICIAN ON A NATIONAL STAGE

About the Book

Edgar Holden, M.D., of Newark: Provincial Physician on a National Stage is a study of medicine and health in Essex County, New Jersey, and its largest city, Newark, in the decades following the Civil War. Th e book is structured around the multifaceted career of Edgar Holden, a Newark physician who transcended the provinciality that characterized Essex County’s medical community and institutions. Th e author demonstrates how institution building and new paradigms of medical authority funneled from burgeoning urban medical centers into the provincial and sluggish medical landscape of northern New Jersey. Th e lack of a medical school within the state stymied the intellectual and professional ferment that the best nineteenth-century American medical schools attracted and fostered. New York City, with its medical institutions and elite practitioners cast a giant shadow over northern New Jersey, which consequently has been somewhat neglected by historians of medicine. An exploration of this lively community of welltrained practitioners, fl edgling institutions, and ailing citizens sheds light on similar medical communities that found themselves importing—but rarely exporting—medical knowledge and expertise.

About the Author

Dr. Sandra Moss practiced and taught general internal medicine in central New Jersey for many years. In 2005, she completed a master’s degree in the history of technology, the environment, and medicine from the federated history program of the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University. Dr. Moss has published some forty articles, chapters, and reviews in the field of medical history, and regularly addresses diverse audiences on a variety of topics in the history of medicine. She is past president of the Medical History Society of New Jersey and of the American Osler Society, an international organization for clinician historians. Her book, The Country Practitioner: Ellis P. Townsend’s Brave Little Medical Journal, was published by Xlibris in 2011.