Bloodletting and Germs

Imagine you are a patient in 1840. You're sick and your village doctor has little more to offer than letting blood and purging your intestines. Or think of being the doctor, repeatedly staring at death and seeking cures while holding the hand of a feverish child.

On his way to America's frontier in 1834 the newly graduated doctor, Jabez Allen MD, stops for one night in an upstate New York village. He meets a sick child, a teacher, and a young socialite abolitionist and stays a lifetime.

Millicent, the abolitionist, and a conductor in the Underground Railroad, becomes Dr. Allen's wife. When they later employ Civia, a runaway slave, as a wet nurse they discover a woman of ever hopeful outlook and unexplored talents. Civia becomes indispensable to Dr. Allen's medical practice.

Anti-slavery passions join Millicent and Civia and force Dr. Allen to confront the nineteenth century medical theories attempting to label Negros as physiologically inferior. Then the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act results the arrest of Civia and her family.

Through it all, patients and practice force Dr. Allen to deal with the contagions of his day, including the cholera that drains life from the daughter of the very man who signed the Fugitive Slave Act, President Millard Fillmore. She dies under Dr. Allen's care.

Dr. Allen is drawn to investigate a typhoid outbreak in a nearby village. Joined by Dr. Austin Flint, their discoveries result in three scientific papers used as an investigative model by John Snow and referenced in Snow's 1855 treatise on London Cholera.

Dr. Allen is elected President of his county's Medical Society, makes the acquaintance of nationally known medical scientists, and participates in the 1878 AMA meeting where organized medicine argues the scientific foundation for the germ theory.

Bloodletting and Germs is a historical novel written as Dr. Allen's memoir. Citing over four hundred sources, it is true to the events of Dr. Allen's life and to the forces changing medical care in the nineteenth century.

Dr. Allen teaches us about managing the unknown as a small-town hero. His doctoring, and his life, put humanity's face on a period of profound scientific and social transformation.