Healing Kentucky: Medicine in the Bluegrass State

From the pioneering Danville surgeon Ephraim McDowell, the first doctor to successfully perform abdominal surgery, and Luke Blackburn, dubbed the Hero of Hickman and elected governor in 1879 after his efforts to combat yellow fever, to contemporary Kentucky doctors performing groundbreaking reconstructive surgery and artificial heart implants, Healing Kentucky tells the story of the two-hundred-year struggle to provide good health care to all Kentuckians. Nancy Disher Baird describes Lexington schoolteacher Linda Neville’s mission to treat the eye disease trachoma in rural Kentucky, Louise Caudill’s efforts to open the first hospital in Morehead, the 1833 cholera epidemic, and many other important episodes in medicine in Kentucky. Written on an upper-elementary school level expressly for adult literacy students and students of English as a second language, Healing Kentucky brings the many heroes of medicine in the Bluegrass State to life.