American Salvation: How Immigrants Made America Great

Immigrants built our canals and railroads, filled our factories and farms, enriched our culture, and helped win America's wars. They built the atomic bomb and Hollywood.

Without immigrants, the United States would be a second-rate power. Each wave of immigrants has faced prejudice and disdain, yet they have risen above to thrive and, in so doing, have helped America thrive.

American Salvation tells the story of American immigration and the stories of individual immigrants who have been and continue to be crucial to the success of the United States

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Once, Americans could count on having a personal or primary care physician who would see patients for new or chronic problems, whether in the office or the hospital. The appeal of such a system is more than psychological, for both primary care and continuity of care with a physician over time are associated with improved patient care, greater patient satisfaction, and lower overall costs. 

These days are ending as primary care in the United States is rapidly disappearing. Where once 80% of American doctors were in primary care, now perhaps only a quarter of new graduates enter the field. Existing   primary care doctors are retiring prematurely while many of those   remaining feel demoralized, dispirited, and defeated. Experts predict increasing shortages of primary care doctors. The collapse of primary care will increase overall costs, hurt hospitals and insurers, but most   of all damage the care of patients.

Patients in Peril explains the roots of the problem, the travails of primary care in America, the role of medical schools, hospitals, insurers and government, and how this all affects patients. Patients in Peril also offers practical achievable reforms that would improve care, reduce costs, and potentially avert this disaster.

The book is currently available at Annie Bloom's, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads and Amazon

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Taming Infection: The American Response to Illness from Smallpox to Covid

Written with coauthor David Sarasohn, Taming Infection tells the story of 15 major infections in American history. These include once common diseases such as tuberculosis, yellow fever, malaria and typhoid up to the modern epidemic of Covid-19. We look at how each affected our nation’s history and the American responses to the various epidemics and chronic endemic infection. 

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Midwest Book Review

Taming Infection: The American Response to Illness from Smallpox to Covid is a wide-ranging history of pandemics in America that will enjoy newfound interest with the current pandemic struggle. This is not the first time the subject has been captured in a book, but what sets Taming Infection apart from other medical and social histories is its attention to the link between health and science findings and public policy-setting, which either embraces these recommendations or resists the notion of sweeping social change.

It uses examples of the fifteen worst diseases to strike the United States as touchstones for discussing these connections, blending history with social and health issues to consider the evolution of American epidemics and their special challenges to public policy-makers.

Readers with little medical history background might be surprised to learn that tuberculosis, malaria, yellow fever, and cholera were once endemic to the United States. Each sweeping threat introduced an unprecedented challenge to politicians and policy-makers who were in charge of regulating and directing public health responses.

Heavily footnoted, with many quotes from source materials and first-hand experiences of the past, Taming Infection offers the opportunity to reconsider the policies and experiences of the past with a new eye to managing and understanding present-day public response and health community efforts.

The history documented herein is surprisingly extensive, offering many references readers will find intriguing: "Vaccination was brought to the United States by Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse in 1800. In 1801 President Thomas Jefferson vaccinated his own family, neighbors, and some visiting Mohican Indians and arranged to import cowpox from England. Jefferson wrote Jenner, “Medicine has never before produced any single improvement of such utility. You have erased from the calendar of human afflictions one of its greatest.” Jefferson also devised a way to preserve the vaccine from heat by insulating it in water."

From how diseases spread, whether in civilian or military circles, to how vaccinations were developed, disseminated, and promoted, Taming Infection is more than a medical history. It offers many social inspections of how treatments were not just created, but promoted among various populaces.

This dual attention to social analysis will particularly intrigue students of social issues history and development: "Historian David Jones observed, “One dramatic aspect of epidemic response is the desire to assign responsibility, From Jews in medieval Europe to meat mongers in Chinese markets, someone is always blamed… stigmatization follows closely on the heels of every pathogen.”

The result is a wide-ranging history that should appeal to a broad audience, from students of social issues and healthcare to those involved in political science studies and the process of developing disease protections.

Heavily footnoted, peppered with authoritative source material references, and strong in photos, charts and graphs, Taming Infection is highly recommended for library collections strong in medical history, social examination, and political science and public policy alike.

D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

Executive profiles – A company is only as strong as its executive leadership. This is a good place to show off who’s occupying the corner offices. Write a nice bio about each executive that includes what they do, how long they’ve been at it, and what got them to where they are.

Taming Infection: The American Response to Illness from Smallpox to Covid

By: Gregg Coodley and David Sarasohn
Published by: Atmosphere Press
Publication Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-1639883189
Reviewed By: Barbara Bamberger Scott
Review Date: May 26, 2022

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Co-authors, physician Coodley and editor Sarasohn, have collaborated to remind and inform Americans about the prevalence of physical scourges, plagues, and pandemics that have deeply affected our nation from earliest times to the current day.

The topics covered in Taming Infection begin with tuberculosis, a disease still to some degree extant but far more curable than it once was. Its spread through airborne transmission was presumably exacerbated by large numbers of people living in crowded conditions, leading to slow, painful death. Pioneering medical research suggested that TB was caused by germs, microbes, tiny almost invisible entities that entered the body through various means. This basic model has gradually emerged as medical fact regarding most forms of illness, with the microbes being carried in some cases by rats (the plague), mosquitos (malaria) or water supply (cholera).

The diseases explored here also include smallpox, yellow fever, typhus, syphilis, influenza, AIDS, measles, diphtheria, pneumococcus, and Covid-19. With the exception of AIDS and Covid-19, nearly all these massively destructive maladies have been known and noted since record keeping became common. The earliest influenza epidemic occurred in North America soon after Columbus landed and also affected pilgrim settlements in New England. The outbreak of the so-named Spanish Influenza in the early twentieth century affected and was affected by the migration of soldiers to and from Europe in World War I, and its treatment has early similarities to the recent Covid-19 phenomena, including mask mandates and the disparities between what the public were told by government and what they were seeing in their own families and regions.

The authors offer copious data throughout this admirable collocation, with reference listings of several pages concerning each of the diseases examined. They conclude that “the conflict between humans and pathogens is an ongoing struggle.” It is certain that new diseases and new strains of bacteria will continue to arise, and the question for all Americans is how to react to deal with them – medically, socially, and individually.

Quill says: In Taming Infection, Coodley and Sarasohn have constructed a scholarly guide that concerns and should be accessed by all Americans, calmly and accurately setting forth the history of communicable diseases and their ravages as an alert to handling the next national medical crisis.

For further information on Taming Infection: The American Response to Illness from Smallpox to Covid, please visit the book's website at: www.taminginfection.com

The Green Years 1964-76: When Democrats and Republicans United to Repair the Earth  

In The Green Years, 1964-1976, Gregg Coodley and David Sarasohn offer the first comprehensive history of the period when the United States created the legislative, legal, and administrative structures for environmental protection that are still   in place over fifty years later. Coodley and Sarasohn tell a dramatic story of cultural change, grassroots activism, and political leadership that led to the passage of a host of laws attacking pollution under President Johnson. At the same time, with Stewart Udall as secretary of the interior, the Wilderness Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and   other land-protection measures were passed and the department shifted its focus from western resource development to broader national conservation issues. The magnitude of what was accomplished was without   precedent, even under conservation-minded presidents like the two Roosevelts. The fast-paced story the authors tell is not only about the Democratic Party; in this era there was still a vital Republican conservation tradition. In the 1960s, Republicans were chronologically as close to Teddy Roosevelt as to Donald Trump. In both the House and Senate and in the Nixon and Ford administrations, Republicans played vital roles. It was President Nixon who established the Environmental Protection Agency and signed into law the 1970 Clean Air Act, revisions in 1972 to the Clean Water Act, and the 1973 Endangered Species Act. Under Nixon, actions were taken to protect the oceans, forests, coastal zones, and grasslands while regulating chemicals, pesticides, and garbage.
 

The authors analyze the full range of transformations during the “Green Years,” from the creation of entirely new pollution-control industries to backpacking becoming mass recreation to how revelations about chemical exposure spurred the natural food movement. And not least, the tectonic shift in the political landscape of the United States with the western states becoming Republican bastions and centers of ongoing backlash against the federal government.  The Green Years, 1964-1976, is the story of environmental progress in the midst of war and civil unrest, and of the lessons we can learn for our future. 

The book is currently available at Annie Bloom's and Amazon 

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Annie Bloom’s Books - 7834 SW Capitol Highway, Portland, OR 97219