Includes bibliographical references (pages 339-372) and index.
Contents
"Healthy country". "Is it thriving & healthy?" -- Sources -- Making American territory -- "New country". "Wild" land and "new" -- Acclimation --Literature of settlement -- "Movers" and "improvers" -- Early Arkansas and Missouri -- Native peoples -- Emigration stories, Black andwhite -- Body. Medicine and the demands of health -- Force and flow -- Blood -- Intake and outgo -- "Risings" and release -- Derangement and proper management -- Change -- Chills and fevers -- Places. "Place " -- Telling the "Health of the country" -- Indoors and out -- Climate and constitution --Movement -- Airs. Reading the air -- Miasma -- Smell -- Counteraction -- Disgust -- Expertise and common knowledge -- Change and the perils of human action -- Blurred boundaries -- Waters. Conduit -- Blessing -- Threat -- Flood -- Swamp -- Sloughs of the spirit -- Wondrous waters : healing springs -- Local knowledge : medical geography and the intellectual hinterland. "On the medical topography of Saint Charles County, Mo. " -- Science of the local -- Politics of local knowledge -- Professional anxieties of the periphery -- Regional boosterism and southern medicine -- Uses of history -- Models for hinterland practice -- Cultivation. Agriculture as material and moral imperative -- Farm work -- Cultivation and sense of self -- Fertility and generation -- Changes wrought by cultivation -- Crisis -- Racial anxiety. Peoples and places -- Environmental belonging -- Vulnerability of the racial self -- Blurred boundaries -- Proper place : free Black identity -- Mixedness and the problem of color -- Failure of order.