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The White House Physician: A History from Washington to George W. Bush
By Ludwig M. Deppisch
266 pp, $39.95
Jefferson, NC, McFarland & Company Inc, 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0-7864-2976-9
JAMA. 2008;299(18):2214-2216.
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Dr Deppisch's charming work is a hybrid: on the one hand, it traces the history of medicine in the United States through the lens of the care of presidents; on the other, it examines the presidency as a peculiar medical entity. The book's major axis is chronological but not rigidly so. In the first 11 chapters, Deppisch treats groups of presidents in terms of the characteristic arrangements of each period for presidential medical care. The final 4 chapters are topical—on the 25th Amendment (procedures to be used when a president becomes incapacitated), on psychiatry, on the deaths and major infirmities of vice presidents, and on the post–White House careers of recent presidential physicians. Interpolated into the biographies of presidential physicians, the problems they dealt with, and the changing institutional character of White House medicine are discussions of the waxing and waning of medical sects in the United States, the rise . . . [Full Text of this Article]
Christopher Hamlin, PhD, Reviewer
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana
hamlin.1@nd.edu
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