Customer Reviews

The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land

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Really well-written history of what at first appears to be a very small slice of 19th-century America. This book takes a seemingly straightforward idea that settlers moved to get to better--and literally healthier--land and uses the idea as a lens through which to understand much of 19th-century America. And, amazingly, her strategy works. Her arguments are convincing and I definitely felt like I was learning new ideas and fascinating tidbits all along the way.

had to buy this book for an american environmental history class. learned a lot of how americans used to perceive health. great class, good book. a little dry sometimes, but how else do you write about something that happened over a hundred years ago?

Valencius explores how early nineteenth-century Americans understood health and the human body, as well as other aspects of the natural world that interested them: climate, topography, agriculture, race. She delves into the work of physicians and other trained observers, but much of her evidence comes from the letters of ordinary settlers in the Mississippi Valley; the result is a fascinating picture of laymen's understanding of basic physiological and environmental phenomena. Valencius's fundamental insight is that there were significant parallels between how early nineteenth-century Americans understood cultivating the land and caring for the human body. They used similar concepts and language to describe both. I found the book somewhat diffuse and repetitive, but that probably reflects the state of scientific understanding at the time. It's a well-written work of scholarship that should be accessible to general readers.