This is not an ordinary book: it's a BookCrossing book! BookCrossing books are world travelers - they like to have adventures and make new friends...and every once in a while they even write home to say what they've been doing.

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Subtitle: The Strange Tale of America's Greatest Medical Discovery and the Haunted Men Who Made It

Trade paperback.

A fascinating read, although at this point I'm mostly glad that the discovery was made at all... Due to the timing of the discovery, there are some interesting people who show up in this book, like Samuel Morse, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

A lot of women definitely owe Queen Victoria a debt: by requesting anesthesia for the delivery of her son in 1853, she settled the question of whether it was appropriate or not to alleviate labor pains. (My thought on reading about the objections of doctors & clerics on religious grounds was that they were nearly all men at the time...so it was easy for them to say that women were meant by God to suffer in childbirth.)

Once I get the next person's address, this book will be headed out in MaryZee's Biographies of Things - hope it finds a new reader!

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