In this book, the author re-creates medicine in the Colonial past. It was a world where surgeons, working at military hospitals, received one and one-third dollars a day for their efforts; where operations, most frequently amputations, were performed without benefit of anesthesia; and where nostalgia was deemed a legitimate diagnosis and was treated as an organic disease during the Revolutionary War. During this time when "antiseptic" was a new word, readers will discover how puritanically minded people were resistant to smallpox inoculations as being against the will of God; about physicians forced to experiment with new vaccines on their own family members for want of other subjects; and even about how best to treat an outbreak of scurvy aboard a slave ship. More than just a historical work, this book examines the medical theories and surgical practices that provided the groundwork for modern medicine.