Edgar Holden, M.D. of Newark, New Jersey: Provincial Physician on a National Stage

Book excerpt: Edgar Holden, M.D., of Newark: Provincial Physician on a National Stage is a study of medicine and health in Essex County, New Jersey, and its largest city, Newark, in the decades following the Civil War. Th e book is structured around the multifaceted career of Edgar Holden, a Newark physician who transcended the provinciality that characterized Essex Countys medical community and institutions. Th e author demonstrates how institution building and new paradigms of medical authority funneled from burgeoning urban medical centers into the provincial and sluggish medical landscape of northern New Jersey. Th e lack of a medical school within the state stymied the intellectual and professional ferment that the best nineteenth-century American medical schools attracted and fostered. New York City, with its medical institutions and elite practitioners cast a giant shadow over northern New Jersey, which consequently has been somewhat neglected by historians of medicine. An exploration of this lively community of welltrained practitioners, fl edgling institutions, and ailing citizens sheds light on similar medical communities that found themselves importingbut rarely exportingmedical knowledge and expertise.