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

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.