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From Snake Oil to Medicine: Pioneering Public Health. By R. Alton Lee. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007. xi + 233 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95 cloth.
When Samuel J. Crumbine closed his eyes for the final time on July 12, 1954, in his home in New York City, he left a nation seismically removed from the one he had entered 91 years earlier. Born during the Civil War and living into the Cold War, he bore witness to social transformations so profound that efforts to encapsulate his passage can leave us unsettled, like viewing a daguerreotype of Sitting Bull in western clothing.
In this meticulously documented chronicle of Samuel Crumbine's life, Professor R. Alton Lee provokes similarly unsettling images of a physically diminutive giant in the field of public health feted at the Waldorf-Astoria late in...