(From jacket of the first edition): When a frontier gunman's wrist was shattered by a bullet, he lost his arm to amputation. When cholera struck a wagon train, the survivors buried the dead along the trail. Nineteenth-century medicine was harsh and primitive, and when a doctor could not be reached, pioneers often died from the hunting-knife surgery of a friend or from a homemade cure.

Here, in all its color, is the story of frontier medicine. Thoroughly researched, yet written with a light and lively hand, this chronicle spins a yarn about the rough-and-tumble era of the pioneer West—the days of sodbuster surgeons, cowboy doctors, railroad sawbones, riverboat remedies, old wives' cures, and get-rich-quick quacks.

And here are the great men of wilderness medicine: Ephraim McDowell who ignored the shouts of a lynch mob in backwoods Kentucky while he performed the first ovariectomy in medical history; William Beaumont, a surgeon at a Great Lakes military outpost, who studied human digestion through a gunshot wound in the stomach of a young voyageur; Daniel Drake, who wrote a masterful medical geography, mapping diseases and their causes in the interior wilderness of North America; and George Goodfellow, the famous gunshot surgeon of Tombstone, Arizona, who patched up the lucky survivors and performed post mortems on the not-so-lucky dead.