Introduction

This issue of Utah Historical Quarterly highlights medicine and public health in Utah and adjacent areas historically settled by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Treating and preventing sickness, promoting health and healing, and nurturing and prolonging life are key features of the human experience, even though the meaning of health, methods of delivering and receiving healthcare, and identities of healers and patients change over time.The articles in this issue appear chronologically and illustrate themes, both basic and complex, in medical and public health history. Brooke LeFevre examines infertility and reproductive medicine among Latter-day Saint women in the late nineteenth century. Having children strongly informed her definition of wifehood and marriage, prompting Elizabeth Pickett Tolman to embrace church teachings—specifically the doctrine of plural marriage—in hopes of conceiving a child. When miraculous means failed, Tolman turned to plant-based methods traditionally favored by the Saints as well as to scientific medicine practiced by professionally trained doctors. Obstetrical interventions didn't reverse her infertility, however, devastating Elizabeth and informing LeFevre's closing remarks about the challenges of Mormon femininity, family, and genealogy-based history.Cathy Gilmore analyzes health and healing among Latter-day Saints on the edges of the Great Basin Kingdom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. June Augusta Bushman Smith and Hyrum Smith grew up in Arizona families with women who were renowned for their healing abilities. “Health and healing had yet to split from their religious roots,” she writes, influencing June and Hyrum to take religious traditions seriously while they trained to be chiropractors. In Alberta, Canada, both spouses worked as chiropractors while Hyrum served as the bishop of the Lethbridge congregation, anointing and blessing the sick, while June gave talks on natural therapies and applied psychology and offered healing to many—even after their church restricted ritual healing to men. The Smiths’ holistic approach to wellness encompassed Mormon faith traditions, folk practices, and new scientific approaches to medicine, providing “continuity and stability” in an era of change to their frontier communities.Gilmore and LeFevre observe the existence of a diverse medical marketplace. Plant-based treatments passed down through oral tradition and dispensed at home by women were commonplace at the end of the nineteenth century. At the same time, scientific therapies and technology—such as the germ theory of disease, vaccination, and the use of anesthesia—and the creation of accredited medical schools and hospitals staffed by male doctors began laying the groundwork of a modern health industry. The authors also recognize the challenges that Mormon women faced to their sense of well-being and their personal and professional aspirations. Rather than value-neutral, the practice of medical science was powerfully influenced by gender, class, and notions of the sacred. Finally, Gilmore and LeFevre emphasize the idea of therapeutic care more than preventative care, an overriding principle of the last three articles.Ginger Franks argues that the state of Idaho failed to mount an effective public health campaign against the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 (often called the Spanish flu) due to several reasons. These included the World War I effort, which pulled many physicians away from the state; mixed messages about the severity of the infection; insufficient government funding and not enough personnel devoted to combating influenza; and lax enforcement of quarantine laws. A popular attitude of self-reliance undermined government efforts to limit or intrude into the private lives of citizens. A recurring theme in public health history is ideological tension between medical professionals, public officials, and citizens over individual rights and government responsibility to community health. Relying on newspaper reports, death certificates, and state records, Franks concludes that the Gem State suffered approximately two thousand deaths during the pandemic.Sarah Langsdon analyzes the politics of combating venereal disease among soldiers in the 1930s and 1940s. Prostitution increased near Ogden's military complex, leading to a rise in sexually transmitted diseases, especially syphilis. Private doctors treated the sick, but with the outbreak of World War II, military planners turned to the more efficient method of regulating prostitution. Although military and public health officials sought assistance from local police in rounding up prostitutes, they enjoyed limited success due to “close ties between Ogden's city officers and the vice that ran rampant in the streets.” Langsdon argues that passage of the federal May Act in 1941, pressure from the state and military, and the widespread prevalence of penicillin led to the decline of venereal disease by the 1950s.Eric Swedin concludes this special issue by analyzing the attitudes of Latter-day Saints in Utah toward vaccination and contagious disease during the 1957 Asian flu. He shows that sentiments shifted over the twentieth century so that “the experience of Utah during this pandemic was mostly typical for the nation.” During the smallpox epidemic of 1899–1901, church leaders embraced vaccination for the most part while many rank-and-file churchgoers did not. Twenty years later, the Saints generally obeyed laws mandating masks and isolating the sick, and then received vaccinations for polio during the federal government's campaign in the 1950s. A Cold War consensus around public health emerged by midcentury in part due to the rise of more efficient manufacturing methods, plus the ability of vaccines to remain stable under extremes of hot and cold.While the ambivalence to vaccination that Swedin and Franks study is specific to the times and places they write about, reluctance to intrusive or coercive health measures is not. In a similar vein, antivaccination protests emerged across the nation during the COVID-19 pandemic despite it taking on a particular cast in Utah and other areas in the West. Similarities and differences are evident in other themes treated in this issue: the rise of regular medicine, importance of maternal and infant health, and treatment of lifestyle diseases, which flesh out the history of health and medicine. In the 1970s, concerns about climate change influenced medical experts to take environmental health seriously. Today, blowing dust from the Great Salt Lake threatens public health, informing personal and community hopes, dreams, and fears about living well, a topic of future historical study.

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