Inland Empire

On  Sunday, Nov. 16th,  2 p.m. in the Assembly room of the A.K. Smiley Public Library, Dr. Bert "Hans" Davidson will discuss:

 Medical History of the Civil War. 

The era of the Civil War was a seminal time in the development of modern medicine. It took place just before new insights that revolutionized healing. In the Civil War, more soldiers died of disease than of injury. It's been estimated that if the war had been fought just a decade later, half of the deaths could have been prevented. Germ theory and the importance of antisepsis, asepsis, and hygiene were not accepted, but effective pain treatment and anesthesia were available. The country was unprepared for the war, and resources weren't available to deal with the massive numbers of sick and wounded. In this lecture we discuss the more interesting aspects of the medical history of the Civil War, like the battleground amputations, the care of the sick and wounded, the medications that were available (both the effective and dangerous ones), the poor conditions under which the soldiers had to live. He will address the contributions women made in the new field of nursing and hospital administration; and how one female U.S. Surgeon, Dr. Mary Walker, became the first and only female Medal of Honor recipient. This is all illustrated with facts, artifacts, and photographs. 

Dr. Davidson has been an avid collector of objects pertaining to the history of medicine and has studied these topics, given lectures, and set up exhibits and museums for over 40 years. He is director of the Southern California Medical Museum (www.socalmedicalmuseum.org) and curator of the Polyplasticum Museum in Zwolle, the Netherlands (http://www.polyplasticum.nl). He also writes and lectures about local Dutch history and the Holocaust. He lives both in Zwolle, the Netherlands, and Redlands, CA, USA.

He is an emeritus Associated Professor at Loma Linda University School of Medicine where he started the first successful In-Vitro Fertilization Program in San Bernardino County and is a Clinical Professor emeritus at the Western University for the Health Sciences.

For 17 years he was the director and owner of the Inland Empire Fertility Medical Group, a Fertility, In-Vitro Fertilization and Reproductive Endocrinology clinic.

Dr. Davidson was born in the Netherlands. He studied at the Municipal University of Amsterdam Medical School, then completed a residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and a fellowship in Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility at UCLA. He received a Ph.D. degree at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.