The Hospital Is Not Heaven: Discerning Secular Thought in Medicine

Frederick Douglass placed a premium on education because he believed that reading gave freedom to enslaved men and women. A people who could read, he argued, were unfit to be slaves. David Blight, professor of American history at Yale, has provided an opportunity to read quite a bit about the 19th-century abolitionist and social reformer in his massive biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. New materials uncovered by historians and librarians make a new biography of Douglass not only useful, but in some ways also necessary to understand Douglass’s interactions with intellectual movements in the 19th century. Blight, more than…