From the pioneering Danville surgeon Ephraim McDowell, the first doctor to successfully perform abdominal surgery, and Luke Blackburn, dubbed the "Hero of Hickman" and elected governor in 1879 after his efforts to combat yellow fever, to contemporary Kentucky doctors performing groundbreaking reconstructive surgery and artificial heart implants, Healing Kentucky tells the story of the two-hundred-year struggle to provide good health care to all Kentuckians. Nancy Disher Baird describes Lexington schoolteacher Linda Neville's mission to treat the eye disease trachoma in rural Kentucky, Louise Caudill's efforts to open the first hospital in Morehead, the 1833 cholera epidemic, and many other important episodes in medicine in Kentucky. Written on an upper-elementary school level expressly for adult literacy students and students of English as a second language, Healing Kentucky brings the many heroes of medicine in the Bluegrass State to life.

Most towns did not have hospitals of their own before the mid-twentieth century, and Kentucky towns were no exception. Kentucky's first real hospital opened in 1823, but it was in Louisville—too far away to serve many Kentucky communities, especially in cases of emergency. For this and other reasons, the lifespan of the average Kentuckian in the 1800s was only 40 years. Today it has grown to 75, and trained medical professionals are available to most communities throughout the state. Healing Kentucky tells how medical care changed in Kentucky over 200 years and became the much safer and better system we know today. It also describes early healing practices and methods used to care for the sick in the days before safe hospitals, even on Civil War battlefields. From cholera epidemics to polio and plastic surgery, readers will learn much about the people who shaped medicine in Kentucky.