Clio Medica Online

When smallpox inoculation entered western medical practice in 1721 it aroused considerable controversy. A broad-based cohort of enlightened Germans such as publishers, poets, pastors and elite women attempted to dispel the doubts and encourage the innovative procedure. Yet many parents remained fearful, and the contagiousness of inoculation also necessitated a new approach. National pride in the past defeat of bubonic plague aroused optimism that smallpox could be banished using a similar strategy. The arrival in 1800 of Jenner’s vaccine ended the debates by offering yet another promising new approach.
Battling Smallpox before Vaccination explores the social and medical impacts of inoculation. It offers belated recognition for the valiant attempts of the many protagonists battling against the so-called ‘murdering angel’ before Edward Jenner’s discovery of vaccination. It provides a comprehensive description and penetrating analysis of the understanding and perception of smallpox, the propagation of pro-inoculation information, varied reactions to inoculation, and debates over the idealistic goal of eradicating smallpox.

This volume addresses the interdependencies between visual technologies and epistemology with regard to our perception of the medical body. It explores the relationships between the imagination, the body, and concrete forms of visual representations: Ranging from the Renaissance paradigm of anatomy, to Foucault’s “birth of the clinic” and the institutionalised construction of a “medical gaze”; from “visual” archives of madness, psychiatric art collections, the politicisation and economisation of the body, to the post-human in mass media representations.
Contributions to this volume investigate medical bodies as historical, technological, and political constructs, constituted where knowledge formation and visual cultures intersect.

Contributors are: Axel Fliethmann, Michael Hau, Birgit Lang, Carolyn Lau, Heikki Lempa, stef lenk, Joanna Madloch, Barry Murnane, Jill Redner, Claudia Stein, Elizabeth Stephens, Corinna Wagner, and Christiane Weller.

Tizian Zumthurm uses the extraordinary hospital of an extraordinary man to produce novel insights into the ordinary practice of biomedicine in colonial Central Africa. His investigation of therapeutic routines in surgery, maternity care, psychiatry, and the treatment of dysentery and leprosy reveals the incoherent nature of biomedicine and not just in Africa. Reading rich archival sources against and along the grain, the author combines concepts that appeal to those interested in the history of medicine and colonialism. Through the microcosm of the hospital, Zumthurm brings to light the social worlds of Gabonese patients as well as European staff. By refusing to easily categorize colonial medical encounters, the book challenges our understanding of biomedicine as solely domineering or interactive.

Tracing Hospital Boundaries explores, for the first time, how the forces of both integration and segregation shaped hospitals and their communities between the eleventh and twentieth centuries in Europe, North America and Africa. Within this broad comparative context it also shines a light on a number of case studies from Southeastern Europe.
The eleven chapters show how people’s access to, and experience of, healthcare institutions was affected by social, cultural and economic, as well as medical, dynamics. These same factors intersected with developing healthcare technologies to shape hospital design and location, as well as internal policies and practices. The volume produces a new history of the hospital in which boundaries – both physical and symbolic – are frequently contested and redrawn.

Contributors are Irena Benyovsky Latin, David Gentilcore, Annemarie Kinzelbach, Rina Kralj-Brassard, Ivana Lazarević, Clement Masakure, Anna Peterson, Egidio Priani, Gordan Ravančić, Jonathan Reinarz, Jane Stevens Crawshaw, David Theodore, Christina Vanja, George Weisz, and Valentina Živković.

Winner of the 2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award

In A History of Population Health Johan P. Mackenbach offers a broad-sweeping study of the spectacular changes in people’s health in Europe since the early 18th century. Most of the 40 specific diseases covered in this book show a fascinating pattern of ‘rise-and-fall’, with large differences in timing between countries. Using a unique collection of historical data and bringing together insights from demography, economics, sociology, political science, medicine, epidemiology and general history, it shows that these changes and variations did not occur spontaneously, but were mostly man-made. Throughout European history, changes in health and longevity were therefore closely related to economic, social, and political conditions, with public health and medical care both making important contributions to population health improvement.

Readers who would like to have a closer look at the quantitative data used in the trend graphs included in the book can find these it here.

During the first period of globalization medical ideas and practices originating in China became entangled in the medical activities of other places, sometimes at long distances. They produced effects through processes of alteration once known as translatio, meaning movements in place, status, and meaning. The contributors to this volume examine occasions when intermediaries responded creatively to aspects of Chinese medicine, whether by trying to pass them on or to draw on them in furtherance of their own interests. Practitioners in Japan, at the imperial court, and in early and late Enlightenment Europe therefore responded to translations creatively, sometimes attempting to build bridges of understanding that often collapsed but left innovation in their wake.

Contributors are Marta Hanson, Gianna Pomata, Beatriz Puente-Ballesteros, Wei Yu Wayne Tan, Margaret Garber, Daniel Trambaiolo, and Motoichi Terada.

​​​​​​​Winner of the J. Worth Estes Prize 2021 awarded by the American Association for the History of Medicine:
Beatriz Puentes-Ballesteros, “Chocolate in China: Interweaving cultural histories of an imperfectly connected world,” in Harold Cook (ed.), Translation at Word: Chinese Medicine in the First Global Age (Leiden, Boston: Brill | Rodopi, 2020).

This is the first full-length study of doctor migration from Ireland covering roughly a century of the export of Irish medical graduates to other parts of the world. From 1860 around forty percent of Ireland’s medical graduates left to pursue careers elsewhere. The book examines the factors which drove emigration, the shifting destinations of the emigrants and the effect of migration both upon them and the Ireland they left behind. This was the migration of a part of the Irish middle class, small in terms of Irish emigration as a whole, but important in the global history of medical migration. At the end of the twentieth century doctor migration as a whole has increased and become a significant part of the medical experience. The book is a contribution to the growing literature on the global history of doctor movements across the world.

Attributing Excellence in Medicine discusses the aura around the prestigious Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. It analyzes the social processes and contingent factors leading to recognition and reputation in science and medicine. This volume will help the reader to better understand the dynamics of the attribution of excellence throughout the 20th century.

Contributors are Massimiano Bucchi, Fabio De Sio, Jacalyn Duffin, Heiner Fangerau, Thorsten Halling, Nils Hansson, David S. Jones, Gustav Källstrand, Ulrich Koppitz, Pauline Mattsson, Katarina Nordqvist, Scott H. Podolsky, Thomas Schlich, and Sven Widmalm.

The Man Who Crucified Himself is the history of a sensational nineteenth-century medical case. In 1805 a shoemaker called Mattio Lovat attempted to crucify himself in Venice. His act raised a furore, and the story spread across Europe. For the rest of the century Lovat’s case fuelled scientific and popular debates on medicine, madness, suicide and religion. Drawing on Italian, German, English and French sources, Maria Böhmer traces the multiple readings of the case and identifies various 'interpretive communities'. Her meticulously researched study sheds new light on Lovat’s case and offers fresh insights on the case narrative as a genre - both epistemic and literary.

Drawing in particular on physicians’ casebooks, Medical Practices, 1600-1900 studies the changing nature of ordinary medical practice in early modern Europe. Combining case studies on individual German, Austrian and Swiss practitioners with a comparative analysis across the centuries, it offers the first comprehensive and systematic overview of the major aspects of premodern practitioners daily work and business – from diagnostic and therapeutic approaches and the kinds of patients treated to financial issues, record keeping and their place in contemporary society.

Scientific experimentation with humans has a long history. Combining elements of history of science with history of medicine, The Uses of Humans in Experiment illustrates how humans have grappled with issues of consent, and how scientists have balanced experience with empiricism to achieve insights for scientific as well as clinical progress. The modern incarnation of ethics has often been considered a product of the second half of the twentieth century, as enshrined in international laws and codes, but these authors remind us that this territory has long been debated, considered, and revisited as a fundamental part of the scientific enterprise that privileges humans as ideal subjects for advancing research.

Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture, 1726–1832 examines the ramifications of Scottish medicine for literary culture within Scotland, throughout Britain, and across the transatlantic world. The contributors take an informed historicist approach in examining the cultural, geographical, political, and other circumstances enabling the dissemination of distinctively Scottish medico-literary discourses. In tracing the international influence of Scottish medical ideas upon literary practice they ask critical questions concerning medical ethics, the limits of sympathy and the role of belles lettres in professional self-fashioning, and the development of medico-literary genres such as the medical short story, physician autobiography and medical biography. Some consider the role of medical ideas and culture in the careers, creative practice and reception of such canonical writers as Mark Akenside, Robert Burns, Robert Fergusson, Sir Walter Scott and William Wordsworth. By providing an important range of current scholarship, these essays represent an expansion and greater penetration of critical vision.

‘What is emotion?’ pondered the young Charles Darwin in his notebooks. How were the emotions to be placed in an evolutionary framework? And what light might they shed on human-animal continuities? These were among the questions Darwin explored in his research, assisted both by an acute sense of observation and an extraordinary capacity for fellow feeling, not only with humans but with all animal life. After Darwin: Animals, Emotions, and the Mind explores questions of mind, emotion and the moral sense which Darwin opened up through his research on the physical expression of emotions and the human–animal relation. It also examines the extent to which Darwin’s ideas were taken up by Victorian writers and popular culture, from George Eliot to the Daily News. Bringing together scholars from biology, literature, history, psychology, psychiatry and paediatrics, the volume provides an invaluable reassessment of Darwin’s contribution to a new understanding of the moral sense and emotional life, and considers the urgent scientific and ethical implications of his ideas today.

Motherhood holds a special place in Argentinian culture. Representing Argentinian Mothers examines the historical intersections of medicine and culture that have underpinned the representations of motherhood during the first half of the twentieth century. From the emergence of a medicalised maternal figure at the beginning of the century to the appearance of a new, politicised mother-figure by the time of Eva Perón, the contentious representations of motherhood constitute a privileged viewpoint to explore the tensions and conflicts underlying the country’s modernisation process. At the core of the analysis is an evaluation of the way in which medical representations of motherhood have been implicated, confirmed or contested in other significant areas of the social and cultural fields.
Through detailed examination of a rich selection of sources including medical texts, newspapers, novels, photojournalism, and paintings, Representing Argentinian Mothers adopts an interdisciplinary approach and an innovative framework based on categories and notions drawn from the History of Ideas and Cultural History. By enquiring about the influence of medicine in the field of ideas, beliefs and images, Yolanda Eraso elaborates new insights to understand their interaction, which will appeal to anyone with an interest in the Medical Humanities.

Divine Doctors and Dreadful Distempers examines the discourse of seventeenth-century English physicians to demonstrate that physicians utilized cultural attitudes and beliefs to create medical theory. They meshed moralism with medicine to self-fashion an image of themselves as knowledgeable health experts whose education assured good judgment and sage advice, and whose interest in the health of their patients surpassed the peddling of a single nostrum to everyone. The combination of morality with medicine gave them the support of the influential godly in society because physicians’ theories about disease and its prevention supported contemporary concerns that sinfulness was rampant. Particularly disturbing to the godly were sins deemed most threatening to the social order: lasciviousness, ungodliness, and unruliness, all of which were most clearly and threateningly manifested in the urban poor. Physicians’ medical theories and suggestions for curbing some of the most feared and destructive diseases in the seventeenth century, most notably plague and syphilis, focused on reforming or incarcerating the sick and sinful poor. Doing so helped propel physicians to an elevated position in the hierarchy of healers competing for patients in seventeenth-century England.

How do you write your life story when readers expect you not to make sense? How do you write a case history that makes sense when, face to face with schizophrenia, your ability to tell a diagnostic story begins to fall apart? This book examines work in several genres of life writing–autobiography, memoir, case history, autobiographical fiction–focused either on what it means to live with schizophrenia or what it means to understand and ‘treat’ people who have received that diagnosis. Challenging the romanticized connection between literature and madness, Life Writing and Schizophrenia explores how writers who hear voices and experience delusions write their identities into narrative, despite popular and medical representations of schizophrenia as chaos, violence, and incoherence. The study juxtaposes these narratives to case histories by clinicians writing their encounters with those diagnosed with schizophrenia, encounters that call their own narrative authority and coherence into question.

What did you do when you fell ill in fifteenth-century Florence? How did you get the medicines that you needed at a price you could afford? What would you find when you entered an apothecary’s shop? This richly detailed study of the Speziale al Giglio in Florence provides surprising answers, demonstrating the continued importance of highly personalised medical practice late into the fifteenth century. Drawing on extensive archival research, it shows how personal relationships and mutual trust, rather than market forces, made payment possible even for those with limited incomes. Examining the spaces, people and products involved, Making and Marketing Medicine investigates the roles played by sociability, information networks and regulation in creating communities as well as in promoting health in Renaissance Italy.

Leading the reader through the darkened séance rooms and laboratories of Imperial and inter-war Germany, The Stepchildren of Science casts light on the emergence of psychical research and parapsychology in the German context. It looks, in particular, at the role of the psychiatrist Albert von Schrenck-Notzing - a figure who fashioned himself as both propagandist and Grand Seignior of German parapsychology - in shaping these nascent disciplines. In contrast to other recent studies in which occultism is seen as a means of dealing with or creating “the modern”, this book considers the epistemological, cultural and social issues that arose from psychical researchers’ and parapsychologists’ claims to scientific legitimacy. Focusing on the boundary disputes between these researchers and the spiritualists, occultists, psychologists and scientists with whom they competed for authority over the paranormal, The Stepchildren of Science demonstrates that in the German context both proponents and opponents alike understood psychical research and parapsychology as border sciences.

Following a humiliating defeat in the Crimean War, the Russian Empire found herself exposed due to major deficiencies in her infrastructure. To gain from European scientific, technical and educational advancements, the Russian Government began to permit studies abroad and relaxed censorship, which brought a new flood of literature into the country. These measures enormously facilitated the growth of Russian science, medicine and education in the late nineteenth century, taking the Empire into a fascinating era of laboratory research, a new cultural and intellectual tradition.
The Imperial Laboratory tells the story of the lives and studies of the leading Russian and German clinician–experimenters who played critical roles in the integration of physics and chemistry into physiology and clinical medicine. A principal theme is the major transformations undergone in military medicine and education. Using a wide range of Russian and German primary sources, this book offers a unique English-language insight into Russian physiology and medicine that will be of interest to both historians and doctors, as well as anyone interested in Russian science and culture.

Visiting relatives and friends in medical institutions is a common practice in all corners of the world. People probably go into hospitals as a visitor more frequently than they do as a patient. Permeable Walls is the first book devoted to the history of hospital and asylum visiting and deflects attention from medical history’s more traditionally studied constituencies, patients and doctors.
Covering the eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries, and taking case studies from around the globe, the authors demonstrate that hospitals and asylums could be remarkably permeable institutions. However, policies towards visitors have varied from outright exclusion, as in the case of some isolation hospitals in Victorian Britain, to near open access in the first Chinese missionary hospitals. Historical studies of visitors and visiting, as a result, tell us much about the changing relationship between healthcare institutions and the communities they serve. These histories are particularly relevant at a time when service providers seek ways to involve patients’ representatives in healthcare decision making; to control hospital super-bugs; and to make the hospital environment accessible yet safe and secure. With the re-emergence of restricted visiting, the subject remains one of the most emotive topics in the history of institutional medicine.
Adopting a wide-ranging definition of visitors, from official inquirers to family members, Permeable Walls provides an innovative perspective on hospitals and asylums historically and will interest historians of medicine, charity and governance, as well as healthcare policy-makers.

Against a backdrop of contemporary social and sexual concerns, and potent fears surrounding the moral and physical ‘degeneration’ of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century society, ‘The Cruel Madness of Love’ explores a critical period in the developing relationship between syphilis and insanity.
General paralysis of the insane (GPI), the most commonly diagnosed of the neurosyphilitic disorders, has been devastating both in terms of its severity and incidence. Using the rich laboratory and asylum records of lowland Scotland as a case study, Gayle Davis examines the evolution of GPI as a disease category from a variety of perspectives: social, medical, and pathological.
Through exploring case notes and the impact of new diagnostic techniques and therapies, such as the Wassermann Test and Malarial Therapy, the reader gains a unique insight into both patients and practitioners. Significant insights are gained into the socio–sexual background and medical experience of patients, as well as the clinical ideas and judgmental behaviour of the practitioners confronting this disease.
‘The Cruel Madness of Love’ will be of interest to anyone wishing to explore the historical relationship between sexuality, morality and disease.

He is what we would call a very good attendant, who would not run away or flinch from any patient, but would try to have his orders carried out if possible. Such was the view of William Coady, attendant to the insane in the British settler colony of Victoria, Australia in the 1870s.
This book is a history of William Coady’s occupation, a history asylum work and workers in nineteenth-century Australia. It considers not only who attendants were and why they worked in the asylum, but also how they and others variously defined the very good attendant.
Colonial asylum advocates imagined the attendant as an archetype, drawing on ideas from Britain about the nature of insanity and its treatment. In exploring the articulation of these ideas in a specific colonial context and their effect on the colonial asylum workplace, Lee-Ann Monk makes an important contribution to the international history of the asylum. She also opens new dimensions in the history of this occupation, on which the fate of patients very much depended, by analysing attendants’ efforts to construct an occupational identity and give meaning to their work, thus providing new insights into their sense of themselves and their occupation.

John Wesley’s Primitive Physic (1747) achieved twenty-three editions in his lifetime, ensuring its popular – and controversial – status in eighteenth-century medicine.
This is the first full-length study to examine the theological, intellectual and cultural background to one of the period’s most successful medical texts. By exploring Wesley’s work in the context of his theology, ‘A Cheap, Safe and Natural Medicine’ extends the on-going reconfiguration of the relationship between religion and medicine.
Wesley was on a theological mission to recover the primitive purity of the first Christians. Yet the remedies contained within Primitive Physic suggest a pragmatic thinker, whose concern for spiritual health did not prevent him from providing practical assistance to those who needed it. The evolution of Wesley’s thinking also demonstrates some of the struggles he faced as leader of the Methodist movement, such as the way he handled contemporary criticism of Primitive Physic when religious ‘enthusiasm’ was often conflated with medical ‘quackery’.
'A Cheap, Safe and Natural Medicine' will be of interest not only to medical and literary historians, but to anyone who is interested in the way religion influences medicine.

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How do doctors decide whether their drugs, or other treatments, actually work? In practice this can be fiendishly difficult. Nowadays the gold standard is the randomised controlled trial (RCT). But the RCT is a recent invention, and the story of how it came to dominate therapeutic evaluation from the latter half of the twentieth century involves acrimony, confrontation, and manipulation of the powerful rhetoric of ‘control’.
Control and the Therapeutic Trial examines the development of the RCT from the eclectic collection of methodologies available to practitioners in the early-twentieth century. In particular, it explores the British Medical Research Council’s (MRC) exploitation of the term ‘controlled’ to help establish its own ‘controlled trials’ as the gold standard for therapeutic evaluation, and, ultimately, the MRC itself as the proper authority to adjudicate on therapeutic efficacy. This rhetorical power still clings, and is exploited today.
Control and the Therapeutic Trial will be of interest not only to historians of twentieth-century medicine and practising clinicians who take therapeutic decisions, but to anyone who seeks a broader insight into the forces that shaped, and control, the modern controlled trial.

Standing armies and navies brought with them military medical establishments, shifting the focus of disease management from individuals to groups. Prevention, discipline, and surveillance produced results, and career opportunities for physicians and surgeons. All these developments had an impact on medicine and society, and were in turn influenced by them. The essays within examine these phenomena, exploring the imperial context, nursing and medicine in Britain, naval medicine, as well as the relationship between medicine, the state and society.
British Military and Naval Medicine challenges the notion that military medicine was, in all respects, ‘a good thing’. The so-called monopoly of military medicine and the authoritarian structures within the military were complex and, at times, successfully contested. Sometimes changes were imposed that cannot be characterised as improvements.
British Military and Naval Medicine also points to opportunities for further research in this exciting field of study.

Missionary medicine flourished during the period of high European imperialism, from the late-1800s to the 1960s. Although the figure of mission doctor – exemplified by David Livingstone and Albert Schweitzer – exercised a powerful influence on the Western imagination during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, few historians have examined the history of this important aspect of the missionary movement. This collection of articles on Asia and Africa uses the extensive archives that exist on medical missions to both enrich and challenge existing histories of the clinic in colonial territories – whether of the dispensary, the hospital, the maternity home or leprosy asylum.
Some of the major themes addressed within include the attitude of different Christian denominations towards medical mission work, their differing theories and practices, how the missionaries were drawn into contentious local politics, and their attitude towards supernatural cures.
Leprosy, often a feature of such work, is explored, as well as the ways in which local people perceived disease, healing and the missionaries themselves. Also discussed is the important contribution of women towards mission medical work.
Healing Bodies, Saving Souls will be of interest not only to students and historians but also the wider reader as it aims to define the place of missionary within the overall history of medicine.

Medicine-by-Post is an interdisciplinary study that will engage readers both in the history of medicine and the eighteenth-century novel. The correspondence from the large private practices of James Jurin, George Cheyne, and William Cullen opens a unique window on the doctor–patient relationship in England and Scotland from this period. The letters, many previously unpublished, reveal a changing rhetoric that mirrors contemporary shifts in medical theory and the patient’s self-image.
Medicine-by-Post uncovers the strategies of self-representation by both healers and patients, and reinterprets the meaning of illness and the medical encounter in eighteenth-century literature in the light of true-life experience. The tension between the patient’s personal needs and the doctor’s professional will presents a ready metaphor for the novelist, depicting the social expectations placed upon the individual as well as a measure of one’s moral character in the context of illness.
The correspondence also demonstrates the subtle changes in rhetoric regarding ‘sensibility’, reflecting evolving medical speculation. It also describes the differing perspectives of the female body between doctors and novelists and the women patients themselves. Yet much of this correspondence shows an unexpected blend of metaphor with a realistic and utilitarian approach to therapeutic advice and the patient’s own compliance. In these letters we discover some genuinely sympathetic doctors.

New Medical Challenges explores a wide range of social and medical practices, exposing the contradictions and ambiguities found in eighteenth-century Scottish health, science and medicine. The overall picture casts further light on the nature of the Enlightenment as a cultural phenomenon.
Commercial society created new jobs, wealth and desires, that threatened contemporary values and physical health. Both luxury and poverty took their toll, spawning disease among the affluent and the poor. A number of key issues are examined, including the role of charity, medical debates and competition, vivisection, and diseases of the time – such as ‘pulmonary consumption’, ‘mill reek’ and ‘ague’. Special chapters are devoted to ‘female troubles’, ‘hysteria’ and ‘hypochondriasis’, showing the evolving relationships across gender and class lines between poor patients and their physicians.
To place medical ideas and practices into proper context, the essays offer extensive background information and rediscover the lost voices of prominent physicians involved in promoting health and battling illness. Thanks to the richness of seldom-tapped archival sources – book manuscripts, consultation letters, hospital registration and management records, together with student essays, lecture notes and notebooks – the selected episodes expose a world of uncertainty, confusion and paradox.
New Medical Challenges tells a wide range of stories that will be of great interest to a broad readership concerned with past health issues.

In early modern Europe, monstrous births were significant events that were seen alive by many people, and dissected, embalmed and collected after death. Emblematic Monsters is a social history of monstrous births as seen through popular print, scholarly books and the proceedings of learned societies.
Representations of monsters are considered in the context of their roles as wonders and emblems, and studies of the anatomy of monsters are discussed along with contemporary theories of their origin. By approaching accounts of monstrous births not only as a literary form but also as descriptions of real-life cases, similarities between the pre-scientific recording of wonders and the scientific case report can be explored.
Most impressively, A.W. Bates draws upon his own experience of diagnosis of birth defects to summarise more than two hundred original descriptions of monstrous births and compare them with modern diagnostic categories.
Emblematic Monsters is an up-to-date approach to a classical yet under-explored subject: gruesome, compelling and monstrous.

One of the great medical controversies of the Enlightenment was the European debate on motion, sensation, and animal experimentation provoked by Albrecht von Haller’s treatise on irritability and sensibility (1752).
Irritating Experiments is the first full-length study to explore the theoretical background and the experimental process that led to Haller's description and separation of two fundamental bodily qualities: irritability, or the capacity of muscles to contract upon stimulation, and sensibility, or the capacity of the nervous system to transmit impressions that are felt as touch or pain in humans, or produce signs of pain in animals.
This new concept presented a serious challenge to the reigning medical systems. Haller’s animal experiments were repeated all over Europe, on a scale never seen before. The results, however, were contradictory. Haller's concept was largely rejected, and animal experimentation could not be established as a major research method in physiology. Focussing on procedural aspects of experimentation, the interaction between experiment and theory, the status of surgery, the use of medical and pathological models, and the culture of criticism, Irritating Experiments tries to explain why.

What shapes health policy? Current thinking dictates that scientific evidence should be the basis for policy making in healthcare, but is this a new approach, and how has it developed? Making Health Policy shows how networks in science and the media have established a dialogue for policy making since 1945.
Surprisingly, many of the networks influencing health policy are not political ones central to public discussion. Instead, scientific networks have shaped policies on public health, based upon findings of chronic disease epidemiology. For policies on illicit drugs, the clinical experience of a small group of psychiatrists held sway. And ironically in an ever cost-conscious world, high-technology areas – such as renal dialysis – saw economic considerations diminish as time passed. Health pressure groups entered the equation, and the last half of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of the media as the defining agency in the science/policy relationship.
Making Health Policy is the first historical study to explore the unspoken links between science and recent health policy.

The Cape Doctor is a social history of medicine, which places formal Western medicine within its political, social and economic context. The work shows the way in which the Cape medical profession excluded all but a few women and black practitioners, and discriminated along lines of race, class and gender in their practice. It revises traditional whiggish and linear accounts of professional advancement, but it also moves beyond the classic revisionist tradition, which documents the emergence of a society divided along lines of race and gender, by providing examples of cultural crossover and medical pluralism. It also provides a perspective on a broad historical process within which to understand present debates about the most appropriate health policies in South Africa today.

This innovative collection of essays employs historical and sociological approaches to provide important case studies of asylums, psychiatry and mental illness in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Leading scholars in the field working on a variety of geographical, temporal, socio-cultural, economic and political contexts, show how class and gender have historically affected and conditioned the thinking, language, and processes according to which society identified and responded to the mentally ill. Contributors to this volume focus on both class and gender and thus are able to explore their interaction, whereas previous publications addressed class or gender incidentally, partially, or in isolation. By adopting this dual focus as its unifying theme, the volume is able to supply new insights into such interesting topics as patient careers, the relationship between lay and professional knowledge of insanity, the boundaries of professional power, and the creation of psychiatric knowledge. Particularly useful to student readers (and to those new to this academic field) is a substantive and accessible introduction to existing scholarship in the field, which signposts the ways in which this collection challenges, adjusts and extends previous perspectives.

Here is presented for the first time an overview of dental practice and the providers of dental treatment at the close of the eighteenth century in some of the major countries of western Europe and further afield. It draws on previously under-explored primary sources, rigorously referenced, and enables comparison of and contrast within the emergent specialty in rapidly-changing social and political environments. The overall picture challenges conventional wisdom and will be of interest to social as well as to dental and medical historians.

The health and welfare of children became an area of concern and action in the early decades of the twentieth century. This concern would develop an ever-broader remit during the course of the century, moving from anxiety about high death rates, physical health and the ‘unfit’, to embrace all children and the mental health and the psychological well-being of individuals.

This volume emerged out of an Anglo-Dutch Workshop held at the University of Warwick in July 1999, and is the first book to explore child health in the twentieth century in a comparative perspective, focussing on such issues as the link between child health and citizenship, the impact of ideas concerning degeneracy, socialisation, consumerism and children’s rights, and the role of the family, state and experts in mediating child health.

Oh, you hurt me, Sir! … are you going to do it again? – A patient, 1832
For Fear of Pain offers a social history of the operating room in Britain during the final decades of painful surgery. It asks profound questions: how could surgeons operate upon conscious patients? How could patients submit? It presents a revisionist view of surgery, hygiene, nursing, military and naval surgery and the introduction of anaesthesia.
For Fear of Pain seeks to unite the clinical with the human. Drawing on fresh evidence, it offers powerful insights into the experience of painful surgery. It is populated by the characters, ambitions, and animosities of the ‘great men’ of contemporary medicine, by the young men who grew into surgeons, and by the patients whose ‘fortitude’ was so notable.

The significance of the Regius Chair of Military Surgery that existed in the University of Edinburgh from 1806–55 is discussed in detail for the first time in this book. The first holder, John Thomson, also held the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh's Chair of Surgery from 1804. This Regius Chair was the only one of its type in Britain for almost 50 years, and was established during the Peninsular War. After the second holder, Sir George Ballingall, died in 1855, the Government withdrew its funding support. This Chair introduced numerous Edinburgh medical students to Military Surgery, and many who attended subsequently entered the Medical Service of either the Army, Navy or East India Company. Large numbers of medical officers in the Public service also attended. These courses were popular, and the topics covered were not discussed elsewhere in the Edinburgh medical curriculum.

This book is the first in-depth study of occupational health in nineteenth and early-twentieth century Britain. As such it is an important contribution to the burgeoning literature on the history of health in the workplace. It focuses on the first four diseases to receive bureaucratic and legislative recognition: lead, arsenic and phosphorus poisoning and anthrax. As such it traces the emergence of medical knowledge and growth in public concern about the impact of these diseases in several major industries including pottery manufacture, matchmaking, wool-sorting and the multifarious trades in which arsenic was used as a raw material. It considers the process of state intervention taking due account of the influence of government inspectors, ‘moral entrepreneurs’ and various interest groups.

There has been a growing recognition of the importance of mathematical and statistical methods in the history of medicine, particularly in those areas where statistical methods are a sine qua non such as epidemiology and randomised clinical trials. Despite this expanding scholarly interest, the development of the mathematical and statistical technologies in the biological sciences has not been examined systematically. This collection of essays aims to provide a broader overview of this field, and to explore the use of these with the use of these quantitative technologies in medical and clinical cultures from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries.

At a time when genetics and informatics are seen to transform therapeutic thinking once again, it is pertinent to look back to earlier therapeutic regimes. The long twentieth century has witnessed a tremendous upsurge in new drugs, remedies and therapeutic strategies. The cultural environments in which they emerged, the social circumstances from which they sprang, and the social effects that remedies engendered are treated in depth in this collection of essays. They address the historical variety of remedies as economic, social, and cultural objects and discuss their particular forms of production and distribution. Drawing predominantly on British and Dutch cases, the curious ‘biographies’ of modern drugs like streptomycin, taxol and interferon are reviewed, the shifting boundaries between medicines and toxic substances are explored, and remedial strategies such as contraceptives are scrutinised. This book, which emerged out of an Anglo-Dutch conference held in 1998, explores cultures of remedies from a comparative perspective.

For fifty years, Theodore Turquet de Mayerne served as a royal physician in France and then in England. Historians have long recognised him as a brilliant practitioner and chemical Galenist, but this book is the first major study of his remarkable Latin casebooks, the ‘Ephemerides Morborum’ (Diaries of Disease). Interpreting the casebooks in the light of Mayerne's own theoretical writings and of contemporaries such as Jean Fernel, the book is a cultural history of medical perception. It shows how Mayerne crafted a medical portrait for his patients, moving from evaluation, through diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutics, and focuses on those moments when theory and practice merged to form an integrated medical outlook that served as the basis for action. Convinced that his innovations had the sanction of Galen and Hippocrates, Mayerne added chemical principles to humoral medicine, a greater empiricism to a more rational approach to medicine, and an interventionist therapeutics to a more cautious view of therapy, thus forging a complex synthesis that bore certain structural similarities to baroque culture and art.

Wine has always been a part of popular medicine. Bacchic Medicine analyses the historical role of wine in the treatment of disease and preservation of health.
The Hippocratic texts gave wine therapy a canonical statement over two millennia ago; but the nineteenth century was the golden age of alcohol and wine therapy. The Germans and the British gave us early canons of wine therapy and, heavily endowed with wine cultural capital, the French followed. But like all therapies, alcohol and wine therapies were not without danger and some of the ‘iatrogenic’ tales are still with us.
In the twentieth century, many doctors rallied to the defence of wine both as a substitute for more dangerous alcoholic drinks and as an efficacious medicament, with an impressive case for the efficacy of wine in fighting bacteria, heart disease and cancer. New science based on animal models and ionic theory fortified their arguments. According to the controversial ‘French Paradox’, wine drinking makes it possible for a population to enjoy a high fat diet yet suffer little. Bacchic Medicine also discusses the contemporary debate over the role of alcohol and wine in preventive medicine.

Neurasthenia, meaning nerve weakness, was ‘invented’ in the United States as a disorder of modernity, caused by the fast pace of urban life. Soon after, from the early 1880s onwards, this modern disease crossed the Atlantic. Neurasthenia became much less ‘popular’ in Britain or the Netherlands than in Germany. Neurasthenia’s heyday continued into the first decade of the twentieth century. The label referred to conditions similar to those currently labelled as chronic fatigue syndrome. Why this rise and fall of neurasthenia, and why these differences in popularity
This book, which emerged out of an Anglo-Dutch-German conference held in June 2000, explores neurasthenia’s many-sided history from a comparative perspective.

Tuberculosis mortality in the United States and in Britain was declining in the late nineteenth century but rising in Ireland. Only in the first decade of the twentieth century did mortality from tuberculosis begin to fall and even then it remained higher in Ireland than in Britain and many other European nations throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
Why Ireland’s pattern of tuberculosis mortality was different is the subject of this book. Several controversies in the history of tuberculosis epidemics are addressed; the degree to which poverty and standard of living played a part in the tuberculosis decline, the role of public health, urbanisation and gender.
Because tuberculosis was comparatively higher in Ireland it remained a much more potent political issue well into the twentieth century and the interaction between Ireland’s politics and the question of tuberculosis is discussed.

Modernising scientific medicine emerged in the nineteenth century as an increasingly powerful agent of change in a context of complex social developments. Women's lives and expectations in particular underwent a transformation in the years after 1870 as education, employment opportunities and political involvement extended their personal and gender horizons. For women, medicine came to offer not just treatment in the event of illness but the possibilities of participation in medical practise, of shaping social policies and political understandings, and of altering the biological imperatives of their bodies. The essays in this collection explore various ways in which women responded to these challenges and opportunities and sought to use the power of modernising Western medicine to further their individual and gender interests.

In the inter-war years there was much debate in Britain as to whether the best path to post-World War I regeneration would be found in the promises of science and technology, in continued and increased efficiency, in specialization and professionalization or whether the future of the nation depended on a rediscovery of older (and more authentic) ways of doing things, on a defiant anti-modernism. This debate on Britain's future was often conducted in terms of Englishness and the rebirth of a lost, more spiritual, village England. However, ‘Englishness' also entered inter-war social thinking through eclectic assimilations of diverse traditions. Prominent themes in the discourses on Britain's post-war regeneration include national character, citizenship, fitness, education, utopia, community and so on. The chapters in the present volume address these themes and break new ground by examining debates well known in political and literary history through their relations to science, medicine, architecture and ideas of social and political ‘health'.

Thomas Robert Malthus's reputation has lately been rehabilitated in the fields of social biology, demography, environmentalism, and economics. In the midst of this current interest and with the chance to mark the occasion of the bicentenary of the first edition of the Essay on Population (1798), the contributors to this volume take this timely opportunity to examine the historical conditions in which Malthus constructed his theory, and in which the concept of a ‘Malthusian' and ‘Neo-Malthusian' philosophy first emerged. The essays redress the balance between Malthus's original argument, the immediate responses to Malthus by medics and theologians in Britain and on the Continent, and some of the ways that his ideas were later attacked, appropriated, or misrepresented. Included here are essays that not only re-evaluate the development of Malthus's theory, but also offer critical perspectives on the generation of the ‘Malthusian league' and debates about birth control in Britain and on the Continent, and Malthus's influence on the emergence of social science and Darwinian evolutionary biology.

Most non-malignant chronic pain is medically unexplained. But that has not stopped doctors from trying. These improvisations at the limit of medical knowledge offer a way into the history of neurosis.
Lesionless pain was a paradigmatic problem of clinical method after 1800. It was central to the emergence of neuralgia, spinal irritation, surgical hysteria, railway spine and hysterical conversion. Evidence of a nineteenth-century tradition of theoretical discussion about the relationship between chronic pain and pathological lesion, trauma, mood, memory and personality is brought together here for the first time. A wide range of medical texts is surveyed, including pathology, surgery, physiology, neurology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. We see the medical gaze first penetrate the tissues of the body then extend to examine the language and mental state of the pain patient.
This history of chronic pain should be of interest to medical historians, pain clinicians, liaison psychiatrists, clinical psychologists and psychotherapists.

This book explores the role of Venereal Disease in shaping perceptions of sexuality in twentieth-century Scotland, and in defining the response of the Modern State to patterns of sexual behaviour. It examines how civic, medical and political authorities reacted to the ‘Hideous Scourge' in times of peace and war and how far policy was informed by anxieties surrounding social change and public morality as much as by the incidence of disease and developments in medical knowledge. It focuses in particular on the moral assumptions underpinning epidemiological debate, and the various dimensions of stigmatisation and control within VD discourse, including gender, generation and class. This study also highlights the protracted campaign in Scotland for legal controls over those suffering from VD, and the enduring problem, resurrected by the threat of HIV and AIDS, of balancing the demands of public health against those of civil liberties in the regulation of ‘dangerous sexualities'.

The essays in this volume, which range across Europe, America and Africa, and from the 18th to the 20th centuries, argue that the experience of travel, and the business of representing that experience, involved an obligatory engagement with the disturbing perception that travel's pleasures were inseparable from its dangers and ennuis. Despite the confidence of some medical authorities in their recommendations of the therapeutic benefits to be derived from ‘change of air' as a way of restoring a state of health, such opinions failed to establish a consensus, either amongst those who followed such peripatetic prescriptions, or amongst the medical professions in general. Mad doctors and climatologists alike were forced to adopt an essentially partisan stance in arguing their case for such recommendations, and were confronted by rival practitioners who could marshal counter-case histories which demonstrated diametrically opposed conclusions concerning the advisability of travel. To this extent, the history of travel and its pathologies is a particularly revealing instance of the way medical thinking was dependent on localised studies which might do more to challenge the universal applicability of generally accepted theories than they did to confirm their diagnostic reliability. The essays collected here not only contribute to our understanding of the conception and application of a variety of medical ideas, showing how they depended on beliefs about climate and corporeal constitution as well as often inconsistent data or récits culled from travellers and geographically dispersed case histories, but also open up illuminatingly complex perspectives on the uncertainties and dangers of the phenomenon of modern travel.

After years at the margins of medical history, the relationship between war and medicine is at last beginning to move centre-stage. The essays in this volume focus on one important aspect of that relationship: the practice and development of medicine within the armed forces from the late nineteenth century through to the end of the Second World War. During this crucial period, medicine came to occupy an important position in military life, especially during the two world wars when manpower was at a premium. Good medical provisions were vital to the conservation of manpower, protecting servicemen from disease and returning the sick and wounded to duty in the shortest possible time. A detailed knowledge of the serviceman's mind and body enabled the authorities to calculate and standardise rations, training and disciplinary procedures.
Spanning the laboratory and the battlefield, and covering a range of national contexts, the essays in this volume provide valuable insights into different national styles and priorities. They also examine the relationship between medical personnel and the armed forces as a whole, by looking at such matters as the prevention of disease, the treatment of psychiatric casualties and the development of medical science. The volume as a whole demonstrates that medicine became an increasingly important part of military life in the era of modern warfare, and suggests new avenues and approaches for future study.

Daniel Turner’s prolific writings provide valuable insight into the practice of a commonplace Enlightenment London surgeon. Examining his personal, professional, and genteel achievements. Enhances our understanding of the boundary between surgeons and physicians in Enlightenment ‘marketplace’ practice. Turner’s pioneering writing on skin disease, De Morbis Cutaneis, emphasizes the skin’s role as a physical and professional boundary between university-educated physicians who treated internal disease and apprentice-trained surgeons relegated to the care of external disorders. Turner’s career-long crusade against quackery and his voluminous writings on syphilis, a common ‘surgical disorder’, provide a refined view into distinction between orthodox and quack practices in eighteenth-century London.

Experimental pharmacology is often portrayed as a creation of the nineteenth century, the age of the sciences in medicine. This book demonstrates that the basic methodology of the field, including chemical analysis, in vitro testing, animal experimentation and human research, was already developed in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Putting remedies on trial was stimulated by the challenge to Galenism through new chemical, mechanical and vitalist concepts of disease, by the import of exotic drugs and the flourishing trade with secret medicines. The book describes the main issues of eighteenth-century pharmacology and therapeutics and provides detailed case studies of three key areas: lithontriptics (remedies against urinary stones), opium, and Peruvian bark (quinine). It shows how pharmacological knowledge and therapeutic change were promoted in medical centres of the time, such as Edinburgh, London, Paris, Halle and Göttingen. Yet it also reveals how by publication of medical case histories many otherwise little-known practitioners contributed to this scientific enterprise as well.

The Bristol doctor James Cowles Prichard (1786-1848) has enjoyed a glowing reputation. Late Victorians regarded him as the founder of British anthropology and, in the twentieth century, he has been considered as a precursor of Darwin. Nowadays his name is cited mainly in context of inquiries into the rise of racial theories.
Prichard's own theoretical goal was simple: the son of Quaker parents, he attempted to establish that the Bible provided a correct account of the earliest history of humankind; above all it was his aim to prove once and for all the doctrine of monogenesis: the unitary origins of mankind. He single-handedly charted the waters of the pre-Victorian human sciences. Philology, anthropology, mythology, Biblical criticism, the philosophy of the human mind, comparative anatomy, physiology, and practical medicine - Prichard mastered subjects so diverse that his learning may be called truly universal. His views have often been misrepresented, however, and his opposition to racial thinking in particular has been underestimated. This book, the first study dedicated exclusively to Prichard, explores his notions of man's place in nature and puts them in the context of contemporary European learning.

The correspondence between Sir Ronald Ross (1857-1932) and Sir Patrick Manson (1844-1922) is rich in both scientific and human terms. It records, in great detail, Ross's research in India between 1895 and 1899, which elucidated the role of mosquitoes in the transmission of malaria, work for which Ross was awarded the 1902 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology. Ross described the mosquito-transmission theory as Manson's 'Grand Induction', and he had returned to India, where he was an officer in the Indian Medical Service, having been primed by Manson. Ross's regular letters to his mentor document the frustrations and false trails as well as the excitement of discovery. Manson in turn acted as a kind of agent in London, publicising his findings, offering advice and seeking to use his influence to secure for Ross the working conditions he so desired.
These 173 letters, plus 85 from the two decades after Ross's return to Britain also record the rise and full of a relationship, as Ross's preoccupation with his place in the history of malariology led to a breach between the two men. Themes of priority, nationalism, and personal vanity punctuate this latter correspondence, which also reveals new insights about the golden years of tropical medicine.
Ross included some of the correspondence in his Memoirs, but most of it appears here, fully annotated, for the first time.

The Paris Clinical School of the nineteenth century has long been recognized as an important turning point in the development of modern scientific medicine. In this volume of essays, leading scholars take a fresh look at the meaning and significance of the Paris clinic for the history of medicine and reassess the analysis of the two most noted authors on the topic in the twentieth century, Erwin H. Ackernecht and Michel Foucault. The contributors offer new insights into the development and influence of Paris medicine and challenge many aspects of accepted interpretation. Their research opens the way for new areas of investigation in understanding major transitions in medicine

Anti-psychiatry' is a movement more sloganized than analysed. Until now it has been associated in the English-speaking world primarily with R.D. Laing and a coterie of his associates, and a radical critique not just of psychiatric hospitalization but of the very premises of psychiatry itself and the basic institutions of society, especially the family.
But are these notions accurate, or rather distorted images, created by Laing himself or by the media? In this book, which has emerged out of an Anglo-Dutch conference held in June 1997, the realities of critical psychiatry are explored, using comparisons and contrasts between the British and the Dutch experiences as a probe. There were, it turns out, various distinct anti-psychiatries - indeed, hardly anybody actually used that label about themselves - and they played a role in the reform no less than the rejection of regular psychiatry.

From a punishment for the immoral acts of others, venereal disease has become a malady that may confront any one of us. This book examines the different stages in this long development and reveals the strange disjunction between waves of public anxiety and the factual incidence of disease, in this troubled overlap between medical science and social life. It describes the various efforts that have been made since 1850 to contain the hazard of sexually transmitted diseases and places the changing views on venereal infection in their historical and social context. The comparisons drawn between the late 19th-century battle against syphilis and present-day responses to the AIDS epidemic underscore the notable changes that have taken place not only in thinking about sexuality, but also in the authority of the medical profession and in the position of patients vis-à-vis policy-makers and all those involved in determining modes of treatment and prevention.

Future historians will wonder why, despite the risks, society persisted in its warm relationship with the cigarette; by the end of the century global consumption was still rising. The 1995 symposium at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine not only examined tobacco's connection with health, but the varied attitudes towards smoking, which have included regarding it as ‘manly', relaxing, fashionable - and decadent. A particular feature was a witness seminar attended not only by those who had made the initial discovery but by those with a crucial role in promoting public awareness of the dangers. And, as shown in this book, we still cannot escape the paradox that, while a considerable proportion of a country's population is hooked on the cigarette, the tobacco industry and the government are equally addicted to the profits and tax revenues it generates.

T.N.R. Morson was born just as chemistry started to be a science. Trained in Paris, he introduced to Britain quinine and morphine followed by many other medicines. His pioneering achievements were recognised by his medical contemporaries. His contributions to the progress of science and its institutions included work at the Society of Arts and the Royal Institution. He was as well-known in Paris as in London. He was a founder of the Pharmaceutical Society becoming its President in 1848 and 1859. He created a substantial pharmaceutical chemical business with world-wide interests.

Modern medical ethics in the English-speaking world is commonly thought to derive from the medical philosophy of the Scotsman John Gregory (1725-1773) and his younger associates, the English Dissenter Thomas Percival (1740-1804) and the American Benjamin Rush (1745-1813). This book is the first extensive study of this suggestion. Dr Haakonssen shows how the three thinkers combined Francis Bacon's and the Scottish Enlightenment's ideas of the science of morals and the morals of science. She demonstrates how their medical ethics was a successful adaptation of traditional moral ideas to the dramatically changing medical world especially the voluntary hospital. In accounting for the dynamics of this process, she rejects the anachronism that modern medical ethics was a new paradigm.

Little attention has been paid to the history of the influence of the social sciences upon medical thinking and practice in the twentieth century. The essays in this volume explore the consequences of the interaction between medicine and social science by evaluating its significance for the moral and aterial role of medicine in modern societies. Some of the essays examine the ideas of both clinicians and social scientists who believed that highly technologized medicine could be made more humanistic by understanding the social relations of health and illness. Other authors interrogate the critical assault which social science has made upon medicine as a system of knowledge, organisation and power. The volume discusses, therefore, the relationship between social-scientific knowledge both in and of medicine in the twentieth century. Collectively the essays illustrate that the respective power of biology and culture in determining human behaviour and social transition continues to be an unresolved paradox.

In the 1890s four young scientists at Sydney University - two Scots, a Londoner and an Australian - began sustained research into Australian native fauna for which each was awarded the FRS. They all went on to pursue notable careers in the biological sciences, concluding in London 46-8 and Cambridge.
This book follows their careers and enduring friendship exploring in detail the life of its senior member, J.T. Wilson (1861-1945), who was professor of anatomy at Sydney University (1890-1920) and Cambridge (1920-1933) and had abiding interests in science, philosophy, education and military affairs.
The narrative is mainly concerned with issues of historical interest to scientists and medical educationists though some, like Empire relations and the contribution of Scots to Australia's development, will interest a wider readership. Many of the preoccupations of Wilson and his colleagues remain topical: the debate between biological science and religion; the struggle to interpret Darwin's theory without placing Homo sapiens at the top of an evolutionary tree; pure versus applied science; vocationalism versusscholarship in university education.

There is now an extensive literature on the social and environmental consequences of living in the risk society. Studies of trauma are also increasingly prominent. But scant attention has been paid to perceptions of risk and danger in the past — in particular, to the history of accidents and the meanings of the accidental. This collection of interdisciplinary essays addresses this lacuna providing a theoretically informed historical sociology of the accident and risk. It explores the social and cultural contexts in which ‘acts of God', calamities, catastrophes, disasters, injuries, casualties, and other category of ‘mishaps' were experienced, conceptualized and responded to.
Drawing on the skills of British, European and North American scholars, Accidents in History combines philosophical, sociological and ecological overviews with in-depth historical case-studies. It spans the period from the eighteenth century to the present, probing the epistemological, social and political roots of the accidental. The authors differentiate between industrial and other forms of injury; trace the origins of the normalization of accidents; and analyze the interactions and gendered discrepancies between domestic and non-domestic mishaps. They also investigate the medicalization of sudden injury, and discuss the emergence of new socio-medical and humanitarian discourses around the organization of relief for victims.

The story told in this book begins in about 1700, when the first attempts were made to study the diseased heart in life (the subject matter of cardiology), as distinct from its appearance after death; it ends, rather arbitrarily, in 1970.
The account of the development of knowledge of heart disease is mainly chronological with emphasis on the fruitful consequences of the cross-fertilization of clinical practice with pathological anatomy at the beginning of the nineteenth century and with physiology at the end.
In addition, shorter chapters deals with such topics as specific disease entities, methods of investigation, cardiac surgery and the work of two individuals - Peter Latham, an example of a physician practising with today's clinical skills but a very imperfect knowledge of the pathogenesis of heart disease and Etienne Marey, an early exponent of the clinical physiology which would, in time, throw light on that pathogenesis.

James Jurin (1684-1750) occupied a central place in the medical and scientific circles of Augustan and Georgian England. His dispassionate yet forceful advocacy of smallpox inoculation using an innovative statistical approach brought him widespread recognition both in Britain and abroad. He was Secretary to the Royal Society for seven years and participated vigorously in the most important scientific debates of the period. Jurin's correspondence, recently made available to the public, provides rich material for the study of eighteenth-century natural philosophy and medicine, especially of the smallpox inoculation debates. This volume reproduces a broad and valuable selection of letters, as well as a list of Jurin's publications and a calendar of the complete correspondence. The introductory biographical essay describes how Jurin combined a career as a successful London physician with that of a natural philosopher.

In the late nineteenth century, for the first time in history, major surgery became reasonably safe. A mortality of up to 30% was considered reasonable. The living abdomen, hitherto a region as unexplored as darkest Africa, was opened up to light and to the knife in explorations not unlike those of Africa — bold, dramatic, often not too well thought out, and dangerous. Surgeons became enthusiastic — some of them wildly so. The subsequent period has been called 'the adolescence of surgery'. It included major surgery, often on the abdomen, done for psychiatric symptoms. Ovaries and wombs were removed and other organs hitched up higher inside the abdomen in an attempt to cure hysteria, neurasthenia or depression.
This book is about the development and effect of some of these operations and about one of the period's most distinguished surgeons, Sir William Arbuthnot Lane. He was internationally famous in three fields of surgery (facial, mastoid and abdominal), then became deeply involved in removing colons — thought to be the 'sink' of the body and the source of dangerous infection.

Marshall Hall was trained as a physician in the early nineteenth century, scientifically oriented, University of Edinburgh Medical School. The son of a Methodist cotton manufacturer and bleacher at Nottingham, Hall believed that in science lay the future for progress in medicine. Following early work on diagnosis, on women's disorders and on blood-letting, Hall came to specialise in the nervous system and in particular on the concept of reflex action. For Hall, who proposed a mechanistic explanation of reflex action, Galenic animal spirits and souls in decapitated creatures were out.
A superb experimentalist, Hall strove to establish experimental medicine (physiology) as the basis of the medical curriculum instead of anatomy, the long standing domain of the surgeons. They were among the strongest critics of Hall's vivisection procedures, despite his efforts to establish a Code of Practice. Hall was involved in several controversies within and without the Royal Society where he was victimised by its Physiological Committee. He addressed a range of social and public health issues including the abolition of slavery, and devised a new method of resuscitation and a more sensitive physiological test for strychnine detection. He also proposed plans for improving and linking sewage disposal and the transport system of the metropolis.

For centuries London has been at the centre of the social and economic fabric of British life, and its empire. London has not only been renowned for its pivotal role in the world of finance and politics, but also for its acute problems of overcrowding and social and economic dislocation. Starting in 1902 and ending just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Metropolitan Maternity highlights the distinct role London played in these years within the debates and policies concerning the economic and military future and physical welfare of the nation. Focusing on the expansion of maternal and child health and welfare services in the early twentieth century, this book shows that London mothers and children tended to be better served than those in provincial cities or rural areas. Yet even in London some areas were better served than others. A central theme of the book is the complexity of socio-economic and political forces that determined the differing levels of provision and health standards within the city. The book also examines the increasing emphasis placed on state sponsorship of health services in the early twentieth century and the growing willingness to involve and listen to mothers and their needs in the planning and development of services.

It is generally assumed that tropical medicine only emerged as a medical specialism in the late nineteenth century under the aegis of men like Patrick Manson and Ronald Ross. However, recent research (much of it brought together for the first time in this volume) shows that a distinctive medicine of 'warm climates' came into existence much earlier in areas like the West-Indies, Indonesia and India. Europeans' health needs were one imperative, but this was more than just the medicine of Europe shipped overseas. Contact with non-Western medical ideas and practices was also a stimulus, as was Europe's encounter with unfamiliar environments and peoples.

These essays provide valuable insights into the early history of tropical medicine and from the standpoint of several European powers. They examine the kinds of medicine practised, the responses to local diseases and environments and diseases, the nature of the medical constituencies that developed, and the relationship between the old medicine of 'warm climates' and the emerging tropical medicine of the late nineteenth century. The volume as a whole expands the parameters for the discussion of the evolution of Western medicine and opens up new perspectives on European science and society overseas.

In eighteenth-century Britain, gaols were places of temporary confinement, where inmates stayed while awaiting punishment. With the rise of the 'penitentiary' from the early nineteenth century, custodial institutions housed prisoners for much longer periods of time. Prisoners were supposed to be reformed as well as punished during their incarceration. From at least the time of John Howard (1726-1790), the health of prisoners has been part of the concern of philanthropists and others concerned with the wider functions of prisons. The Victorians established a Prison Medical Service, and members of the medical profession have long been involved in caring for the mental and physical needs of prisoners. For two centuries, prison overcrowding has been identified as a major cause of mortality and morbidity in prisons. Historical debates thus often have a modern ring to them, which make the essays in this volume particularly timely.

The history of the physiological sciences remains an open field of investigation for scholars from different disciplines. A recent shift of interest towards physiology as the mother of many contemporary biomedical disciplines, has been observed on both scientific and historical levels. Due to its unique richness and variety of facts, interpretations, theoretical models, and moreover unanswered questions, physiology remains a matter of considerable, historical and epistemological interest.
For scholars interested in the experimental as well as the conceptual and theoretical aspects of the physiological sciences in their broader sense, and concerned by their place within the national and international frameworks of biomedical research, forms of cooperation have been proposed within the networks of the European Association for the History of Medicine and health. The present volume is the first publication of this cooperation.
In this volume definite disciplines like neurophysiology and endocrinology, and comparative international aspects are under scrutiny by well established scientists and scholars, physiologists, historians and philosophers. A strong emphasis is placed upon neuroscientific topics like brain localization, functional architecture, physiological mechanisms, behavioral and integrative aspects of the neurosciences, neurotransmission. Local research traditions, national differences and forms of international communication are also examined.

Modern nutrition science is usually considered to have started in the 1840s, a period of great social and political turmoil in western Europe. Yet the relations between the production of scientific knowledge about nutrition and the social and political valuations that have entered into the promotion and application of nutritional research have not yet received systematic historical attention.
The Science and Culture of Nutrition, 1840-1940 for the first time looks at the ways in which scientific theories and investigations of nutrition have made their impact on a range of social practices and ideologies, and how these in turn have shaped the priorities and practices of the science of nutrition. In these reciprocal interactions, nutrition science has affected medical practice, government policy, science funding, and popular thinking.
In uniting major scientific and cultural themes, the twelve contributions in this book show how Western society became a nutrition culture.

Den Grundtenor dieses Bandes über "Gesundheit und Krankheit im 18.jahrhundert" bilden weniger die kurativen Bemühungen der Medizin als vielmehr "Die geheimen Gebrechen des Kopfes oder des Herzens“ (Kant), die von Betroffenen reflektiert oder dichterisch verarbeitet und gestaltet werden. Gesundheit ist nach der Definition der Encyclopédie "l’état le plus parfait de la vie", und es ist bezeichnend für die Intentionen und Wiederherstellung allen Kreisen der Bevölkerung eröffnet werden soll.

Ce livre ne se propose pas avant tout de traiter des efforts curatifs entrepris par la médicine du XVIIIe siècle. Il invite plutôt le lecteur à se pencher sur les « infirmités secrètes du cœur et de la conscience »(Kant) telles qu’elles nous sont révélées par les témoignages littéraires et poétiques ; que le lecteur se laisse surprendre par les moyens mis en œuvre par les témoins du XVIIIe pour affronter et communiquer ou même surmonter leurs maux intimes. Selon la définition de l’Encyclopédie, notre santé serait "l’état le plus parfait de la vie". Au siècle des Lumières le vœux est vif de montrer à tout être humain les moyens de conserver ou de récupérer son bien le plus précieux.

Professional education forms a key element in the transmission of medical learning and skills, in occupational solidarity and in creating and recreating the very image of the practitioner. Yet the history of British medical education has hitherto been surprisingly neglected. Building upon papers contributed to two conferences on the history of medical education in the early 1990s, this volume presents new research and original synthesis on key aspects of medical instruction, theoretical and practical, from early medieval times into the present century. Academic and practical aspects are equally examined, and balanced attention is given to different sites of instruction, be it the university or the hospital. The crucial role of education in medical qualifications and professional licensing is also examined as is the part it has played in the regulation of the entry of women to the profession.

Contributors are Juanita Burnby, W.F. Bynum, Laurence M. Geary, Faye Getz, Johanna Geyer-Kordesch, S.W.F. Holloway, Stephen Jacyna, Peter Murray Jones, Helen King, Susan C. Lawrence, Irvine Loudon, Margaret Pelling, Godelieve Van Heteren, and John Harley Warner.

The interpretation of eighteenth-century medicine has been much contested. Some have view it as a wilderness of rationalism and arid theories between the Scientific Revolution and the astonishing changes of the nineteenth-century. Other scholars have emphasized the close and fruitful links between medicine and the Enlightenment, suggesting that medical advance was the very embodiment of the philosphes’ ideal of a practical science that would improve mankind’s lot and foster human happiness.
In a series of essays covering Great Britain, France, Germany and other parts of Europe, noted historians debate these issues through detailed examinations of major aspects of eighteenth-century medicine and medical controversy, including such topics as the introduction of smallpox inoculation, the transformation of medical education, and the treatment of the insane. The essays as a whole suggest a positive reading of the transformations in eighteenth-century medicine, while stressing local diversity and uneven development.

This collection of papers – some of which written by the world’s leading specialists in the area of ancient medicine – aims at promoting an integrated approach to medical theory and practice in classical antiquity. Questions of health and disease are considered in their relation to the social, intellectual, moral and religious dimensions of the ancient world. The papers focus on the socio-cultural setting of the experience of pain and illness, the different reactions they provoked and the importance that was attached to this experience in literature, religion and philosophy.
The first volume offers articles (from an archaeological, historical and philological point of view) dealing with social, institutional and geographical aspects of medical practice. It also has a special section on medical views on women, children and sexuality, and on female medical activity.
The second volume focuses on the ways in which religious and magical beliefs influenced the experience of, and the attitude towards, illness and medical practice. It also deals with the relations of medicine with philosophy, and the other sciences and with the variety of linguistic and textual forms in which medical knowledge was expressed and communicated.

Contributors to the second volume are Darrel W. Amundsen, Angelos Chaniotis, Philip J. van der Eijk, Elsa García Novo, Burkhard Gladigow, Richard Gordon, Katerina Ierodiakonou, Alberto Jori, Karl-Heinz Leven, James Longrigg, Harm Pinkster, I. Rodríguez Alfageme, Ineke Sluiter, Heinrich von Staden, Gilles Susong, Teun Tieleman, and M. Vegetti.

This collection of papers – some of which written by the world’s leading specialists in the area of ancient medicine – aims at promoting an integrated approach to medical theory and practice in classical antiquity. Questions of health and disease are considered in their relation to the social, intellectual, moral and religious dimensions of the ancient world. The papers focus on the socio-cultural setting of the experience of pain and illness, the different reactions they provoked and the importance that was attached to this experience in literature, religion and philosophy.
The first volume offers articles (from an archaeological, historical and philological point of view) dealing with social, institutional and geographical aspects of medical practice. It also has a special section on medical views on women, children and sexuality, and on female medical activity.
The second volume focuses on the ways in which religious and magical beliefs influenced the experience of, and the attitude towards, illness and medical practice. It also deals with the relations of medicine with philosophy, and the other sciences and with the variety of linguistic and textual forms in which medical knowledge was expressed and communicated.

Contributors to the first volume are Lawrence J. Bliquez, Simon Byl, Armelle Debru, Nancy Demand, Danielle Gourevitch, Ann Ellis Hanson, H.F.J. Horstmanshoff, Ralph Jackson, Eva C. Keuls, Jukka Korpela, Ernst Künzl, Gabriele Marasco, Attilio Mastrocinque, Karin Nijhuis, Vivian Nutton, H.W. Pleket, Heikki Solin, Peter Van Minnen, and Juliane C. Wilmanns.

Since George Rosen’s comprehensive History of Public Health, first published in 1956, there has been no internationally comparative survey of the subject. Over the past three decades or so, however, research in this field has expanded rapidly, especially with regard to the history of disease and social order and public health politics and the state. Most of these studies have been highly scholarly and specialised and often dealing with only one aspect of public health in any one national context. The essays here examine the road history of public health in different national contexts in order to provide a work of comparative reference that could be used as a teaching aid.
The book focuses on whether the construction of a public health system is an inherent characteristic of the managerial function of modern political systems. Thus, each essay traces the steps leading to the growth of health government in various nations, examining the specific conflicts and contradictions which each incurred. As a result the volume highlights the need for further comparative analysis of public health systems as a highly fruitful topic for future study.

The eleven essays in this volume illustrate the richness, complexity, and diversity of French medical culture in the nineteenth century, a period that witnessed the medicalization of French society. Medical themes permeated contemporary culture and politics, and medical discourse infused many levels of French society from the bastions of science - the medical faculties and research institutions - to novels, the theater, and the daily lives of citizens as patients.
The contributors to this volume - all established scholars in the history of medicine - present the French medical experience from the point of view of both practitioners and patients, and show how medical themes colored popular perceptions and shaped public policies. Topics addressed range from popular medicine to elite Parisian medicine, the interaction of literary and medical discourse, social theater, medical research and practice, medical specialization and education. The essays reflect current trends of medico-historical analysis which emphasize the centrality of class, race, and gender in understanding concepts of disease and the practice of medicine. They show how the medical experience of patients, practitioners, students, and researchers varied according to social class, gender, and geography and the importance of these factors for the construction of disease.

Medical ethics has been a constant adjunct of Western medicine from its origins in Greek times. Although the Hippocratic Oath has been intensely studied, until recently there has been very little historical work on medical ethics between the Oath and Thomas Percival's Medical Ethics of 1803, which is commonly thought of as the first treatise on modern medical ethics. This volume brings together original research which throws new light on how standards of behaviour for medical practitioners were articulated in the different religious, political and social as well as medical contexts from the classical period until the nineteenth century. Its ten essays will place the early history of medical ethics into the framework of the new social and intellectual history of medicine that has been developed in the last ten years.

The great British reformer Jeremy Bentham wrote that 'the art of legislation is but the art of healing practised upon a large scale'. He added that 'It is the common endeavour of both to relieve men from the miseries of life. But the physician relieves them one by one: the legislator by millions at a time'. Bentham raised the question of the interplay of medicine with politics. It forms an important topic with powerful contemporary overtones. This volume, containing eleven essays plus a lengthy introduction, seeks to explore it historically. It takes a long perspective, covering the last two centuries and also an international viewpoint, examining Britain in detail but also containing contributions dealing with the United States, Germany, Russia and France.

Therapeutics has been central to the medical enterprise in all times and all places, but a subject that is all too often neglected by historians. The essays in this volume follow a range in chronology from antiquity to the 1980s and in geography from the Mediterranean Basin to the New World. They touch on such matters as diet and drugs, magic and surgery, orthodox and unorthodox approaches. What they share is an attempt to get beyond the easy dismissal of almost all therapeutics before the twentieth century as meaningless and harmful and to examine concrete dimensions of the therapeutic encounter in its social, professional, religious and scientific reverberations.

As periodical of the International Academy of the History of Medicine, this Clio Medica volume contains 17 papers.

As periodical of the International Academy of the History of Medicine, this Clio Medica volume contains 4 papers.

As periodical of the International Academy of the History of Medicine, this Clio Medica volume contains 19 papers.

As periodical of the International Academy of the History of Medicine, this Clio Medica volume contains 17 papers + reviews & notices.

As periodical of the International Academy of the History of Medicine, this Clio Medica volume contains 12 papers.

As periodical of the International Academy of the History of Medicine, this Clio Medica volume contains 10 papers.

As periodical of the International Academy of the History of Medicine, this Clio Medica volume contains 11 papers.

As periodical of the International Academy of the History of Medicine, this Clio Medica volume contains 15 papers.

As periodical of the International Academy of the History of Medicine, this Clio Medica volume contains 19 papers.

How did medical students become Galenic physicians in the early modern era? Making Physicians guides the reader through the ancient sources, textbooks, lecture halls, gardens, dissecting rooms, and patient bedsides in the early decades of an important medical school. Standard pedagogy combined book learning and hands-on experience. Professors and students embraced Galen’s models for integrating reason and experience, and cultivated humanist scholarship and argumentation, which shaped their study of chymistry, medical botany, and clinical practice at patients' bedsides, in private homes and in the city hospital. Following Galen’s emphasis on finding and treating the sick parts, professors correlated symptoms and the evidence from post-mortems to produce new pathological knowledge.

For the last half century, Mikuláš Teich has made many eminent contributions to the histories of science, technology, medicine and society. His essentially Marxist historiographical stance has resisted the notion that science is an autonomous entity, and has instead stressed the interplay of the economic, the social and the scientific forces in history. At the same time, particularly in studies of biochemistry, he has emphasized the significance of the role of science and technology in modern economic change.
In a career divided between Czechoslovakia and the UK, he has always been highly internationalist in his historical outlooks, combining what is valuable in Contentinal and British methods.
This volume is to honour him on his eightieth birthday. Examining European developments since the sixteenth century, the essays, many by old friends and colleagues, cluster around themes close to his own personal scholarship and related to volumes which he has edited. The book is divided into sections on Questions of History; Scientific Lives; Disciplines; Natural History, and Science and Disease.