This book follows the social, economic and demographic transformations of the Alpine area from the late Middle Ages. Its aim is to reassess the image of the upland community which emerges from the work of historians, geographers and social anthropologists. The book therefore deals at length with such problems as the causes and consequences of emigration and patterns of marriage and inheritance in favouring or hampering the adjustments of local populations to changing economic or ecological circumstances, and tackles the vexed question of the relative importance of cultural and environmental...

Making a Medical Market begins with the first voluntary hospital in 1720 and ends in 1911 with national health insurance. It looks at different forms of practice--public appointments in hospitals, office under state welfare systems, and private practice. From the 1750s medicine became more commercialized. Doctors were successful in raising demand for their own services but were unsuccessful in restricting competition. Many medical practitioners struggled to make a living by seeing many patients at low fees, so that "five minutes for the patient" is not a new feature of health care.

This study redresses the North and South imbalance of much of the work in British economic and social history by focusing on the impact of the building trade. The period 1450-1750 witnessed substantial changes in England, including the size of national population, the range of industry, agricultural techniques, and the proportion of population tied to the soil. Using sources from local archives, the author addresses conditions of work in the building trades, levels of remuneration, gender differences in work, and relationships with employers.

Nobel laureate Robert Fogel's compelling new study examines health, nutrition and technology from 1700 to 2100. Although throughout most of human history, chronic malnutrition has been the norm, a synergy between improvements in productive technology and human physiology has enabled humans to more than double their average longevity and to increase their body size by over fifty percent over the past three centuries. Larger, healthier humans have contributed to the acceleration of economic growth and technological change, resulting in reduced economic inequality, declining hours of work and a...

Susannah Ottaway combines a comprehensive survey of existing literature on the history of ageing with original interpretation and analysis of available data. Using a wide variety of sources (literature, correspondence, poor house and workhouse documents and diaries), Ottaway's account of the experiences of the aged reveals attitudes in eighteenth-century England that shed light on contemporary aging issues by historical comparison.

Based upon extensive archival material, this is a pioneering study of the impact of the famine that occurred in Greece during its occupation by German, Italian and Bulgarian forces in 1941 and 1942. Violetta Hionidou examines the politics of the food crisis, focusing on the famine's demographics and the effectiveness of relief operations. Her interdisciplinary approach combines demographic, historical and anthropological methodologies to present a comprehensive account of the situation--documented by the archives of the International Red Cross.

This book is an unusual history of doctors trained in Britain in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and their careers in Britain and the empire. Anne Crowther and Marguerite Dupree describe the experience of a whole generation of doctors at a time of rapid changes in medical knowledge. Amongst them were Sophia Jex-Blake and the first group of medical women in Britain. Many became disciples of Joseph Lister as he trained them in his new methods of antiseptic surgery. Surgery was not confined to specialists, and Lister's methods were adapted to suit hospitals and households, peace and...