The essays in this volume provide an unusual historical perspective on the experience of illness: they try to reconstruct what being ill (from a minor ailment to fatal sickness) was like in pre-industrial society from the point of view of the sufferers themselves. The authors examine the meanings that were attached to sickness; popular medical beliefs and practices; the diffusion of popular medical knowledge; and the relations between patients and their doctors (both professional and ?fringe?) seen from the patients? point of view. This is an important work, for illness and death dominated...

This book is the first comprehensive and detailed study of early modern midwives in seventeenth-century London. Midwives, as a group, have been dismissed by historians as being inadequately educated and trained for the task of child delivery. The Midwives of Seventeenth-Century London rejects these claims by exploring the midwives' training and their licensing in an unofficial apprenticeship by the Church. Dr. Evenden also offers an accurate depiction of the midwives in their socioeconomic context by examining a wide range of seventeenth-century sources. This expansive study not only recovers...

This study of the popularity of phrenology in the second quarter of the nineteenth century concentrates on the social and ideological functions of science during the consolidation of urban industrial society. It is influenced by Foucault, by recent work in the history and sociology of science, by critical theory, and by cultural anthropology. The author analyses the impact of science on Victorian society across a spectrum from the intellectual establishment to working-class freethinkers and Owenite socialists. In doing so he provides the first extended treatment of the place and role of...

Spreading Germs discusses how modern ideas on the nature and causes of infectious diseases were constructed and spread within the British medical profession during the last third of the nineteenth century. Michael Worboys challenges many existing interpretations, arguing that at various times there were many germ theories that developed in different ways and did not always embrace science and the use of laboratories. It was the discipline of bacteriology that institutionalized the various new ideas and practices during the 1880s, and in a way that was more evolutionary than revolutionary.

This book explores the origins of our contemporary system of drug regulation and the modern clinical trial. Marks illustrates the symbiotic relationship between the history of modern drug regulation and the history of therapeutic reform. Accompanying this history of public policy is a detailed account of changing experimental ideals and practices. Marks traces the history of therapeutic experimentation, from the "collective investigations" of the past century to the controlled clinical trial that emerged after 1950 as the paradigm of scientific experimentation. The result is the first general...

This study examines the pre-history of statistics in eighteenth-century England and France, before state governments and other institutions began to collect statistical data on a regular basis. Eighteenth-century political and medical arithmeticians developed a variety of useful techniques to measure health and population. This book highlights the history of numerical tables, as new scientific instruments, and explains how they were used to evaluate smallpox inoculations, and the health and size of populations.

In the early nineteenth century in the United States, cancer in the breast was a rare disease. Now it seems that breast cancer is everywhere. Written by a medical historian who is also a doctor, Unnatural History tells how and why this happened. Rather than there simply being more disease, breast cancer has entered the bodies of so many American women and the concerns of nearly all the rest, mostly as a result of how we have detected, labeled, and responded to the disease. The book traces changing definitions and understandings of breast cancer, the experience of breast cancer sufferers,...

Ranging from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the 1980s, this book focuses on the evolution of the law and medical practice of abortion in England. Little academic attention has hitherto been given to the development and scope of abortion law in England, the formative influence of the medical profession, and the impact of the law on medical practice. Consequently, Dr Keown considers the performance of abortion by doctors, and the influence the medical profession had on the restriction of the law in the nineteenth century and on its relaxation in the twentieth. The book does not deal...

Trauma--the psychological consequences of wars, accidents and abuse--has become the subject of heated debate among doctors, psychologists, and lay critics (and activists) in recent years. The essays in this book trace the origins of these debates in medicine and culture in modern Europe and America. They cover medical and cultural aspects of experiences understood to be "traumatic" from rail and factory accidents in the later nineteenth century through the First World War and its aftermath.

The half century between 1885 and 1935 witnessed a significant improvement in the health of the British people and an unprecedented expansion of state-provided preventive and therapeutic services. The book examines this time of change through the ideas and experiences of one prominent participant, Sir Arthur Newsholme, who rose to become a leading public health authority in Britain. Eyler draws particular attention to Newsholme's role in constructing a highly successful local health program; his tenure as the Medical Officer of the Local Government Board in Whitehall, where he launched some...