This book examines in detail how eugenics in early twentieth-century France provided a broad cover for a variety of reform movements that attempted to bring about the biological regeneration of the French population. Like several other societies during this period, France showed a growing interest in natalist, neo-Lamarckian, social hygiene, racist, and other biologically-based movements as a response to the perception that French society was in a state of decline and degeneration. William Schneider's study provides a fascinating account of attempts to apply new discoveries in biology and...

By examining German university medicine between 1750 and 1820, this book presents a new interpretation of the emergence of modern medical science. It demonstrates that the development of modern medicine as a profession linking theory and practice did not emerge suddenly from the revolutionary transformation of Europe at the opening of the nineteenth century, as Foucault and others have argued. Instead, Thomas H. Broman points to cultural and institutional changes occurring during the second half of the eighteenth century that reshaped both medical theory and physicians' professional identity....

The advent of tropical medicine was a direct consequence of European and American imperialism, when military personnel, colonial administrators, businessmen, and settlers encountered a new set of diseases endemic to the tropics. Professor Farley describes how governments and organizations in Britain, the British colonies, the United States, Central and South America, South Africa, China, and the World Health Organization faced one particular tropical disease, bilharzia or schistosomiasis. Bilharzia is caused by a species of blood vessel-inhabiting parasitic worms and today afflicts over 200...

Between the birth of the Third Republic and the outbreak of World War I, French medical doctors gained a far-reaching influence over the political life of their country, serving as mayors on the local level and ranking second only to lawyers in parliament. Their frequent medical contact with the people served as the foundation for their political success. In this volume Ellis explores the causes and significance of this phenomenon by examining the careers of the members of parliament who held degrees in medicine. It is the first book to deal explicitly with the backgrounds and careers of the...

In Mission and Method Ann La Berge shows how the French public health movement developed within the socio-political context of the Bourbon Restoration and July Monarchy, and within the context of competing ideologies of liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and statism. The dialectic between liberalism, whose leading exponent was Villerme, and statism, the approach of Parent-Duchatelet, characterized the movement and was reflected in the tension between liberal and social medicine that permeated nineteenth-century French medical discourse. Professor La Berge also challenges the prevalent...

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 ambitious book presents an across-the-board study of medicine, in any urban centre, for any period of British history. By selecting Wakefield and Huddersfield as contrasting types of northern towns, and examining in details their systems of medical care, Dr Marland has written a local history that says something important about the country as a whole. Wakefield and Huddersfield contrasted in their economic demographic and social development during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, allowing an effective comparative analysis of medical facilities in the two communities....

This penetrating case study of institution building and entrepreneurship in science shows how a minor medical speciality evolved into a large and powerful academic discipline. Drawing extensively on little-used archival sources, the author analyses in detail how biomedical science became a central part of medical training and practice. The book shows how biochemistry was defined as a distinct discipline by the programmatic vision of individual biochemists and of patrons and competitors in related disciplines. It shows how discipline builders used research programmes as strategies that they...

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,...