A Cultural History of Medicine presents anauthoritative survey from ancient times to the present. The set of six volumescovers over 2500 years of history, charting the changes in medical experience,knowledge and practices throughout history. This volume, ACultural History of Medicine in the Modern Age, explores medicine as acultural practice from 1920 to the present day. As with all the volumes in the illustrated Cultural History of Medicineset, this volume presents essays on the environment, food, war, animals, objects,experiences, authority and the mind. A Cultural History of Medicine...

Historians describe the ‘long 19th century’ as an age of empire, characterized by expansion and industrialization. The period witnessed the evolution of Western medicine into something uniquely ‘modern’, rooted in the shift to industrial capitalism and encroachment of government monitoring to state health, as well as the colonial mindset that drove overseas travel and encounters with unfamiliar populations, climates and disease. More than ever before, food, drugs, people and sickness circumvented the globe, crossing borders and prompting enormous changes in the way people...

The Enlightenment, as concept and time period, was haunted by ambiguities about the relationships between mind and body, humans and the natural world, and reason and imagination. The 18th century was inherently contradictory, particularly when it came to ideas about medicine and the body. The growing optimism that medicine and science could control nature and disease was counterbalanced by the hierarchies of gender, race and class being fixed on the body. Enlightenment ideals emphasized rationalism and expertise, but they existed alongside religious belief and everyday authority....

Since the ‘cultural turn’ of the 1980s the history of Renaissance medicine has been radically transformed, with older narratives stood on their head as concepts and categories for research have been re-thought. At the core of this change – for the period now familiarly referred to (not insignificantly) as ‘early modern’ – stands an epistemological reconsideration of the production of natural knowledge, and of power in relation to the core of medicine’s subject, the human body. Additionally, at issue are the origins of modernity itself. Building on the foundations...