This edited collection brings together new research by world-leading historians and anthropologists to examine the interaction between images of plague in different temporal and spatial contexts, and the imagination of the disease from the Middle Ages to today. The chapters in this book illuminate to what extent the image of plague has not simply reflected, but also impacted the way in which the disease is experienced in different historical periods. The book asks what is the contribution of the entanglement between epidemic image and imagination to the persistence of plague as a category...

Offering a valuable resource for medical and other historians, this book explores the processes by which pharmacy in Britain and its colonies separated from medicine and made the transition from trade to profession during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

When the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain was founded in 1841, its founders considered pharmacy to be a branch of medicine. However, the 1852 Pharmacy Act made the exclusion of pharmacists from the medical profession inevitable, and in 1864 the General Medical Council decided that pharmacy legislation was best left...

This book traces the career of pioneering South African plastic and reconstructive surgeon, Jack Penn, from its beginnings during the Second World War. It explores the establishment of Penn’s private practice, and his work in diverse countries, including Gabon, Japan and Israel, as he sought to rectify the injury caused by conflict. It also addresses his role on the President’s Council, established by Prime Minister P.W. Botha to introduce reform to the system of apartheid.

The relationship between alcohol consumption and liver cirrhosis has long been contested by doctors and medical professionals, creating numerous implications for the public reputation of alcohol in Britain. Despite this, it was not until the 1970s that cirrhosis came to be understood as an ‘alcoholic disease’. This book contextualises developments in this debate through the twentieth century by examining the significant influence that medical expertise had on policy responses to alcohol misuse, as well as the social reputation of alcohol consumption. It demonstrates how the degree to...

This book examines British eugenics from its origins in 1865 to the early 1990s. It considers the two institutions promoting the doctrine: the Galton Laboratory attached to the University of London; and the Eugenics Society. It charts internal and ideological changes across more than a century, seeing eugenics as primarily a political movement. The doctrine had influence on British society and guided adherents ranging from scientists to charitable ladies. The Galton Laboratory published detailed studies of heredity. It transformed itself into a centre for medical genetics after the Second...