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...

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.

During the 1940s and 1950s, tens of thousands of Americans underwent some form of psychosurgery; that is, their brains were operated upon for the putative purpose of treating mental illness. From today's perspective, such medical practices appear foolhardy at best, perhaps even barbaric; most commentators thus have seen in the story of lobotomy an important warning about the kinds of hazards that society will face whenever incompetent or malicious physicians are allowed to overstep the boundaries of valid medical science. Last Resort challenges the previously accepted psychosurgery story and...

Charitable Knowledge explores the interconnections among medical teaching, medical knowledge and medical authority in eighteenth-century London. The metropolis lacked a university until the nineteenth century, so the seven major voluntary hospitals--St. Bartholomew, St. Thomas, Guy, the Westminster, St. George, the Middlesex, and the London--were crucial sites for educating surgeons, surgeon-apothecaries and visiting physicians. Lawrence explains how charity patients became teaching objects, and how hospitals became medical schools. She demonstrates that hospital practitioners gradually...

This collection of essays presents fresh interpretations of the growth of medico-legal ideas, institutions and practices in Britain, Europe and America over the past four hundred years. Based on a wealth of new research, it brings the historical study of legal medicine firmly into the realm of social history. Case studies of infanticide, abortion, coroners' inquests, and criminal insanity show that legal medicine has often been the focus of social change and political controversy. The contributors also emphasize the formative influence of legal systems on medico-legal knowledge and practice....

Analysis of the orgins of the holocaust traditionally centres around v lkisch racial ideologies, overlooking the effects of racial ideas on biology and health. Based on a wealth of hitherto neglected archival sources, this book analyses the origins, social composition and impact of eugenics in the context of the social and political tension of an industrialising empire.

This book explores the tradition of the "science of man" in French medicine of the era 1750-1850, focusing on controversies about the nature of the "physical-moral" relation and their effects on the role of medicine in French society. Its chief purpose is to recover the history of a holistic tradition in French medicine that has been neglected, because it lay outside the mainstream themes of modern medicine, which include experimental, reductionist, and localistic conceptions of health and disease. Professor Williams also challenges existing historiography, which holds that the...

Is women's destiny rooted in their biology? Since the end of the eighteenth century the science of gynecology has legitimized the view that women are "naturally" fitted for activities in the private sphere of the family. This book argues that the definition of femininity as propounded by gynecological science is a cultural product of a wider, more political context. Providing a unique account of gynecology in practice, it shifts the historical focus from the use to the production of ideas about "women's nature." Dr. Moscucci traces the origins of gynecology to the emergence of a predictable...

This is the first thorough study of charity and of medical and poor relief in post-Renaissance Italy. It departs from current interpretations by putting much greater emphasis on the various circumstances that motivated individual men and women to become involved in charity, and argues that conflicts and tensions in their social and political surroundings were crucial in prompting their charitable activity and defining perceptions of the needy.

This is the first major study of public health in British India. It covers many previously unresearched areas such as European attitudes toward India and its inhabitants, and the way in which these were reflected in medical literature and medical policy; the fate of public health at the local level under Indian control; and the effects of quarantine on colonial trade and the pilgrimage to Mecca. The book places medicine within the context of debates about the government of India, and relations between rulers and ruled, and in emphasizing the active role of the indigenous population it differs...