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...

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 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.

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...

Active learning about the founding of the United States The American History Workbook engages students in the study of our nation's history with challenging exercises that promote more active learning.

This is a collection of original studies on the international health and welfare organizations between the First and the Second World Wars. The diversity of such organizations and their many-sided activities make this a rich and complex area of historical investigation that has direct relevance to current issues in international health. Multilateral organizations such as the League of Nations and a variety of types of non-governmental organizations are discussed. The role of scientific and professional factors, as well as the priorities of women's employment, eugenics and pronatalism are also...

In this full-length biography of a major nineteenth century American medical personality, Bonnie Ellen Blustein shows how William A. Hammond, M.D. developed his specialty practice in neurology as a vehicle through which to pursue broad scientific interests within the limits set by the solo-practitioner structure of the medicine of his day. Hammond (1828-1900) was one of the most successful American physicians of the nineteenth century. He was first recognized as a natural history collector and as an original investigator in physiological chemistry, winning international respect for...