The social history of medicine over the past fifteen years has redrawn the boundaries of medical history. Specialized papers and monographs have contributed to our knowledge of how medicine has affected society and how society has shaped medicine. This book synthesizes, through a series of essays, some of the most significant findings of this "new social history" of medicine. The period covered ranges from ancient Greece to the present time. While coverage is not exhaustive, the reader is able to trace how medicine in the West developed from an unlicensed open market place, with many...

This is a major synthesis of the knowledge and practice of early modern English medicine, as expressed in vernacular texts set in their social and cultural contexts. The book vividly maps out some central areas: remedies (and how they were made credible), notions of disease, advice on preventive medicine and on healthy living, and how and why surgeons worked on the body. In particular, two of the most high-profile diseases of the age--the pox and the plague--are discussed in detail, and their treatment analyzed.

This book considers the underlying forces which helped to produce a revolution in seventeenth-century medicine. It shows how in the period between 1630 and 1730 medicine came to represent something more than a marginal activity unrelated to social and intellectual phenomena and also how it was influenced and formed by the same developments in religion, politics, science and commerce which shaped the general history of the seventeenth century. In an attempt to divert the historiography of the subject away from Newton, natural philosophy and the 'scientific revolution', the essays in this...