This is the first comprehensive analysis of the best single record we have which details the many medical practitioners in early modern London. It reveals the attitudes and realities in the conflict between the College of Physicians and the practitioners, whom the College regarded as illicit or irregular. In so doing, the book challenges the assumptions we make about the dominant professional values of modern western society.

Debates on policy concerning medical care and social welfare of the elderly become ever more pressing, and many of the assumptions on which they are based are now open to question. This study sets out to provide a historical perspective on the economic, medical, class and gender relations of the elderly, which until now have received relatively little attention.

This important collection of Margaret Pelling's essays brings together her key studies of health, medicine and poverty in Tudor and Stuart England - including a number published here for the first time. They show that - then as now - health and medical care were everyday obsessions of ordinary people in the Tudor and Stuart era. Margaret Pelling's book brings this vital dimension of the early modern world in from the periphery of specialist study to the heart of the concerns of social, economic and cultural historians.