By examining German university medicine between 1750 and 1820, this book presents a new interpretation of the emergence of modern medical science. It demonstrates that the development of modern medicine as a profession linking theory and practice did not emerge suddenly from the revolutionary transformation of Europe at the opening of the nineteenth century, as Foucault and others have argued. Instead, Thomas H. Broman points to cultural and institutional changes occurring during the second half of the eighteenth century that reshaped both medical theory and physicians' professional identity....

The half century between 1885 and 1935 witnessed a significant improvement in the health of the British people and an unprecedented expansion of state-provided preventive and therapeutic services. The book examines this time of change through the ideas and experiences of one prominent participant, Sir Arthur Newsholme, who rose to become a leading public health authority in Britain. Eyler draws particular attention to Newsholme's role in constructing a highly successful local health program; his tenure as the Medical Officer of the Local Government Board in Whitehall, where he launched some...

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...

This is the first comprehensive study on a national scale of the entire range of medical practitioners who flourished in preindustrial and early industrial societies. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, it provides a richly detailed examination of medical practice as it existed in France during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Professor Ramsey argues that to penetrate this world, in many ways strangely different from our own, we must join two lines of inquiry: the history of the professions and the history of popular culture. The book considers not only the immediate...

This book examines in detail how eugenics in early twentieth-century France provided a broad cover for a variety of reform movements that attempted to bring about the biological regeneration of the French population. Like several other societies during this period, France showed a growing interest in natalist, neo-Lamarckian, social hygiene, racist, and other biologically-based movements as a response to the perception that French society was in a state of decline and degeneration. William Schneider's study provides a fascinating account of attempts to apply new discoveries in biology and...

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...

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...

Only comparatively recently have historians begun to recognize the importance and influence of Joan Baptista Van Helmont (1579 1644) in the history of medicine and chemistry. Van Helmont's theories on the nature of life, biological time, physiology and disease, the structure of matter, and the processes of chemical change are veiled in his writings by a brand of Renaissance mysticism. His organic conception of the natural world, together with his belief in alchemy and astral forces, has resulted in a predominantly unsympathetic attitude among historians of science, by whom he is generally...

While much is known about the leaders of the medical profession in the eighteenth century, little has been written about rank-and-file practitioners--the apothecaries, blood-letters, and herb-women--or about the patients they treated. Focusing on Bristol, the book examines how the poor gradually lost medical autonomy and authority over their bodies, as the city's hospital was transformed from a charity to a medical workplace by the contingencies of urban apprenticeship and changes in the structure of the city's medical occupations. As hospitals assumed the role of training surgeons and...

In Mission and Method Ann La Berge shows how the French public health movement developed within the socio-political context of the Bourbon Restoration and July Monarchy, and within the context of competing ideologies of liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and statism. The dialectic between liberalism, whose leading exponent was Villermé , and statism, the approach of Parent-Duchâ telet, characterized the movement and was reflected in the tension between liberal and social medicine that permeated nineteenth-century French medical discourse. Professor La Berge also challenges the...