Modernising scientific medicine emerged in the nineteenth century as an increasingly powerful agent of change in a context of complex social developments. Women's lives and expectations in particular underwent a transformation in the years after 1870 as education, employment opportunities and political involvement extended their personal and gender horizons. For women, medicine came to offer not just treatment in the event of illness but the possibilities of participation in medical practise, of shaping social policies and political understandings, and of altering the biological imperatives...

Since 1860, life expectancies and standards of general health have improved dramatically in industrialised societies. In the 1860s, there was little that medicine could do to cure or prevent illness, death rates were high and life expectancy short. Health and Medicine in Britain since 1860 sets out to examine the relationship between health and medicine and how it has changed in Britain in the past 150 years. From the placebo effect to Viagra, through changes in society and in the organisation, practice and expertise of medicine, this volume reviews the processes through which modern...

Social medicine was one of the key health paradigms of the early twentieth century. It perceived public health as a function of social conditions and aimed at improving it through comprehensive, horizontal strategies. Yet, it was no homogeneous or static phenomenon. Depending on time, place and circumstances, it took different, sometimes ideologically contradictory forms. This volume portrays leading medical experts from seven European countries. Their juxtaposition reveals a network of international interaction and shows how different people coped with the crises of the time in different...