Books in the Cambridge Studies in the History of Medicine series

The Congolese people termed sleeping sickness the 'colonial disease'. This study examines why Belgian colonisation of the Congo, rather than benefiting the local population, exacerbated many diseases.

Originally published in 1986, this book uses Florentine death registers to show the changing character of plague from the first outbreak of the Black Death in 1348 to the mid-fifteenth century. Through an innovative study of this evidence, Professor Carmichael finds that there were many differences between the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century epidemics.

This book provides a series of original studies of international health and welfare organisations between the Wars. It will interest students of international relations, social history, gender studies, history of science and medicine, as well as those concerned with international aid.

In early modern England, housewives, clergymen, bloodletters, herb women, and patients told authoritative tales about the body. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, medicine had begun to drown out these voices. This book argues that changes in the relationship between rich and poor underlay this rise in medicine's authority.

East Coast fever can kill 95% of a herd of cattle in three weeks. The disease was unknown to western science until it was introduced into Rhodesia in 1901. This book describes the social and economic impact, the scientific investigations into it, and the effort to control it.

Between the birth of the Third Republic and the outbreak of World War I, French medical doctors gained a far-reaching influence over the political life of their country, serving as mayors on the local level and ranking second only to lawyers in parliament. This book explores the causes and significance of this phenomenon.

This book, first published in 2001, explains how eugenicists tried to bring about the biological regeneration of the French population. It is the first attempt to set forth the major components of French eugenics both for comparison with other countries and to show the interaction of the various movements that comprised it.

This book, first published in 1998, revisits the period in the 1940s and 1950s when tens of thousands of Americans were operated on for mental illness. By exploring the history of psychiatry as a discipline and a medical specialty, it explains why so many trusted and caring physicians believed that the procedure benefited their patients.

Is women's destiny rooted in their biology? This book argues that the definition of femininity as propounded by gynaecological science is a cultural product of a wider, more political context.

In this 1998 book Robert Aronowitz offers historical essays about how diseases change their meaning. By juxtaposing the history of different diseases, the author shows how values and interests have determined research programs, public health activities, clinical decisions, and the patient's experience of illness.

William Alexander Hammond, M. D. (1828-1900), one of the most successful American physicians of the nineteenth century. This biography shows how he developed his New York practice in neurology as a vehicle for pursuing broad scientific interests within the limits of the solo-practitioner structure of the medicine of his day.

Mission and Method challenges the prevalent notion that the British were the leaders in the nineteenth-century public health movement and set the model for similar movements elsewhere. It suggests that an active and influential french public health movement antedated the British and greatly influenced British public health leaders.

Charitable Knowledge explores the formation of the teaching hospital in eighteenth-century London. The metropolis lacked a university until the nineteenth century, so the seven major voluntary hospitals were crucial sites for educating surgeons and visiting physicians. Lawrence explains how charity patients became teaching objects, and how hospitals became medical schools.

This is the first comprehensive study on a national scale of the entire range of medical practitioners 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.

By examining German university medicine between 1750 and 1820, this book presents a new interpretation of the emergence of modern medical science. In contrast to the standard picture of the medical profession before 1800 which treats physicians almost exclusively as healers, Thomas H. Broman argues that healing was only one aspect of a complex professional identity in 1750.

This book explores the tradition of the 'science of man' in French medicine of the era 1750-1850. 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.

The advent of AIDS has led to a revival of interest in the historical relationship of disease to society. There now exists a new consciousness of AIDS and history, and of AIDS itself as an historic event. This is the starting-point of this collection of essays.

This collecion of essays on the social history of legal (or forensic) medicine explores the involvement of medical experts in legal proceedings and prison regimes in settings ranging frm colonial America and Enlightenment Germany to modern Britain and the USA.

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.

Professor Farley describes how governments and organizations faced one particular tropical disease, bilharzia or schistosomiasis.

By carefully retelling the story of the foundations of public health in industrial revolution Britain not as the triumph of responsible government over urban filth but as a politically savvy choice to undermine the potential of a public medicine to provide a basis for radical criticism of laissez faire capitalism, this book opens the possibility for understanding health as a matter of justice.

The first major study of public health in British India that covers many previously unresearched areas such as European attitudes towards India; the fate of public health under Indian control; and the effects of quarantine on colonial trade and the pilgrimage to Mecca.

This book describes the medical world of the early fourteenth century through a study of the extensive archival material and contemporary writings which exist for eastern Spain in the decades before the Black Death. It brings together the world of medical thought and the actual world shared by patients and practitioners.

This book concerns the development of institutional medicine, medical practice and health care during the initial colonisation and later colonial rule of Papua New Guinea. It discusses the relationship between public health and the medical profession and colonial bureaucracy, and also analyses the profession's social and technical ideas.

This is the first detailed account of the rise of pathological anatomy in France and England in the early years of the nineteenth century. It traces the emergence of this important medical tradition, and examines the forces that moved these medical ideas and techniques from one culture to another.

This ambitious book presents an across-the-board study of medicine, in any urban centre, for any period of British history. By selecting Wakefield and Huddersfield as contrasting types of northern towns, and examining in details their systems of medical care, Dr Marland has written a local history which says something important about the country as a whole.

This 1986 book explores the theory and practice of late nineteenth-century psychiatry. Psychiatric theory is discussed less as an objective body of biomedical knowledge than as a product of the social turmoil that characterized the final decades of the nineteenth century.

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 rendered obscure by Renaissance his tendency to mysticism. This intellectual biography, the culmination of many years of reflection on the topics discusses, illuminates Van Helmont's creative insights.

This penetrating case study of institution building and entrepreneurship in science shows how a minor medical speciality evolved into a large and powerful academic discipline. Drawing extensively on little-used archival sources, the author analyses in detail how biomedical science became a central part of medical training and practice.