Books in the The History of Medicine in Context series

Ailing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French men and women, members of their families, or their local physician or surgeon, could write to high profile physicians and surgeons seeking expert medical advice. This study, the first full-length examination of the practice of consulting by letter.

This book provides a fresh account of the dissections that took place across early modern Europe on those who had died of a disease or in unclear circumstances. It shows how autopsies informed the understanding of pathology of those involved, from medical practitioners' debates to laypeople's experience of suffering.

The close relationship between religion, medicine and natural philosophy in the post-reformation period has been documented and explored in a body of research since the 1990s. However, the direct and continued impact of Melanchthonian natural philosophy within the individual Lutheran principalities of northern Europe in general and Scandinavia in particular still has to be fully investigated and understood. This volume provides insight into how and why medicine and natural philosophy in a "liberal" and Melanchthonian form could continue to blossom in Scandinavia despite a growing Lutheran uniformity promoted by the State.

This book focuses on the representation, perception and treatment of wounds in the Middle Ages. Contributors situate wounds within the context of religious belief before turning to theory, symbolism, and more grounded spheres involving the law and the battlefield. Adopting an innovative approach to the subject.

By far the most influential work on the history of the body, across a wide range of academic disciplines, remains that of Thomas Laqueur. This book puts on trial the one-sex/two-sex model of Laqueur's Making Sex.

An investigation that contributes to the scholarship on women and medicine in early modern Britain by examining the diagnosis and treatment of female patients by male professional medical practitioners from 1590 to 1740.

Examines the methods by which British authorities sought to keep their territories free from contagious diseases, and the reactions to, and practical consequences of, these policies. This study provides a picture of attitudes to trade, culture, politics and medicine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Explores the quality of medical, nursing and welfare facilities provided in hospitals for soldiers during the formative years of the British standing army between 1660 and 1714. This book shows how, in the latter part of the 17th century, the army adapted and developed its facilities in line with advances in science, medicine and military theory.

The success of work on bacterial diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis tends to eclipse the broad context in which those studies were embedded. This text shows how, by the end of the 19th century, the quest for specific causes had spread well beyond bacterial diseases.

Rather than viewing Hippocratic ideals and values as an unchanging legacy, historians have increasingly explored the ways in which Hippocrates and his medicine have been constructed and reconstructed over time. This book examines the multiple uses, constructions, and meanings since the Renaissance.

A study of military nursing during the period of civil conflict from 1642 to 1660. Amongst other things, the text highlights the broad field that must be covered if a true assessment of 17th-century military nursing is to be made.

Throughout history, governments have had to confront the problem of how to deal with the poor. This volume looks at how northern European governments of the 18th and 19th centuries coped with the problem, balancing any new measures against perceived negative effects.

Music has been used as a cure for disease since as far back as King David's Iyre, but the notion that it might be a serious cause of mental and physical illness was rare until the late eighteenth century. This book outlines and explains the development of this idea of pathological music from the Enlightenment onwards.

As a study in intellectual history, this work offers insights into early modern texts on melancholy, including dramatic and literary representations of melancholy and melancholic suffering, and critically engages with a range of scholarship dealing with early modern medical, religious and cultural issues.

The story of early modern medicine, with its extremes of scientific brilliance and barbaric practice, has long held a fascination for scholars. This title provides an exploration of the changes and developments in medicine as practised in Ireland and by Irish physicians studying and working abroad during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Explores the identity of the 'French disease' (alias the 'French pox' or 'Morbus Gallicus') in the German Imperial city of Augsburg between 1495 and 1630. This book combines concern with conceptualisation of the disease with its practical application. It focuses on how theoretical understanding of the pox shaped the various therapeutic reactions.

This is the first volume to take a broad historical sweep of the close relation between medicines and poisons in the Western tradition, and their interconnectedness. They are like two ends of a spectrum, for the same natural material can be medicine or poison, depending on the dose, and poisons can be transformed into medicines, while medicines can turn out to be poisons. The book looks at important moments in the history of the relationship between poisons and medicines in European history, from Roman times, with the Greek physician Galen, through the Renaissance and the maverick physician Paracelsus, to the present, when poisons are actively being turned into beneficial medicines.

The eighteenth-century practitioners of anatomy saw their own period as 'the perfection of anatomy'. This book looks at the investigation of anatomy in the 'long' eighteenth century in disciplinary terms. It considers the practical aspects of anatomizing, the questions of how one became an anatomist, and where and how the discipline was practised.

Places the diverse practices of immunity in their historical contexts. This volume suggests that it was the craft-like, small-scale, and local conditions of clinical medicine that turned the immunity of individuals and populations into biomedical objects. It is suitable for historians and sociologists of health.

This work surveys, examines, and analyzes the British apprenticeship model of nurse training from 1860 at St Thomas's Hospital, until the publication of the last national syllabus from the General Nursing Council in England and Wales in 1977.

This book places childbirth in early-modern England within a wider network of social institutions and relationships. Starting with illegitimacy - the violation of the marital norm - it proceeds through marriage to the wider gender-order and so to the 'ceremony of childbirth', the popular ritual through which women collectively controlled this.

Placing the making of the dentiste within social, political and technical contexts, this book aims to receal the origins of the dentiste in the French surgical profession. This new sphere of practice represented a radical departure from what had gone before as this book reveals.

Birth control holds an unusual place in the history of medicine. This book outlines the early history of birth control in India, particularly the Tamil south, and illuminates India's role in a global birth control network.

The life of Florence Nightingale features prominently in the body of English literature and fiction, but there is very little written about her involvement with India and the Indian people. This volume explores her influence on health in India even though she never visited the subcontinent.

Dr Henri de Rothschild was a fifth generation Rothschild and perhaps the most famous of the Paris Rothschilds of the finde-siecle period. This is a biography of Henri de Rothschild that focuses on his medical achievements and that of his close family in France.

Studies how doctors responded to deep-seated fears about nervous degeneracy and population decline in France between 1750 and 1850. This book uncovers a medical debate in which four generations of hygiene activists used biomedical science to transform the self, sexuality and community in order to regenerate a sick and decaying nation.