Books in the The History of Medicine in Context series

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

This book investigates German plague prints and treatises published between 1473 and 1573 in order to explore the intertwined histories of plague, print, medicine, and the Reformation. It presents the broadest study of German plague treatises in any language, and traces a German reform of healing that unfolded during the Renaissance and Reformat

Garcia de Ortäs Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India (1563) was printed in Goa, the capital of the Portuguese empire in the East and a port city that occupied a prominent role in the circuit of trade. Orta, a Portuguese physician who lived in Goa for thirty years, presents dialogues concerning more than eighty different drugs, fruits, spices, minerals and medical preparations, all of them native to India or observed in use there. This volume analyses the Colloquies, its history, context and reception, and its value to historians as a symbol of the impact of globalization in a sixteenth-century medical world.

The British Pharmacopoeia has provided official standards for the quality of substances and articles used in medicine since its first publication. Cartwright explores how these standards have been achieved through a comprehensive review of the history and development of pharmacopoeias in the UK. The book, which places the British Pharmacopoeia in its global context as an instrument of the British Empire, will be of value to historians of medicine and pharmacy and practitioners of medicine, pharmacy and pharmaceutical analytical chemistry.

This book investigates German plague prints and treatises published between 1473 and 1573 in order to explore the intertwined histories of plague, print, medicine, and the Reformation. It presents the broadest study of German plague treatises in any language, and traces a German reform of healing that unfolded during the Renaissance and Reformation.

This collection of essays explores the multiple uses, constructions and meanings of Hippocrates and Hippocratic medicine since the Renaissance, and elucidate the cultural and social circumstances that encouraged the creation of such varied proposals.

Representing a new wave of research and analysis on Nazi human experiments and coerced research, the essays in this volume deliberately break with a top-down history limited to concentration camp experiments under the control of Himmler and the SS. Instead the collection positions extreme experiments (where research subjects were taken to the point of death) within a far wider spectrum of abusive coerced research. The book considers the experiments not in isolation but as integrated within wider aspects of medical provision as it became caught up in the Nazi war economy, revealing that researchers were opportunistic and retained considerable autonomy.

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.

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 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.

Taking the Vesalian anatomical revolution as its point of departure, this volume charts the apparent rise and fall of anatomy studies within universities in sixteenth-century Spain, focussing particularly on primary sources from 1550 to 1600.

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.

Almost every medical faculty possesses anatomical and/or pathological collections: human and animal preparations, wax - and other models, as well as drawings, photographs, documents and archives relating to them. This volume explores the changing status of anatomical collections from the early modern period to date.