Books in the The History of Medicine in Context series

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.