This is a major synthesis of the knowledge and practice of early modern English medicine in its social and cultural contexts. The book vividly maps out some central areas: remedies (and how they were made credible), notions of disease, advice on preventive medicine and on healthy living, and how surgeons worked upon the body and their understanding of what they were doing. The structures of practice and knowledge examined in the first part of the book came to be challenged in the later seventeenth century, when the 'new science' began to overturn the foundation of established knowledge. However, as the second part of the book shows, traditional medical practice was so well entrenched in English culture that much of it continued into the eighteenth century. Various changes did however occur, which set the agenda for later medical treatment and which are discussed in the final chapter.
The social history of medicine over the last fifteen years has redrawn the boundaries of medical history. Specialised papers and monographs have contributed to our knowledge of how medicine has affected society and how society has shaped medicine. This book synthesises, through a series of essays, some of the most significant findings of this 'new social history' of medicine. The period covered ranges from ancient Greece to the present time. While coverage is not exhaustive, the reader is able to trace how medicine in the West developed from an unlicensed open market place, with many different types of practitioners in the classical period, to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century professionalised medicine of State influence, of hospitals, public health medicine, and scientific medicine. The book also covers innovatory topics such as patient-doctor relationships, the history of the asylum, and the demographic background to the history of medicine.
This is a major synthesis of the knowledge and practice of early modern English medicine in its social and cultural contexts. The book vividly maps out some central areas: remedies (and how they were made credible), notions of disease, advice on preventive medicine and on healthy living, and how surgeons worked upon the body and their understanding of what they were doing. The structures of practice and knowledge examined in the first part of the book came to be challenged in the later seventeenth century, when the 'new science' began to overturn the foundation of established knowledge. However, as the second part of the book shows, traditional medical practice was so well entrenched in English culture that much of it continued into the eighteenth century. Various changes did however occur, which set the agenda for later medical treatment and which are discussed in the final chapter.
British Medicine in an Age of Reform, charts the nature and dynamics of the radical changes which occurred between 1780 and 1850 - a great turning point in British medicine. Medicine was reformed just
This set comprises two paperback volumes. The first volume, The Western Medical Tradition, 800BC-1800AD, examines the system of medical ideas that went back to the Greeks of the eighth century BC, and
