Medicine in Society Historical Essays

These essays synthesises many of the most significant findings of recent research from ancient Greece to the present day.

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.

1. Introduction Andrew Wear; 2. Healers in the medical market place: towards a social history of Graeco-Roman medicine Vivian Nutton; 3. Medicine and society in medieval Europe, 500–1500 Katharine Park; 4. The patient in England, c. 1660–c. 1800 Roy Porter; 5. Making sense of health and the environment in early modern England Andrew Wear; 6. Medicine in the age of Enlightenment Guenter B. Granshaw; 7. The rise of the modern hospital in Britain Lindsay Granshaw; 8. Medical practitioners 1750–1850 and the period of medical reform in Britain Irvine Loudon; 9. Public health, preventive medicine and professionalization: England and America in the nineteenth century Elizabeth Fee and Dorothy Porter; 10. Madness and its institutions Roy Porter; 11. From infectious to chronic diseases: changing patterns of sickness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Paul Weindling; 12. Providers, 'consumers', the state and the delivery of health care services in twentieth-century Britain Jane Lewis; 13. The implications of increased life expectancy for family and social life Arthur E. Imhof; Index.

This volume of essays synthesises many of the most significant findings of recent research and ranges in its interests from ancient Greece to the present day.