The British apprenticeship model of nurse training, developed under Florence Nightingale's influence from 1860 at St Thomas's Hospital, gained national and world-wide recognition. Its end was heralded with the publication of the last national syllab…
Much of contemporary medical theory and practice focuses on the identification of specific causes of disease. However, this has not always been the case: until the early nineteenth century physicians thought of diseases in quite different terms. The…
Wounds were a potent signifier reaching across all aspects of life in Europe in the middle ages, and their representation, perception and treatment is the focus of this volume. Following a survey of the history of medical wound treatment in the midd…
This investigation contributes to the existing 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. In order to obtain a c…
Communities great and small across Europe for eight centuries have contracted with doctors. Physicians provided citizen care, helped govern, and often led in public life. Civic Medicine stakes out this timely subject by focusing on its golden age, w…
The early decades of the eighteenth century saw the appearance of a completely new type of surgical practitioner in France: the dentiste. The use of this title was of the utmost significance, indicating not just the making of a new practitioner but…
At the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, amongst the first acts of Charles II's government was the abolition of the New Model Army and the sweeping away of the legislation and institutions that had supported it, including most of the medical prov…
Students notoriously vote with their feet, seeking out the best and most innovative teachers of their subject. The most ambitious students have been travelling long distances for their education since universities were first founded in the 13th cent…
Florence Nightingale and the Health of the Raj presents in detail Nightingale's involvement with India and Indians, and shows how she progressed from being concerned with the narrow sphere of army sanitation to the socio-economic condition of the wh…
Bodies and body parts of the dead have long been considered valuable material for use in medical science. Over time and in different places, they have been dissected, autopsied, investigated, harvested for research and therapeutic purposes, collecte…
As a maritime trading nation, the issue of quarantine was one of constant concern to Britain. Whilst naturally keen to promote international trade, there was a constant fear of importing potentially devastating diseases into British territories. In…
Building upon sustained scholarly and popular interest in both alchemy and pre-modern medicine, this volume reveals how physicians practiced alchemy and alchemists produced medicaments. It shows how, besides sharing knowledge, physicians and alchemi…
In the popular imagination, the notion of military medicine prior to the twentieth century is dominated by images of brutal ignorance, superstition and indifference. In an age before the introduction of anaesthetics, antibiotics and the sterilisatio…
Historians have long recognized epidemics to be a significant, though sometimes hidden, factor in the fortunes of societies and civilizations. The study of epidemics heightens our understanding of relationships between economic systems and living co…
Dr Henri de Rothschild was a fifth generation Rothschild and perhaps the most famous of the Paris Rothschilds of the fin-de-siecle period. A 'sleeping partner' of the bank and the non-drinking owner of Mouton-Rothschild, Henri spent much of his life…
Melancholy is rightly taken to be a central topic of concern in early modern culture, and it continues to generate scholarly interest among historians of medicine, literature, psychiatry and religion. This book considerably furthers our understandin…
Music has been used as a cure for disease since as far back as King David's lyre, but the notion that it might be a serious cause of mental and physical illness was rare until the late eighteenth century. At that time, physicians started to argue th…
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. This means looking in a novel way not only a…
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 th…
The name of Hippocrates has been invoked as an inspiration of medicine since antiquity, and medical practitioners have turned to Hippocrates for ethical and social standards. While most modern commentators accept that medicine has sometimes fallen s…
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 exa…
Immunity is as old as illness itself, yet historians have only just begun to take up the challenge of reconstructing the modern transformation of attempts to protect against disease. Crafting Immunity assembles in one volume the most recent efforts…
This book studies how doctors responded to - and helped shape - deep-seated fears about nervous degeneracy and population decline in France between 1750 and 1850. It uncovers a rich and far-ranging medical debate in which four generations of hygiene…
This book 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. Rejecting the imposition of modern conceptions of disease upon the past, it reveals…
The poor and the sick-poor have always presented a problem to the governments and churches of Europe. Whose responsibility are they? Are they a wilful burden on the honest working population, or are they a necessary presence for the true Christian t…
Developed throughout early modern Europe, lazaretti, or plague hospitals, took on a central role in early modern responses to epidemic disease, in particular the prevention and treatment of plague. The lazaretti served as isolation hospitals, quaran…
One of the key themes of the Enlightenment was the search for universal laws and truths that would help illuminate the workings of the universe. It is in such attitudes that we trace the origins of modern science and medicine. However, not all eight…
The practice of medicine in the days before the development of anaesthetics could often be a brutal and painful experience. Many procedures, especially those involving surgery, must have proved almost as distressing to the doctor as to the patient.…
While the writings of early modern medical practitioners habitually touch on performance and ceremony, few illuminate them as clearly as the Protestant physicians Felix Platter and Thomas Platter the Younger, who studied in Montpellier and practiced…
Throughout history governments have had to confront the problem of how to deal with the poorer parts of their population. During the medieval and early modern period this responsibility was largely borne by religious institutions, civic institutions…
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: Body and Gender from the Greeks to F…
Health, Sickness, Medicine and the Friars in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries explores the attitudes and responses of the mendicant orders to illness, their contribution to medical history, the influence of health and sickness as a factor in…
Uroscopy - the diagnosis of disease by visual examination of the urine - played a very prominent role in early modern medical practice and in the lives of ordinary people. Widely considered as the most reliable way to diagnose diseases and pregnanci…
