Imperial Bodies in London


Book Description

Since the eighteenth century, European administrators and officers, military men, soldiers, missionaries, doctors, wives, and servants moved back and forth between Britain and its growing imperial territories. The introduction of steam-powered vessels, and deep-docks to accommodate them at London ports, significantly reduced travel time for colonists and imperial servants traveling home to see their families, enjoy a period of study leave, or recuperate from the tropical climate. With their minds enervated by the sun, livers disrupted by the heat, and blood teeming with parasites, these patients brought the empire home and, in doing so, transformed medicine in Britain. With Imperial Bodies in London, Kristin D. Hussey offers a postcolonial history of medicine in London. Following mobile tropical bodies, her book challenges the idea of a uniquely domestic medical practice, arguing instead that British medicine was imperial medicine in the late Victorian era. Using the analytic tools of geography, she interrogates sites of encounter across the imperial metropolis to explore how medical research and practice were transformed and remade at the crossroads of empire.




Fit to Practice


Book Description

Traces the history of the British General Medical Council to reveal the persistence of hierarchies of gender, national identity, and race in determining who was fit to practice British medicine.




This Is Going to Hurt


Book Description

In the US edition of this international bestseller, Adam Kay channels Henry Marsh and David Sedaris to tell us the "darkly funny" (The New Yorker) -- and sometimes horrifying -- truth about life and work in a hospital. Welcome to 97-hour weeks. Welcome to life and death decisions. Welcome to a constant tsunami of bodily fluids. Welcome to earning less than the hospital parking meter. Wave goodbye to your friends and relationships. Welcome to the life of a first-year doctor. Scribbled in secret after endless days, sleepless nights and missed weekends, comedian and former medical resident Adam Kay's This Is Going to Hurt provides a no-holds-barred account of his time on the front lines of medicine. Hilarious, horrifying and heartbreaking by turns, this is everything you wanted to know -- and more than a few things you didn't -- about life on and off the hospital ward. And yes, it may leave a scar.




Merchants of Medicines


Book Description

The period from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century—the so-called long eighteenth century of English history—was a time of profound global change, marked by the expansion of intercontinental empires, long-distance trade, and human enslavement. It was also the moment when medicines, previously produced locally and in small batches, became global products. As greater numbers of British subjects struggled to survive overseas, more medicines than ever were manufactured and exported to help them. Most historical accounts, however, obscure the medicine trade’s dependence on slave labor, plantation agriculture, and colonial warfare. In Merchants of Medicines, Zachary Dorner follows the earliest industrial pharmaceuticals from their manufacture in the United Kingdom, across trade routes, and to the edges of empire, telling a story of what medicines were, what they did, and what they meant. He brings to life business, medical, and government records to evoke a vibrant early modern world of London laboratories, Caribbean estates, South Asian factories, New England timber camps, and ships at sea. In these settings, medicines were produced, distributed, and consumed in new ways to help confront challenges of distance, labor, and authority in colonial territories. Merchants of Medicines offers a new history of economic and medical development across early America, Britain, and South Asia, revealing the unsettlingly close ties among medicine, finance, warfare, and slavery that changed people’s expectations of their health and their bodies.




Making a Medical Living


Book Description

A socio-economic history of medical practice from the first voluntary hospital to national health insurance.




Can Medicine Be Cured?


Book Description

A fierce, honest, elegant and often hilarious debunking of the great fallacies that drive modern medicine. By the award-winning author of The Way We Die Now. Seamus O'Mahony writes about the illusion of progress, the notion that more and more diseases can be 'conquered' ad infinitum. He punctures the idiocy of consumerism, the idea that healthcare can be endlessly adapted to the wishes of individuals. He excoriates the claims of Big Science, the spending of vast sums on research follies like the Human Genome Project. And he highlights one of the most dangerous errors of industrialized medicine: an over-reliance on metrics, and a neglect of things that can't easily be measured, like compassion. 'A deeply fascinating and rousing book' Mail on Sunday. 'What makes this book a delightful, if unsettling read, is not just O'Mahony's scholarly and witty prose, but also his brutal honesty' The Times.




Making it in British Medicine


Book Description

Gone are the days when you present to colleagues with hand-drawn overheads. Presenting Health with PowerPoint shows how you can work through PowerPoint to create effective presentations. In an easy-to-use step-by-step format it takes you through the components of the European Computer Driving Licence the basic IT qualification and guides you through the text by showing what actually appears on the computer using screenshots toolbar icons mouse and keyboard actions. The accompanying CD-ROM provides downloadable resources and useful website links. Presenting Health with PowerPoint is designed for doctors nurses and managers at all levels throughout primary and secondary care who need not have prior knowledge of Microsoft PowerPoint.




The Foundation Programme for Doctors


Book Description

This book includes a foreword by Jane Dacre, Academic Vice President, Royal College of Physicians, Professor of Medical Education, CHIME, Royal Free and University College Medical School, University College London, Consultant Physician and Rheumatologist, The Whittington Hospital, London. This book prepares you for the often daunting life after medical school, detailing everything you need to know about preparing, applying and surviving. It's the most up-to-date guide available filling you in on recent important changes to the application system. This practical guide is full of valuable tips, tables, worked examples, frequently asked questions, further resources and useful addresses. Highly recommended for final year medical students and other clinical medical students preparing for their final year, this book is also invaluable for junior doctors progressing through the Foundation Programme and all those with teaching and supervisory responsibilities in medical schools and hospitals. 'An invaluable resource for our new generation of doctors. It takes readers through the process from application, to F2 and beyond. It offers useful advice in a useable and readable format. It is written by a group of current and past medical students who have lived through, and continue to live through, the insecurities of the changing medical career structures. Its style is informal, engaging and easy to absorb, so it should be a good distraction for those currently in the run-up to their finals exams. Good luck to all of you, and don't forget, Medicine is a wonderful career.' - Jane Dacre, in the Foreword.




Beyond the state


Book Description

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. The Colonial Medical Service was the personnel section of the Colonial Service, employing the doctors who tended to the health of both the colonial staff and the local populations of the British Empire. Although the Service represented the pinnacle of an elite government agency, its reach in practice stretched far beyond the state, with the members of the African service collaborating, formally and informally, with a range of other non-governmental groups. This collection of essays on the Colonial Medical Service of Africa illustrates the diversity and active collaborations to be found in the untidy reality of government medical provision. The authors present important case studies covering former British colonial dependencies in Africa, including Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and Zanzibar. They reveal many new insights into the enactments of colonial policy and the ways in which colonial doctors negotiated the day-to-day reality during the height of imperial rule in Africa. The book provides essential reading for scholars and students of colonial history, medical history and colonial administration.




Medical Nihilism


Book Description

Medical nihilism is the view that we should have little confidence in the effectiveness of medical interventions. Jacob Stegenga argues persuasively that this is how we should see modern medicine, and suggests that medical research must be modified, clinical practice should be less aggressive, and regulatory standards should be enhanced.