Literature & Medicine During the Eighteenth Century


Book Description

First published in 1993, Literature & Medicine During the Eighteenth Century analyses the close interplay of medicine and literature by paying special attention to questions of body language and the representation of inner life. Although today, medicine and literature are widely seen as falling on different sides of the ‘two cultures’ divide, this was not so in the eighteenth century when doctors, scientists, writers, and artists formed a well-integrated educated elite. Locke, Smollett and Goldsmith were doctors, and physicians such as Erasmus Darwin doubled as poets. Written by leading historians of medicine and eighteenth-century literary critics, this book uncovers the interconnections between medical and psychological theory and ideas of taste, beauty, and genius. Its contributors explore the rich cultural milieu of the period and investigate the ways in which medicine itself contributed to informing a gendered discourse of the world. This book will be of interest to historians, literary scholars and medical historians.




Studies on Indian Medical History


Book Description

This volume of studies presents the papers given at the second workshop of the European Ayurdic society, a group which was formed in Groningen in 1983. The volume is thus a sequel to Proceedings of the international workshop on priorities in the study of Indian medicine. The workshop was held over a period of three days in September 1985 in the congenial surroundings of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine ii London, and it provided a splendid opportunity for scholars in the field of Indian medical history to meet in one place and to share the latest research in their respective areas.




Essays in the History of Therapeutics


Book Description

Therapeutics has been central to the medical enterprise in all times and all places, but a subject that is all too often neglected by historians. The essays in this volume follow a range in chronology from antiquity to the 1980s and in geography from the Mediterranean Basin to the New World. They touch on such matters as diet and drugs, magic and surgery, orthodox and unorthodox approaches. What they share is an attempt to get beyond the easy dismissal of almost all therapeutics before the twentieth century as meaningless and harmful and to examine concrete dimensions of the therapeutic encounter in its social, professional, religious and scientific reverberations.




The Popularization of Medicine


Book Description

In the early modern centuries a body of popularized medical writings appeared, telling ordinary people how they could best take care of their own health. Often written be doctors, such books gave simple advice for home treatments, while commonly warning of the dangers of magic, quackery, old wive's tales and faith-healing. The Popularization of Medicine explores the rise of this form of people's medicine, from the early days of printing to the Victorian age, focusing on the different experiences of Britain, the Continent and North America.




The History of Medicine: A Very Short Introduction


Book Description

Against the backdrop of unprecedented concern for the future of health care, this i Very Short Introduction/i surveys the history of medicine from classical times to the present. Focussing on the key turning points in the history of Western medicine - such as the advent of hospitals and the rise of experimental medicine - but also offering reflections on alternative traditions such as Chinese medicine, Bill Bynum offers insights into medicine's past, while at the same time engaging with contemporary issues, discoveries, and controversies.




Physic and Philanthropy


Book Description

The Wellcome Trust is a charitable institution supporting medical and allied research throughout the world. This History of the Trust marks the celebration of its fiftieth anniversary in 1986. Professor A. Rupert Hall, a prominent science historian, long associated with the Trust, and B. A. Bembridge, a retired Trust scientist, have written this lucid and well informed account which charts the development of the organisation from its inception in 1936 to the present day. Within this framework, there is an underlying discussion of the 'philosophy' of the financial endowment of science and medicine. The Wellcome Trust has had an enormous impact on medical research over the years. This volume provides a unique insight into the development of a leading scientific research body, and its relevance to similar institutions the world over.







The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (The Norton History of Science)


Book Description

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize "A panoramic and perfectly magnificent intellectual history of medicine…This is the book that delivers it all." —Sherwin Nuland, author of How We Die Hailed as "a remarkable achievement" (Boston Globe) and as "a triumph: simultaneously entertaining and instructive, witty and thought-provoking…a splendid and thoroughly engrossing book" (Los Angeles Times), Roy Porter's charting of the history of medicine affords us an opportunity as never before to assess its culture and science and its costs and benefits to mankind. Porter explores medicine's evolution against the backdrop of the wider religious, scientific, philosophical, and political beliefs of the culture in which it develops, covering ground from the diseases of the hunter-gatherers to the more recent threats of AIDS and Ebola, from the clearly defined conviction of the Hippocratic oath to the muddy ethical dilemmas of modern-day medicine. Offering up a treasure trove of historical surprises along the way, this book "has instantly become the standard single-volume work in its field" (The Lancet).




The History of Medical Education in Britain


Book Description

Professional education forms a key element in the transmission of medical learning and skills, in occupational solidarity and in creating and recreating the very image of the practitioner. Yet the history of British medical education has hitherto been surprisingly neglected. Building upon papers contributed to two conferences on the history of medical education in the early 1990s, this volume presents new research and original synthesis on key aspects of medical instruction, theoretical and practical, from early medieval times into the present century. Academic and practical aspects are equally examined, and balanced attention is given to different sites of instruction, be it the university or the hospital. The crucial role of education in medical qualifications and professional licensing is also examined as is the part it has played in the regulation of the entry of women to the profession. Contributors are Juanita Burnby, W.F. Bynum, Laurence M. Geary, Faye Getz, Johanna Geyer-Kordesch, S.W.F. Holloway, Stephen Jacyna, Peter Murray Jones, Helen King, Susan C. Lawrence, Irvine Loudon, Margaret Pelling, Godelieve Van Heteren, and John Harley Warner.




The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine


Book Description

An authoritative and accessible illustrated introduction to medical history.