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New Medical Challenges During the Scottish Enlightenment
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005.
New Medical Challenges explores a wide range of social and medical practices, exposing the contradictions and ambiguities found in eighteenth-century Scottish health, science and medicine. The overall picture casts further light on the nature of the Enlightenment as a cultural phenomenon. Commercial society created new jobs, wealth and desires, that threatened contemporary values and physical health. Both luxury and poverty took their toll, spawning disease among the affluent and the poor. A number of key issues are examined, including the role of charity, medical debates and competition, vivisection, and diseases of the time – such as ‘pulmonary consumption’, ‘mill reek’ and ‘ague’. Special chapters are devoted to ‘female troubles’, ‘hysteria’ and ‘hypochondriasis’, showing the evolving relationships across gender and class lines between poor patients and their physicians. To place medical ideas and practices into proper context, the essays offer extensive background information and rediscover the lost voices of prominent physicians involved in promoting health and battling illness. Thanks to the richness of seldom-tapped archival sources – book manuscripts, consultation letters, hospital registration and management records, together with student essays, lecture notes and notebooks – the selected episodes expose a world of uncertainty, confusion and paradox. New Medical Challenges tells a wide range of stories that will be of great interest to a broad readership concerned with past health issues.
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Mending Bodies, Saving Souls: A History of Hospitals
Oxford University Press, 1999
By chronicling the transformation of hospitals from houses of mercy to tools of confinement, from dwellings of rehabilitation to spaces for clinical teaching and research, from rooms for birthing and dying to institutions of science and technology, this book provides a historical approach to understanding today's hospitals. The story is told in a dozen episodes which illustrate hospitals in particular times and places, covering important themes and developments in the history of medicine and therapeutics, from ancient Greece to the era of AIDS. This book furnishes a unique insight into the world of meanings and emotions associated with hospital life and patienthood b y including narratives by both patients and caregivers. By conceiving of hospitals as houses of order capable of taming the chaos associated with suffering, illness, and death, we can better understand the significance of their ritualized routines and rules. From their beginnings, hospitals were places of spiritual and physical recovery. They should continue to respond to all human needs. As traditional testimonials to human empathy and benevolence, hospitals must endure as spaces of healing.
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Culture, Knowledge and Healing: Historical Perspectives of Homeopathic Medicine in Europe and North America.
Edited with Robert Jütte and John Woodward. Sheffield: European Association for the History of Medicine and Health Publications, 1998.
Alternative or complementary medicine is on the rise around the world. These terms and others, such as holistic or integrative, characterize a number of therapeutic practices that are not closely linked to current notions of scientific medicine or subjected to its standard proofs of efficacy. This volume features one of the most popular and best-studied alternative practices: homeopathy. With some important revisions and additions, it contains a number of essays written by prominent medical historians who participated at a conference organized under the auspices of the Department of the History of Health Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco and the Robert Bosch Foundation in Stuttgart. With additional support from the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., the primary goal of this 1993 meeting was to bring the history of homeopathy within a broader international context and reexamine its status as an alternative medical system with the tools of social history and employment of clinical records. The book breaks new ground, placing homeopathy within particular national networks of professionals and lay persons. An extensive, consolidated bibliography provides additional reading suggestions.
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AIDS and the Historian: Proceedings of a Conference at the National Institutes of Health 20-21 March 1989.
Edited with Victoria A. Harden. Bethesda: N.I.H. Publications, 1991.
In 1986, leading American historians of medicine publicly acknowledged their responsibility to contribute to a better understanding of a new epidemic disease: AIDS. Since then, several publications and the formation of working groups demonstrated a scholarly commitment to illuminate and explain aspects of this disease through comparative studies of previous mass outbreaks. The AIDS History Group, founded in 1988 and sponsored by the American Association for the History of Medicine, recommended holding a series of programmatic workshops designed to evaluate the current literature on AIDS, discuss ways to apply historical standards to that literature, and suggest further research topics for scholars who wished to contribute to the public debate. Historians must exert leadership and dialogue with representatives of other academic disciplines as well as the various AIDS communities. The latter offer narratives and unique insights into the epidemic.
This collection of essays edited by the Co-Chairs of the AIDS History Group and organizers of the conference constitute important departure points and strategies for the study of AIDS. It also reproduces a number of discussions held among conference participants who attended the four workshops
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Hospital Life in Enlightenment Scotland: care and teaching at the Royal Informary of Edinburgh
Cambridge University Press, 1986
This work offers the first complete account of institutional life in an eighteenth-century British hospital. Using a multitude of surviving documents, the author presents an intimate view of the experiences of the sick poor and their physicians at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh between 1750 and 1800. The first voluntary institution of its kind founded outside London, the Infirmary is examined within the contemporary context of the Scottish Enlightenment and the tenets of British philanthropy. From its inception, this hospital was a focal point for the convergence of charitable intentions, local civic pride, and the improvement of scientific medicine.
After briefly reviewing the Infirmary’s early developments, building projects, finances, and regulations, the story concentrates on the experiences of patients and staff. Both groups are followed from the admitting room to the various wards, from the teaching section to the operating theatre. Admission routines, history-taking, diagnoses, and treatment are all meticulously reconstructed with the help of registers, minutes of meetings, lecture notes, and nearly 100 individual clinical histories preserved in casebooks. The final chapter is devoted to clinical instruction of medical students and surgical apprentices who were flocking to the Edinburgh University for their training.
Histories of hospitals have traditionally failed to probe the nature, workings and meaning of institutional confinement. Such narratives downplay the fate of patients and their diseases while medical treatments are judged to be harmful. By contrast, Professor Risse delves deeply into the organizational aspects of the Edinburgh Infirmary and effectively demonstrates that through careful patient selection and the assistance of experienced practitioners, this eighteenth-century British hospital played an important role in the study and treatment of the sick poor who secured admission.
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Medicine Without Doctors: Home Health Care in American History
Edited with Ronald L. Numbers, and Judith W. Leavitt. New York: Science History Publications, 1977.
The tradition of self-help in medicine has existed since time immemorial. Until healing roles were clearly defined and professionalization was on its way, much of what constituted healing was fundamentally domestic in nature. In fact, it could be argued that healing was originally a familial or communal activity before being ritualized and invested in special persons. The essays that follow, originally delivered in April 1975 at a symposium organized by the Department of the History of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin, develop a number of themes. The decision to focus on the American scene—especially the last 150 years—is, of course arbitrary. The choice was primarily prompted by the availability of sources and the existence of a nucleus of prominent social historians interested in the topic. Medical self-help continues to be an essential practice and resource, and its history should be subjected to critical examination.
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History of Physiology, by Karl E. Rothschuh. Editor and translator. Huntington: R. E. Krieger, 1973 and 1981.
This is the first general history of physiology published in English. Originally written by the German physician-historian Karl E. Rothschuh in 1953, this survey has been carefully updated, translated and furnished with additional chapters and bibliographies by Guenter B. Risse. The result is a fine bird’s eye view of the subject, accessible to both the general reader and historians of science and medicine. A series of charts, tables, and photographs depict the growth of physiology. Dates of events, titles of publications, concepts, methods and techniques provide essential information. Developments during the past century are presented as products of groups and schools of affiliated scientists, a useful device that exposes the web of personal relationships between teachers and their students, institutional rivalries, and international influences.
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Modern China and Traditional Chinese Medicine, editor and contributor. Springfield: C. Thomas, 1973
This book is the first critical analysis of recent developments in medical techniques and public health delivery that have taken place in the People’s Republic of China. Caution and suspended judgment characterize the collected essays, delivered during a symposium held at the University of Wisconsin in the spring of 1972. The topic of Chinese medicine is currently receiving great attention in the popular media, thanks to the thaw in Chinese-American relations that culminated with President Nixon’s visit to China a few months earlier. The purpose of the symposium was to bring together a group of outstanding scholars from a variety of fields such as Chinese history, medical history, neurophysiology, anesthesiology and public health in an effort to present key issues within an interdisciplinary forum that can promote greater understanding and promote new research. Topics such as acupuncture and pain control, public health and popular health care delivery are examined and critically discussed. A short list of useful books and articles representing the topics covered during the symposium is appended. This publication should be viewed as an interim document that provides discriminating readers with a more sober and scholarly source of information in the midst of sensational media reports.
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