The History of Medicine in Context
About the Book Series
For more than 20 years The History of Medicine in Context series, edited by Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell, provided a unique platform for the publication of research pertaining to the study of medicine from broad social, cultural, political, religious and intellectual perspectives. Offering cutting-edge scholarship on a range of medical subjects that cross chronological, geographical and disciplinary boundaries, the series consistently challenges received views about medical history and shows how medicine has had a much more pronounced effect on western society than is often acknowledged. As medical knowledge progresses, throwing up new challenges and moral dilemmas, The History of Medicine in Context series offers the opportunity to evaluate the shifting role and practice of medicine from the long perspective, not only providing a better understanding of the past, but often an intriguing perspective on the present.
Gabrielle Falloppia, 1522/23-1562: The Life and Work of a Renaissance Anatomist
1st Edition
By Michael Stolberg
May 27, 2024
Renaissance anatomist Gabrielle Falloppia is best known today for his account of the eponymous fallopian tubes but he made numerous other anatomical discoveries as well, was one of the most famous surgeons of his time, and is widely believed to have invented the condom. Drawing on Falloppia's ...
'I Follow Aristotle': How William Harvey Discovered the Circulation of the Blood
1st Edition
By Andrew Cunningham
January 29, 2024
This book presents a new interpretation of how and why the discovery of the circulation of the blood in animals was made. It has long been known that the English physician William Harvey (1578–1657) was a follower of Aristotle, but his most strikingly ‘modern’ and original discovery – of the ...
The World of Worm: Physician, Professor, Antiquarian, and Collector, 1588-1654
1st Edition
By Ole Peter Grell
January 29, 2024
This monograph offers the first comprehensive treatment of the multi-faceted scholarly interests of Ole Worm, professor of medicine at the University of Copenhagen. Scholarship about Worm has focused mainly on Worm’s collecting and the creation of his cabinet of curiosity, the Museum Wormianum, ...
Forty Days: Quarantine and the Traveller, c. 1700 – c. 1900
1st Edition
By John Booker
May 31, 2023
Forty Days: Quarantine and the Traveller, c. 1700 –1900 provides a timely reminder that no traveller in past centuries could return from the East without spending up to 40 days in a lazaretto to ensure that no symptoms of plague were developing. Quarantine was performed in virtual prisons ranging ...
Authority, Gender, and Midwifery in Early Modern Italy: Contested Deliveries
1st Edition
By Jennifer F. Kosmin
May 06, 2022
Authority, Gender, and Midwifery in Early Modern Italy: Contested Deliveries explores attempts by church, state, and medical authorities to regulate and professionalize the practice of midwifery in Italy from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. Medical writers in this period devoted...
Civic Medicine: Physician, Polity, and Pen in Early Modern Europe
1st Edition
Edited
By J. Andrew Mendelsohn, Annemarie Kinzelbach, Ruth Schilling
June 30, 2021
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, when cities rivaled territorial states in local and...
Pathology in Practice: Diseases and Dissections in Early Modern Europe
1st Edition
Edited
By Silvia De Renzi, Marco Bresadola, Maria Conforti
December 12, 2019
Post-mortems may have become a staple of our TV viewing, but the long history of this practice is still little known. This book provides a fresh account of the dissections that took place across early modern Europe on those who had died of a disease or in unclear circumstances. Drawing on different...
Plague, Print, and the Reformation: The German Reform of Healing, 1473�1573
1st Edition
By Erik A. Heinrichs
December 12, 2019
This book surveys a neglected set of sources, German plague prints and treatises published between 1473 and 1573, in order to explore the intertwined histories of plague, print, medicine and religion during the Reformation era. It argues that a particularly German reform of healing flourished in ...
Hospital Care and the British Standing Army, 1660–1714
1st Edition
By Eric Gruber von Arni
October 06, 2017
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 provisions provided by the republican regime. ...
Health Care and Poor Relief in 18th and 19th Century Southern Europe
1st Edition
By Ole Peter Grell, Andrew Cunningham
June 29, 2017
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 to live the true Christian life? In the 18th and ...
The Making of the Dentiste, c. 1650-1760
1st Edition
By Roger King
June 29, 2017
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 of an entirely new practice - the dentiste was, ...
Health Care and Poor Relief in 18th and 19th Century Northern Europe
1st Edition
By Ole Peter Grell, Andrew Cunningham
May 16, 2017
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 and individual charity. By the eighteenth century...