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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.

39 Series Titles


Health, Sickness, Medicine and the Friars in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries

Health, Sickness, Medicine and the Friars in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries

1st Edition

By Angela Montford
May 16, 2017

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 the orders' decision making, the extent of their ...

Justice to the Maimed Soldier Nursing, Medical Care and Welfare for Sick and Wounded Soldiers and their Families during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1642–1660

Justice to the Maimed Soldier: Nursing, Medical Care and Welfare for Sick and Wounded Soldiers and their Families during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1642–1660

1st Edition

By Eric Gruber von Arni
May 16, 2017

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 sterilisation of instruments, it is perhaps unsurprising that...

The Nurse Apprentice, 1860–1977

The Nurse Apprentice, 1860–1977

1st Edition

By Ann Bradshaw
May 16, 2017

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 syllabus from the General Nursing Council for England ...

The Return of Epidemics Health and Society in Peru During the Twentieth Century

The Return of Epidemics: Health and Society in Peru During the Twentieth Century

1st Edition

By Marcos Cueto
May 16, 2017

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 conditions. It illuminates the ideologies and ...

Contraception, Colonialism and Commerce Birth Control in South India, 1920–1940

Contraception, Colonialism and Commerce: Birth Control in South India, 1920–1940

1st Edition

By Sarah Hodges
February 27, 2017

Birth control holds an unusual place in the history of medicine. Largely devoid of doctors or hospitals, only relatively recently have birth control histories included tales of laboratory-based therapeutic innovation. Instead, these histories elucidate the peculiar slippages between individual ...

Florence Nightingale and the Health of the Raj

Florence Nightingale and the Health of the Raj

1st Edition

By Jharna Gourlay
February 27, 2017

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 whole of India. Despite her interest in the ...

Medicine and Religion in Enlightenment Europe

Medicine and Religion in Enlightenment Europe

1st Edition

Edited By Ole Peter Grell, Andrew Cunningham
February 27, 2017

The Enlightenment period, here understood as covering the years 1650 to 1789, is usually considered to be a period when religion was obliged to give way to rationality. With respect to medicine this means that the religious elements in the treatment and interpretation of diseases to all intents and...

Female Patients in Early Modern Britain Gender, Diagnosis, and Treatment

Female Patients in Early Modern Britain: Gender, Diagnosis, and Treatment

1st Edition

By Wendy D. Churchill
February 01, 2017

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 clearer understanding of female illness and ...

Healing, Performance and Ceremony in the Writings of Three Early Modern Physicians: Hippolytus Guarinonius and the Brothers Felix and Thomas Platter

Healing, Performance and Ceremony in the Writings of Three Early Modern Physicians: Hippolytus Guarinonius and the Brothers Felix and Thomas Platter

1st Edition

By M.A. Katritzky
November 29, 2016

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 in their birth town of Basle, or the Catholic ...

Medical Consulting by Letter in France, 1665–1789

Medical Consulting by Letter in France, 1665–1789

1st Edition

By Robert Weston
November 17, 2016

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 examination of the practice of consulting by letter, ...

Crafting Immunity Working Histories of Clinical Immunology

Crafting Immunity: Working Histories of Clinical Immunology

1st Edition

By Jennifer Keelan, Kenton Kroker
November 15, 2016

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 of an international group of scholars to place the...

Ireland and Medicine in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Ireland and Medicine in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

1st Edition

By James Kelly, Fiona Clark
November 15, 2016

The story of early modern medicine, with its extremes of scientific brilliance and barbaric practice, has long held a fascination for scholars. The great discoveries of Harvey and Jenner sit incongruously with the persistence of Galenic theory, superstition and blood-letting. Yet despite continued ...

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