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.
Reinventing Hippocrates
1st Edition
Edited
By David Cantor
November 15, 2016
The name of Hippocrates has been invoked as an inspiration of medicine since antiquity, and medical practitioners have turned to Hippocrates for ethical and social standards. While most modern commentators accept that medicine has sometimes fallen short of Hippocratic ideals, these ideals are ...
The Great Nation in Decline: Sex, Modernity and Health Crises in Revolutionary France c.1750–1850
1st Edition
By Sean M. Quinlan
November 15, 2016
This book studies how doctors responded to - and helped shape - deep-seated fears about nervous degeneracy and population decline in France between 1750 and 1850. It uncovers a rich and far-ranging medical debate in which four generations of hygiene activists used biomedical science to transform ...
Centres of Medical Excellence?: Medical Travel and Education in Europe, 1500–1789
1st Edition
Edited
By Ole Peter Grell, Andrew Cunningham
October 31, 2016
Students notoriously vote with their feet, seeking out the best and most innovative teachers of their subject. The most ambitious students have been travelling long distances for their education since universities were first founded in the 13th century, making their own educational pilgrimage or ...
Henri de Rothschild, 1872–1947: Medicine and Theater
1st Edition
By Harry W. Paul
October 27, 2016
Dr Henri de Rothschild was a fifth generation Rothschild and perhaps the most famous of the Paris Rothschilds of the fin-de-siècle period. A 'sleeping partner' of the bank and the non-drinking owner of Mouton-Rothschild, Henri spent much of his life building medical institutions and promoting ...
Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease
1st Edition
By James Kennaway
October 10, 2016
Music has been used as a cure for disease since as far back as King David's lyre, but the notion that it might be a serious cause of mental and physical illness was rare until the late eighteenth century. At that time, physicians started to argue that excessive music, or the wrong kind of music, ...
Maritime Quarantine: The British Experience, c.1650–1900
1st Edition
By John Booker
September 30, 2016
As a maritime trading nation, the issue of quarantine was one of constant concern to Britain. Whilst naturally keen to promote international trade, there was a constant fear of importing potentially devastating diseases into British territories. In this groundbreaking study, John Booker examines ...
Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy and Madness in Early Modern England
1st Edition
By Jeremy Schmidt
September 08, 2016
Melancholy is rightly taken to be a central topic of concern in early modern culture, and it continues to generate scholarly interest among historians of medicine, literature, psychiatry and religion. This book considerably furthers our understanding of the issue by examining the extensive ...
Negotiating the French Pox in Early Modern Germany
1st Edition
By Claudia Stein
September 08, 2016
This book explores the identity of the 'French disease' (alias the 'French pox' or 'Morbus Gallicus') in the German Imperial city of Augsburg between 1495 and 1630. Rejecting the imposition of modern conceptions of disease upon the past, it reveals how early modern medical theory facilitated ...
The Anatomist Anatomis'd: An Experimental Discipline in Enlightenment Europe
1st Edition
By Andrew Cunningham
September 08, 2016
The eighteenth-century practitioners of anatomy saw their own period as 'the perfection of anatomy'. This book looks at the investigation of anatomy in the 'long' eighteenth century in disciplinary terms. This means looking in a novel way not only at the practical aspects of anatomizing but also at...
The Body Divided: Human Beings and Human 'Material' in Modern Medical History
1st Edition
Edited
By Sarah Ferber, Sally Wilde
September 08, 2016
Bodies and body parts of the dead have long been considered valuable material for use in medical science. Over time and in different places, they have been dissected, autopsied, investigated, harvested for research and therapeutic purposes, collected to turn into museum and other specimens, and ...
Ritual and Conflict: The Social Relations of Childbirth in Early Modern England
1st Edition
By Adrian Wilson
September 06, 2016
This book places childbirth in early-modern England within a wider network of social institutions and relationships. Starting with illegitimacy - the violation of the marital norm - it proceeds through marriage to the wider gender-order and so to the ’ceremony of childbirth’, the popular ritual ...
The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence
1st Edition
By Helen King
September 06, 2016
By far the most influential work on the history of the body, across a wide range of academic disciplines, remains that of Thomas Laqueur. This book puts on trial the one-sex/two-sex model of Laqueur's Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud through a detailed exploration of the ways in...