The eleven essays in this volume illustrate the richness, complexity, and diversity of French medical culture in the nineteenth century, a period that witnessed the medicalization of French society. Medical themes permeated contemporary culture and politics, and medical discourse infused many levels of French society from the bastions of science - the medical faculties and research institutions - to novels, the theater, and the daily lives of citizens as patients. The contributors to this volume - all established scholars in the history of medicine - present the French medical experience from the point of view of both practitioners and patients, and show how medical themes colored popular perceptions and shaped public policies. Topics addressed range from popular medicine to elite Parisian medicine, the interaction of literary and medical discourse, social theater, medical research and practice, medical specialization and education. The essays reflect current trends of medico-historical analysis which emphasize the centrality of class, race, and gender in understanding concepts of disease and the practice of medicine. They show how the medical experience of patients, practitioners, students, and researchers varied according to social class, gender, and geography and the importance of these factors for the construction of disease.
This monograph, a coherent and consistent historical narrative about Romania's modernization, focuses on one section of the country's elites of the late nineteenth century, namely the health professionals, and on the imagery they constructed as they interacted with the peasant and his world. Doctors ventured out of cities and became a familiar sight on dusty country roads in of Moldavia and Wallachia. Beyond a charitable impulse they did so thru patriotism as the rural world became ever more prominent within the national ideology. Furthermore, new health legislation required the district general practitioner (medicul de plasă) to visit the villages in his catchment area twice a month. Based on solid original research, the book describes rural conditions of the time and the efforts aiming to improve peasants' way of life with abundant quotes from doctors' public health reports and memoirs. The book sheds light on a variety of microscale realities of social life in the medical discourse on the peasant and the rural world in the mirror of medical discourse. Themes include general hygiene, clothing, dwellings, nutrition, drinking habits and healing practices of the peasantry, in the eye of medical specialists. Related official measures, laws, regulations, norms about public health are also discussed in the frame of wider modernizing processes.
The beginning of the Mexican War of Independence in 1810 triggered radical political, social, and economic changes, including the reorganization of the medical profession. During this tumultuous period of transition, physicians and surgeons merged in an effort to monopolize the field and ensure their professional survival in a postcolonial, liberal republic. Carving a Niche traces the evolution of various medical occupations in Mexico from the end of the colonial period to the beginning of the regime of Porfirio Díaz, demonstrating how competition and collaboration, identity, ever-changing legislation, political instability, and foreign intervention resulted in a complex, gradual, and unique process of medical professionalization – one that neither conformed to theoretical models nor resembled hierarchies found in other parts of the world. Through extensive research, Luz María Hernández Sáenz analyzes the uphill struggle of practitioners to claim their place as public health experts and to provide and control medical education in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Highlighting the significance of race, class, gender, and nationality, Carving a Niche demonstrates that in the case of Mexico, liberal reforms praised by traditional works often hindered, rather than promoted, the creation of a modern medical profession and the delivery of quality health care services.
This book presents and explores a challenging new approach in book history. It offers a coherent volume of thirteen chapters in the field of early modern book history covering a wide range of topics and it is written by renowned scholars in the field. The rationale and content of this volume will revitalize the theoretical and methodological debate in book history. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in the field of early modern book history as well as in a range of other disciplines. It offers book historians an innovative methodological approach on the life cycle of books in and outside Europe. It is also highly relevant for social-economic and cultural historians because of the focus on the commercial, legal, spatial, material and social aspects of book culture. Scholars that are interested in the history of science, ideas and news will find several chapters dedicated to the production, circulation and consumption of knowledge and news media.
Urban presents the NEA in its historical context, turning a fair and clear eye on this powerful and controversial organization, and using this context to both criticize and commend. The culmination of a three decade long study, this unique volume presents an unusually thorough and much needed holistic view of the NEA.
Prior to the nineteenth century, the practice of medicine in the Western world was as much art as science. But, argues W. F. Bynum, 'modern' medicine as practiced today is built upon foundations that were firmly established between 1800 and the beginning of World War I. He demonstrates this in terms of concepts, institutions, and professional structures that evolved during this crucial period, applying both a more traditional intellectual approach to the subject and the newer social perspectives developed by recent historians of science and medicine. In a wide-ranging survey, Bynum examines the parallel development of biomedical sciences such as physiology, pathology, bacteriology, and immunology, and of clinical practice and preventive medicine in nineteenth-century Europe and North America. Focusing on medicine in the hospitals, the community, and the laboratory, Bynum contends that the impact of science was more striking on the public face of medicine and the diagnostic skills of doctors than it was on their actual therapeutic capacities.
This second collection of studies by Maurice Crosland has as a first theme the differences in the style and organisation of scientific activity in Britain and France in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Science was more closely controlled in France, notably by the Paris Academy of Sciences, and the work of provincial amateurs much less prominent than in Britain. The most dramatic change in any branch of science during this period was in chemistry, largely through the work of Lavoisier and his colleagues, the focus of several articles here, and the dominance of this group caused considerable resentment outside France, not least by Joseph Priestley. The issue of authority in science emerges again, within France under the rule of Napoleon, in a study of the exceptional power exercised by the great mathematician Laplace both in theoretical science and in academic politics. This exploration of organisation and power is complemented by a comparative study of the practice of early 'physics' and chemistry and their different reliance on laboratories. This raises the question of whether chemistry provided a model for later experimental work in other sciences, both through the construction of pioneering laboratories and in establishing early schools of research.