Patient's Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth- Century England

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Stanford University Press, 1989 - 305 pagini
Premodern society in England was overshadowed by illness and the threat of death. Disease descended suddenly, selecting individual victims or attacking entire households and the community at large. What did people do when they fell sick? The authors investigate the well-established tradition of self-diagnosis and medication, called 'family medicine' or 'kitchen physic'; the use of traditional healers, such as midwives, itinerants, and 'wise women'; and the flourishing world of quacks whose nostrums promised to restore one's youth or to cure cancer. Doctors and the medical profession were not held in especially high regard ('If the world knew the villainy and knavery - besides ignorance - of the physicians and apothecaries, the people would throw stones at 'em as they walked in the streets'). The authors examine the problems and opportunities of practitioners in terms of treatments, renumeration, and social status and describe how practitioners tried to achieve ascendancy over their often suspicious patients. What did doctors have to offer the sick in the centuries before Victorian professionalization and the birth of scientific medicine?

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Despre autor (1989)

Roy Sydney Porter was born December 31, 1946. He grew up in a south London working class home. He attended Wilson's Grammar School, Camberwell, and won an unheard of scholarship to Cambridge. His starred double first in history at Cambridge University (1968) led to a junior research fellowship at his college, Christ's, followed by a teaching post at Churchill College, Cambridge. His Ph.D. thesis, published as The Making Of Geology (1977), became the first of more than 100 books that he wrote or edited. Porter was a Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Churchill College, Cambridge from 1972 to 1979; Dean from 1977 to 1979; Assistant Lecturer in European History at Cambridge University from 1974 to 1977, Lecturer from 1977 to 1979. He joined the Wellcome Institute fot the History of Medicine in 1979 where he was a Senior Lecturer from 1979 to 1991, a Reader from 1991 to 1993, and finally a Professor in the Social History of Medicine from 1993 to 2001. Porter was Elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1994, and he was also made an honorary fellow by both the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Roy Porter died March 4, 2002, at the age of 55.

Informații bibliografice

TitluPatient's Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth- Century England
AutoriDorothy Porter, Roy Porter
Edițieilustrată
EditorStanford University Press, 1989
ISBN0804717443, 9780804717441
Lungime305 pagini
  
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