The pregnant, birthing, and nurturing body is a recurring topos in early modern French literature. Such bodies, often metaphors for issues and anxieties obtaining to the gendered control of social and political institutions, acquired much of their descriptive power from contemporaneous medical and scientific discourse. In this study, Kirk Read brings together literary and medical texts that represent a range of views, from lyric poets, satirists and polemicists, to midwives and surgeons, all of whom explore the popular sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century narratives of birth in France. Although the rhetoric of birthing was widely used, strategies and negotiations depended upon sex and gender; this study considers the male, female, and hermaphroditic experience, offering both an analysis of women's experiences to be sure, but also opening onto the perspectives of non-female birthers and their place in the social and political climate of early modern France. The writers explored include Rabelais, Madeleine and Catherine Des Roches, Louise Boursier, Pierre de Ronsard, Pierre Boaistuau and Jacques Duval. Read also explores the implications of the metaphorical use of reproduction, such as the presentation of literary work as offspring and the poet/mentor relationship as that of a suckling child. Foregrounded in the study are the questions of what it means for women to embrace biological and literary reproduction and how male appropriation of the birthing body influences the mission of creating new literary traditions. Furthermore, by exploring the cases of indeterminate birthing entities and the social anxiety that informs them, Read complicates the binarisms at work in the vexed terrain of sexuality, sex, and gender in this period. Ultimately, Read considers how the narrative of birth produces historical conceptions of identity, authority, and gender.

His family survived famine-ravaged Ireland in the 1850s. His ancestors settled in poverty-rife Victorian Liverpool, working to survive and thrive. Some of them became soldiers serving in Gallipoli and on the Western Front. One would be the last man to step off the SS Titanic as it sank beneath the icy waves. He would testify at the inquest. This is their story. Stephen McGann is Doctor Turner in the BBC hit-drama series Call the Midwife. Flesh and Blood is the story of the McGann family as told through seven maladies - diseases, wounds or ailments that have afflicted Stephen's relatives over the last century and a half, and which have helped mould him into what he now perceives himself to be. It's the story of how health, or the lack of it, fuels our collective will and informs our personal narrative. Health is the motivational antagonist in the drama of our life story - circumscribing the extent of our actions, the quality of our character and the breadth of our ambition. Our maladies are the scribes that write the restless and mutating genome of our self-identity. Flesh and Blood combines McGann's passion for genealogy with an academic interest in the social dimensions of medicine - and fuses these with a lifelong exploration of drama as a way to understand what motivates human beings to do the things they do. He looks back at scenes from his own life that were moulded by medical malady, and traces the crooked roots of each affliction through the lives of his ancestors, whose grim maladies punctuate the public documents or military records of his family tree. In this way he asks a simple, searching question: how have these maladies helped to shape the story of the person he is today?

This is the first exploration of the relationship between the abdomen and British society between 1800 and 1950. Miller demonstrates how the framework of ideas established in medicine related to gastric illness often reflected wider social issues including industrialization and the impact of wartime anxiety upon the inner body.

Dr Henri de Rothschild was a fifth generation Rothschild and perhaps the most famous of the Paris Rothschilds of the fin-de-siecle 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 scientific medicine, including the promotion of Ehrlich's Salvarsan to cure syphilis and the use of radium to cure cancer. His hospital in a working class area of northern Paris boasted the latest in medical advances. Henri was particularly influential in developing the new science of infant feeding, while his broader concerns with infant health led to his playing a prominent role in the development of the specialty of pediatrics. This biography of Henri de Rothschild focuses on his medical achievements and that of his close family in France. Henri, his wife Mathilde and his mother Therese all had busy medical careers during World War I. The book also gives an account of both women's experiences of the war. Along with his explicitly scientific medical concerns, Henri was also a prolific playwright and, under the pseudonym Andre Pascal, wrote several plays about doctors. This book situates the plays, and particularly the themes of charlatanism, women doctors and medical ethics, in their contemporary context of the social and medical life of Paris. A fascinating and vividly written study of a somewhat neglected figure in the history of the illustrious Rothschild family, this book will make a valuable addition to the libraries of scholars in the history of medicine and those studying child health and welfare, the portrayal of doctors in literature, and more broadly the social and cultural life of early-twentieth century Paris.

This volume of thirteen essays focuses on the health and treatment of the peoples of northern Europe and North America over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This volume describes important medical discoveries, from the introduction of the first antibiotic to the present, where serendipity, intuition, coincidence, or laboratory accident played an important role in bringing a discovery to light. Although chance is the principal determinant, the book emphasizes other factors, such as economic and political exigencies and being in the right place at the right time.

Daily life and living conditions in the Byzantine world are relatively underexplored subjects, often neglected in comparison with more visible aspects of Byzantine culture, such as works of art. The book is among the few publications on Greek Byzantine populations and helps pioneer a new approach to the subject, opening a window on health status and dietary patterns through the lens of bioarchaeological research. Drawing on a diversity of disciplines (biology, chemistry, archaeology and history), the author focuses on the complex interaction between physiology, culture and the environment in Byzantine populations from Crete in the 7th to 12th centuries. The systematic analysis and interpretation of the mortality profiles, the observed pathological conditions, and of the chemical data, all set in the cultural context of the era, brings new evidence to bear on the reconstruction of living conditions in Byzantine Crete. Individual chapters look at the demographic profiles and mortality patterns of adult and non-adult populations, and study dietary habits and breastfeeding and weaning patterns. In addition, this book provides an indispensable body of primary data for future research in these fields, and so furthers an interdisciplinary approach in tracing the health of the past populations.

The essays in this collection focus on the dynamic relationship between health and place. Historical and anthropological perspectives are presented - each discipline having a long tradition of engaging with these concepts. The resulting dialogue should produce a new layer of methodology, enhancing both fields.

The first work of its kind, The History of Medications for Women: Materia medica woman is a richly detailed, far-ranging illustrated history of medications for women in all the great cultures and civilizations, from ancient times to the present. Compiled by an acclaimed author of medical history literature, this is the only book that extends from the earliest uses of ergometrine, lettuce, and mummy medicine, through the history of women's medications in ancient Assyria and Egypt, and into the 16th through 20th centuries. With the main sections organized by origin and timeline, the book contains lists of medications used by women from earliest times to the present accompanied by historically-based text. The author includes botanical, chemical, pharmacalogical, and therapeutic details where appropriate, as well as extensive quotations from both contemporary and old, rare books. The text is complemented with the history of obstetrics and gynecology, along with short biographies and illustrations. Additionally, the author presents a unique fund of hard-to-find information in sections devoted to topics such as anesthesia and analgesia, antiseptics, antibiotics and chemotherapy, blood transfusion and Rhesus disease, eclampsia, family planning, menopause, and uterine stimulants. Interesting and thought-provoking, The History of Medications for Women will not only provide an enjoyable read, but will allow you to appreciate the past and look at the future with a new perspective.

The first book of its kind, Forensic Medicine in Western Society: A History draws on the most recent developments in the historiography, to provide an overview of the history of forensic medicine in the West from the medieval period to the present day. Taking an international, comparative perspective on the changing nature of the relationship between medicine, law and society, it examines the growth of medico-legal ideas, institutions and practices in Britain, Europe (principally France, Italy and Germany) and the United States.

Following a thematic structure within a broad chronological framework, the book focuses on practitioners, the development of notions of 'expertise' and the rise of the expert, the main areas of the criminal law to which forensic medicine contributed, medical attitudes towards the victims and perpetrators of crime, and the wider influences such attitudes had. It thus develops an understanding of how medicine has played an active part in shaping legal, political and social change.

Including case studies which provide a narrative context to tie forensic medicine to the societies in which it was practiced, and a further reading section at the end of each chapter, Katherine D. Watson creates a vivid portrait of a topic of relevance to social historians and students of the history of medicine, law and crime.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, meat eating was a regular part of daily life in the Western world. Whilst the extra protein in this diet had a beneficial effect on growth and resilience to certain diseases, excessive amounts were found to promote cancer, heart disease and obesity. When it comes to meat this is often what we talk about today: its implications for us, our planet and our health. However, few seem to agree on what these implications are. This collection of ten historical essays explores some of the complex relations between meat and human health in twentieth-century North America and Europe. Its subjects include the relations between the meat and the pharmaceutical industries, the slaughterhouse and the rise of endocrinology, the therapeutic benefits of meat extracts and the short-lived fate of liver ice-cream in the treatment of pernicious anaemia. Other articles examine responses to BSE and bovine tuberculosis, cancer and meat consumption, DES in cattle, American-style meat in Mexico and Nazi attitudes towards meat eating. Together these papers highlight a complicated array of often contradictory attitudes towards meat and human health.

What do we mean when we talk about disability in the Middle Ages? This volume brings together dynamic scholars working on the subject in medieval literature and history, who use the latest approaches from the field to address this central question. Contributors discuss such standard medieval texts as the Arthurian Legend, The Canterbury Tales and Old Norse Sagas, providing an accessible entry point to the field of medieval disability studies to medievalists. The essays explore a wide variety of disabilities, including the more traditionally accepted classifications of blindness and deafness, as well as perceived disabilities such as madness, pregnancy and age. Adopting a ground-breaking new approach to the study of disability in the medieval period, this provocative book will interest medievalists and scholars of disability throughout history.

Ranging from the Egypt of the Pharaohs to the present day, Historical Atlas of Dermatology and Dermatologists offers a unique insight into the history of dermatology and the influences that led to present practice. It sheds new light on the emergence of dermatology as a separate medical speciality and on some of the key players who have contributed to its development. Arranged as an illustrated time-line this volume features an exceptional range of historical plates such as 'Molluscum contagiosum', from Thomas Bateman's Delineations of Cutaneous Diseases, 1817, an 1869 painting of ichthyosis hystrix by Carl Heitzmann, and early experiments in ultraviolet therapy by Finsen and colleagues in 1903. The authors have selected individuals representative of each era, workers who dealt seriously with the dermatologic concerns of the day, or who through their opinions or behavior project the color and ambience of the period in which they lived. They have included typical examples of the books, journals, instruments, and devices that made up the annals and paraphernalia of the speciality as it evolved. In order to know where you are going, you have to know where you've been. The field of dermatology has been fragmented in the last 30 years. It is becoming increasingly difficult to answer the simple questions: What is dermatology and what is a dermatologist? Research dermatology, dermato-histopathology, pediatric dermatology, and the explosion of surgical techniques have all made their mark on how dermatology is practiced. Historical Atlas of Dermatology and Dermatologists explores the development of this field and where it may be going in the future.

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 questions of how one became an anatomist, where and how the discipline was practised, what the point was of its practice, what counted as sub-disciplines of anatomy, and the nature of arguments over anatomical facts and priority of discovery. In particular pathology, generation and birth, and comparative anatomy are shown to have been linked together as sub-disciplines of anatomy. At first sight anatomy seems the most long-lived and stable of medical disciplines, from Galen and Vesalius to the present. But Cunningham argues that anatomy was, like so many other areas of knowledge, changed irrevocably around the end of the eighteenth century, with the creation of new disciplines, new forms of knowledge and new ways of investigation. The 'long' eighteenth century, therefore, was not only the highpoint of anatomy but also the endpoint of old anatomy.

This impressive volume presents a thorough examination of all aspects of physical impairment and disability in medieval Europe. Examining a popular era that is of great interest to many historians and researchers, Irene Metzler presents a theoretical framework of disability and explores key areas such as:

• medieval theoretical concepts
• theology and natural philosophy
• notions of the physical body
• medical theory and practice.

Bringing into play the modern day implications of medieval thought on the issue, this is a fascinating and informative addition to the research studies of medieval history, history of medicine and disability studies scholars the English-speaking world over.

This book is a case study which narrates the history of the National Organization of the Spanish Blind (ONCE), established in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. Contrary to other affluent countries where most blind people live on welfare benefits, the Spanish blind enjoy full employment. Furthermore, the average income of the Spanish blind is higher than that of the sighted. Why is this so? Why the blind, and not the deaf mute, or any other group of disabled people? This book shows that ONCE answers these questions. The book explains ONCE'S origins, the shifting strategies that the organization has pursued to adapt to an ever-changing environment, its original goals and the way they have mutated and been interpreted, its conflicting relationship with an authoritarian regime, its struggle to find its place in a democratic regime, and its relations with other groups of disabled people. A historical narrative, the book lies at the intersection between disability and organization studies, history and sociology. It will be of interest to all scholars of disability studies, the sociology of work, the history of medicine and contemporary Spanish history.

"This book is a search for 'the real Anandibai Joshee' -- a search in which the readers are invited to participate." In her short and eventful life, Anandibai Joshee, the first Indian woman to earn a medical degree, broke many stereotypes. Literate at a time when it was taboo for a girl to attend school or even 'pick up a paper', she was courageous, articulate, and assertive. And ambitious. Fuelled by a desire to improve the healthcare that was available to Indian women at that time, she travelled across the seas to the United States to study medicine. Meera Kosambi's biography of Anandibai is more than just a retelling of the life of a woman who was ahead of her times. Drawing on a host of narratives, Kosambi recovers Anandibai's many voices, which have been submerged in history - that of a conflicted feminist, a nationalist, and a reformer, among others - and her engagement with the world at large. This volume is a testament to Meera Kosambi's commitment to social history. When she passed away in 2015, she left an incomplete manuscript that has painstakingly been put together by the editors. Drawing on archival research, including a host of Anandibai's letters, her poems in Marathi, newspaper reports, and rare photographs, this book will be of immense interest to scholars and researchers of modern Indian history, sociology, gender, and South Asian studies.

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 peregrinatio. This volume deals with the peregrinatio medica from the viewpoint of the travelling students: who went where; how did they travel; what did they find when they arrived; what did they take back with them from their studies. Even a single individual could transform medical studies or practice back home on the periphery by trying to reform teaching and practice the way they had seen it at the best universities. Other contributions look at the universities themselves and how they were actively developed to attract students, and at some of the most successful teachers, such as Boerhaave at Leiden or the Monros at Edinburgh. The essays show how increasing levels of wealth allowed more and more students to make their pilgrimages, travelling for weeks at a time to sit at the feet of a particular master. In medicine this meant that, over the period c.1500 to 1789, a succession of universities became the medical school of choice for ambitious students: Padua and Bologna in the 1500s, Paris, Leiden and Montpellier in the 1600s, and Leiden, GAttingen and Edinburgh in the 1700s. The arrival of foreign students brought wealth to the university towns and this significant economic benefit meant that the governors of these universities tried to ensure the defence of freedom of religion and freedom of speech, thus providing the best conditions for the promotion of new views and innovation in medicine. The collection presents a new take on the history of medical education, as well as universities, travel and education more widely in ancien regime Europe.

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 research into the period as a whole, most work has focussed on the metropolitan centres of England, Scotland and France, ignoring the huge range of national and regional practice. This collection aims to go some way to rectifying this situation, providing an exploration of the changes and developments in medicine as practised in Ireland and by Irish physicians studying and working abroad during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Bringing together research undertaken into the neglected area of Irish medical and social history across a variety of disciplines, including history of medicine, Colonial Latin American history, Irish, and French history, it builds upon ground-breaking work recently published by several of the contributors, thereby augmenting our understanding of the role of medicine within early modern Irish society and its broader scientific and intellectual networks. By addressing fundamental issues that reach beyond the medical institutions, the collection expands our understanding of Irish medicine and throws new light on medical practices and the broader cultural and social issues of early modern Ireland, Europe, and Latin America. Taking a variety of approaches and sources, ranging from the use of eplistolary exchange to the study of medical receipt books, legislative practice to belief in miracles, local professionalization to international networks, each essay offers a fascinating insight into a still largely neglected area. Furthermore, the collection argues for the importance of widening current research to consider the importance and impact of early Irish medical traditions, networks, and practices, and their interaction with related issues, such as politics, gender, economic demand, and religious belief.

Pastoral Drama and Healing in Early Modern Italy represents the first full-length study to confront seriously the well-rehearsed analogy of the pastoral poet as healer. Usually associated with the edifying function of the Renaissance pastoral, this analogy, if engaged more profoundly, raises a number of questions that remain unanswered to this day. How does the pastoral heal? How exactly do the inner workings of the text cater to the healing? What socio-cultural conventions make the healing possible? What are the major problems that pastoral poetry as mimesis must overcome to make its healing morally legitimate? In the wake of Derrida's seminal work on the Platonic pharmakon, which has in turn led recent criticism to formulate a much more concrete understanding of the theater/drug analogy, the stringent approach to the therapeutic function of the Renaissance pastoral offered in this work provides a valuable critical tool to unpack the complexity contained within a little-understood cliche.

This book focuses on the entwinement of politics and medicine and power and knowledge in India during the age of empire. Using the powerful metaphor of ?pathology? - the science of the origin, nature, and course of diseases - the author develops and challenges a burgeoning literature on colonial medicine, moving beyond discussions of state medicine and the control of epidemics to everyday life, to show how medicine was a fundamental ideology of empire. Related to this point, and engaging with postcolonial histories of biopower and modernity, the book highlights the use of this racially grounded medicine in the formulation of modern selves and subjectivities in late colonial India. In tracing the cultural determinants of biological race theory and contextualizing the understanding of race as pathology, the book demonstrates how racialism was compatible with the ideologies and policies of imperial liberalism.

Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal brings together the study of modern South Asia, race theory, colonialism and empire and the history of medicine. It highlights the powerful role played by the idea of ?pathology? in the rationalization of imperial liberalism and the subsequent projects of modernity embraced by native experts in Bengal in the ?long? nineteenth century.

Written by an author with plenty of experience holding a scalpel, Dr. David Schneider's The Invention of Surgery is an in-depth biography of the practice that has leapt forward over the centuries from the dangerous guesswork of ancient Greek physicians through the world-changing "implant revolution" of the twentieth century. The Invention of Surgery explains this dramatic progress and highlights the personalities of the discipline's most dynamic historical figures. It links together the lives of the pioneering scientists who first understood what causes disease, how organs become infected or cancerous, and how surgery could powerfully intercede in people's lives, and then shows how the rise of surgery intersected with many of the greatest medical breakthroughs of the last century, including the evolution of medical education, the transformation of the hospital from a place of dying to a habitation of healing, the development of antibiotics, and the rise of transistors and polymer science. And as Schneider argues, surgery has not finished transforming; new technologies are constantly reinventing both the practice of surgery and the nature of the objects we are permanently implanting in our bodies. Schneider considers these latest developments, asking "What's next?" and analyzing how our conception of surgery has changed alongside our evolving ideas of medicine, technology, and our bodies.

The biggest challenges in public health today are often related to attitudes, diet and exercise. In many ways, this marks a return to the state of medicine in the eighteenth century, when ideals of healthy living were a much more central part of the European consciousness than they have become since the advent of modern clinical medicine. Enlightenment advice on healthy lifestyle was often still discussed in terms of the six non-naturals - airs and places, food and drink, exercise, excretion and retention, and sleep and emotions. This volume examines what it meant to live healthily in the Enlightenment in the context of those non-naturals, showing both the profound continuities from Antiquity and the impact of newer conceptions of the body. Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429465642

With the character of the doctor as her subject, Tabitha Sparks follows the decline of the marriage plot in the Victorian novel. As Victorians came to terms with the scientific revolution in medicine of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the novel's progressive distance from the conventions of the marriage plot can be indexed through a rising identification of the doctor with scientific empiricism. A narrative's stance towards scientific reason, Sparks argues, is revealed by the fictional doctor's relationship to the marriage plot. Thus, novels that feature romantic doctors almost invariably deny the authority of empiricism, as is the case in George MacDonald's Adela Cathcart. In contrast, works such as Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science, which highlight clinically minded or even sinister doctors, uphold the determining logic of science and, in turn, threaten the novel's romantic plot. By focusing on the figure of the doctor rather than on a scientific theme or medical field, Sparks emulates the Victorian novel's personalization of tropes and belief systems, using the realism associated with the doctor to chart the sustainability of the Victorian novel's central imaginative structure, the marriage plot. As the doctors Sparks examines increasingly stand in for the encroachment of empirical knowledge on a morally formulated artistic genre, their alienation from the marriage plot and its interrelated decline succinctly herald the end of the Victorian era and the beginning of Modernism.

An acknowledged expert on the history of modern pharmacology and drug therapy, John Parascandola here brings together 19 of his most important papers on these subjects. The book is divided into three topical sections. In the first group of articles, devoted to pharmacological theory, Dr. Parascandola sheds new light on our understanding of the history of such key pharmacological concepts as receptor theory, structure-activity relationships, and the role of stereochemistry in physiological action. The second section focuses on the discipline of pharmacology and offers insights into the pivotal role played by John J. Abel in the shaping of the field, the development of pharmacology in schools of pharmacy and in the Federal Government, and the national pharmacological society's membership ban on pharmacologists working in industry. The final section on drug therapy discusses various drugs from antibiotics to sulfones, and their use in the treatment of diseases such as leprosy and syphilis.