First published in 2005, this encyclopedia demonstrates that the millennium from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance was a period of great intellectual and practical achievement and innovation. In Europe, the Islamic world, South and East Asia, and the Americas, individuals built on earlier achievements, introduced sometimes radical refinements and laid the foundations for modern development. Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine details the whole scope of scientific knowledge in the medieval period in more than 300 A to Z entries. This comprehensive resource discusses the research, application of knowledge, cultural and technology exchanges, experimentation, and achievements in the many disciplines related to science and technology. It also looks at the relationship between medieval science and the traditions it supplanted. Written by a select group of international scholars, this reference work will be of great use to scholars, students, and general readers researching topics in many fields, including medieval studies, world history, history of science, history of technology, history of medicine, and cultural studies.

Biographies of scientists carry an increasingly prominent role in today's publishing climate. Traditional historical and sociological accounts of science are complemented by narratives that emphasize the importance of the scientific subject in the production of science. Not least is the realization that the role of science in culture is much more accessible when presented through the lives of its practitioners. Taken as a genre, such biographies play an important role in the public understanding of science. In recent years, there has been an increasing number of monographs and collections about biography in general and literary biography in particular. However, biographies of scientists, engineers and medical doctors have rarely been the topic of scholarly inquiry. As such, this volume of essays will be welcomed by those interested in the genre of science biography, and who wish to re-examine its history, foundational problems and theoretical implications. Borrowing approaches and methods from cultural studies and the history, philosophy and sociology of science, the contributions cover a broad range of subjects, periods and locations.By presenting such a rich diversity of essays, the volume is able to chart the reoccurring conceptual problems and devices that have influenced scientific biographies from classical antiquity to the present day. In so doing, it provides a compelling overview of the history of the genre, suggesting that the different valuations given scientific biography over time have been largely fuelled by vested professional interests.

Public health policies had a profound impact on urban life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, yet relatively few people took an active interest in the formulation of these policies. In this book Marjaana Niemi examines the impact of different political aims and pressures on 'scientific' health policies through the analysis of public health programmes in two case studies, one in Birmingham and the other in Gothenburg. By examining early twentieth-century campaigns concerned with infant welfare and the prevention of tuberculosis, the book provides illuminating insights into the relationship between public health and the regulation of urban life. Not only does the book analyse the processes whereby different political aims became embedded in these 'apolitical' health campaigns, but it also highlights the important part that the campaigns played in urban politics and governance. The political aims which public health campaigns advanced are explored by comparing health policies in Britain and Sweden, where officials were part of one public health community, enjoying close links, attending the same conferences and contributing to the same journals. The problems they dealt with were often similar and in both countries health authorities claimed scientific grounds for their programmes. Yet the policies they pursued were often strikingly different. Through examination of two different national approaches, the book does justice to the full complexity of the policy-making process and illuminates the wide range of factors that affected municipal policies.

Originally published in 1990, Medicine at the Courts of Europe 1500-1837 is a collection of essays examining the whole range of medical activities in a variety of European courts, from Rome of the Borgias to the Russia of Catherine the Great. It documents the diverse influences of custom, wealth, religion and royal intervention, along with foreign innovation, popular literary satire and matters of litigation which so changed the face of court medicine over three centuries. By looking at court medical practitioners in such a wide chronological, geographic and thematic context, these essays provide many new insights for all those interested in the history of medicine, society and politics from the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century.

Originally published in 1976 The Rise of the Medical Profession combines a sociological and historical approach to the rise of the medical profession in England. Sociologically it offers a theoretical framework which for the first time links the study of social mobility and professionalism with the theory of stratification. Historically, it examines the movement which led to the unification of the medical profession arising from effective social organisation among the surgeon-apothecaries in the early nineteenth century. It demonstrates that through the successful pursuit of the occupational strategy of professionalism the doctors have been able to raise their income and status in the community and to dominate the institutions and organisations of medical care. In their relationship with the state, they have been generally successful in securing a recognition of their privileged position. The future of the medical profession and of professionalism is discussed in the context of the changing balance between state power and that of free private occupation associations, whether of the type based on professionalism or unionism. The ideal-type conception of the middle class as essentially individualistic is challenged by the exploration of middle class collective action, particularly professionalism.

Originally published in 1982 Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Tudor and Stuart England traces the development of obstetrics and gynaecology over the past two centuries. Between the 16th and 18th century midwifery passed from a female mystery, employing traditional medicines and superstitions, to a scientifically-based clinical skill, with both gains and losses to the patient. The case-mortality was high enough to make the increasing involvement of male surgeons socially acceptable, despite sexual taboos. Thus, as scientific knowledge of anatomy and physiology developed and was applied in the form of new techniques, so the midwives, who had less opportunity and inclination to acquire the new knowledge and skills, lost esteem and by the mid-eighteenth century were increasingly relegated to the service of the poor. The book also examines ideas about sexuality, menstruation, conception, pregnancy and lactation and shows how the views of society about femaleness, marital relations and the management of pregnancy and childbearing were influenced by these notions.

Originally published in 1987, Problems and Methods in the History of Medicine is a collection of papers surveying and assessing the particular approaches and techniques which have been used in the history of medicine in the past or are still being developed (from the influence of Annales to the role of the computer). The emphasis is on historical practice rather than methodology in isolation. Besides the topics indicated above, a third problematic is that of historical demography. A common theme to all three groups of paper is the relation between quantitative 'hard' data and qualitative 'soft' data.

Originally published in 1992, Medical Theory, Surgical Practice examines medical and surgical concepts of disease and their relation to the practice of surgery, in particular historical settings. It emphasises that understanding concepts of disease does not just include recounting explicit accounts of disease given by medical men. It needs an analysis of the social relations embedded in such concepts. In doing this, the contributors illustrate how surgery rose from a relatively humble place in seventeenth century life to being seen as one of the great achievements of late Victorian culture. They examine how medical theory and surgical practices relate to social contexts, how physical diagnosis entered medicine and whether anaesthesia and Lister's antiseptic techniques really did cause a revolution in surgical practice.

Originally published 1979 The Scientific Revolution in Victorian Medicine looks at the discovery of inhalation anaesthesia in 1846, and how it began a new era in surgery. The book looks at James Young Simpson's demonstration of the value of chloroform as an anaesthetic, and how many surgeons quickly adopted it. The book also looks at the dangers of chloroform if mishandled and only after considerable controversy and numerous fatalities was its use thoroughly understood and established. Ten years later an even more lengthy struggle began over antiseptic surgery. The 'germ' theory, on which Lister's technique was founded had few adherents among British surgeons, and his methods were deemed absurdly complicated. He was opposed and sometimes ridiculed by the most distinguished men in the profession, including Simpson. Over ten years were required to persuade the majority of British surgeons that Lister did actually achieve the results which he claimed and that it was possible for a competent surgeon to do equally well, if only he would take the trouble. This book shows that a great many factors interacted in delaying the introduction of these new ideas. The almost wholly unscientific nature of British medical education and practice before 1860 or 1870, detailed in the first chapter, was one factor; rivalry and distrust between London and Scotland was another. Genuine disadvantages in the new methods were not unimportant either, while personal animosities failure to face the facts, and fear of the unknowable consequences of change all played a significant part.

Originally published in 1990, Nobel Laureates in Medicine or Physiology is a biographical reference work about the recipients of Nobel Prizes in Medicine or Physiology from 1901-1989. Each article is written by an accomplished historian of medicine or science. The book is designed to be accessible to students and general readers as well as to specialists in medical science and history. Each article combines personal and scientific biography, and each has an extensive biography to guide further reading and research.

Originally published in 1995, The History of Pharmacy is a critical bibliography of selected information on the history of pharmacy. The book is designed to guide students and academics through the history of science and technology. Topics range from medicine, chemical technology and the economics and business of pharmacy to pharmacy's influence in the arts. The bibliography includes an exhaustive selection of primary and secondary sources and is arranged chronologically. This book will be of interest to those researching in the area of the history of science and technology and will appeal to students and academic researchers alike.

Originally published in 1992 Medical Journals and Medical Knowledge examines both broad developments in print and media and the practice of particular journals such as the British Medical Journal. The book is the first study to address these questions and to examine the impact of regular news on the making of the medical community. The book considers the rise of the medical press, and looks at how it recorded and described principal developments and so promoted medical science and enhanced medical consciousness. This book was a seminal work when first published and was one of the first to consider the importance of the roots of medical journalism, editorial practices and the ways in which the medical journalism altered the world of medicine.

Originally published 1995 The Making of Man-Midwifery looks at how the eighteenth century witnessed a revolution in childbirth practices. By the last quarter of the century increasing numbers of babies were being delivered by men - a dramatic shift from the women-only ritual that had been standard throughout Western history. This authoritative and challenging work explains this transformation in medical practice and remarkable shift in gender relations. By tracing the actual development and transmission of the new midwifery skills through the period, the book addresses both technological and feminist arguments of the period. The study is distinctive in treating childbirth as both a bodily and a social event and in explaining how the two were intimately connected. Practical obstetrics is shown to have been shaped by the social relations surrounding deliveries, and specific techniques were associated with distinctive places and political allegiances. The books studies how increasing numbers emergent male-midwives had overtaken women in the skill of delivering children and how as such expectant mothers chose to use these male-midwives, thus heralding the growth of male-midwives in the period.

The volumes in this set, originally published between 1926 and 1995, draw together research by leading academics in the area of medicine and history, and provide a rigorous examination of related key issues. The volume examines the advancement of medicine throughout history from medicine in antiquity to advancements in science during the Victorian period, the set looks at the rise of the medical profession, how medical journals have adapted and contributed to modern medicine, midwifery and surgical practices, whilst also exploring medical history and advancements throughout the world. This set will be of particular interest to academics of history, medicine, sociology and anthropology respectively.

The seventeenth century witnessed profound reforms in the way French cities administered poor relief and charitable health care. New hospitals were built to confine the able bodied and existing hospitals sheltering the sick poor contracted new medical staff and shifted their focus towards offering more medical services. Whilst these moves have often been regarded as a coherent state led policy, recent scholarship has begun to question this assumption, and pick-up on more localised concerns, and resistance to centrally imposed policies. This book engages with these concerns, to investigate the links between charitable health care, poor relief, religion, national politics and urban social order in seventeenth-century France. In so doing, it revises our understanding of the roles played in these issues by the crown and social elites, arguing that central government's social policy was conservative and largely reactive to pressure from local elites.It suggests that Louis XIV's policy regarding the reform of poor relief and the creation of General Hospitals in each town and city, as enshrined in the edict of 1662, was largely driven by the religious concerns of the kingdom's devout and the financial fears of the Parisian elites that their city hospitals were overburdened. Only after the Sun King's reign did central government begin to take a proactive role in administering poor relief and health care, utilizing urban charitable institutions to further its own political goals. By reintegrating the social aspirations of urban elites into the history of French poor relief, this book shows how the key role they played in the reform of hospitals, inspired by a mix of religious, economic and social motivations. It concludes that the state could be a reluctant participant in reform, until pressured into action by assisting elite groups pursuing their own goals.

Winner of the Best First Monograph from the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England (ISSEME) 2021. An examination of the Old English medical collections, arguing that these texts are products of a learned intellectual culture. Four complete medical collections survive from Anglo-Saxon England. These were first edited by Oswald Cockayne in the nineteenth century and came to be known by the names Bald's Leechbook, Leechbook III, the Lacnunga, and the Old English Pharmacopeia. Together these works represent the earliest complete collections of medical material in a western vernacular language. This book examines these texts as products of a learned literary culture. While earlier scholarship tended to emphasise the relationship of these works to folk belief or popular culture, this study suggests that all four extant collections were probably produced in major ecclesiastical centres. It examines the collections individually, emphasising their differences of content and purpose, while arguing that each consistently displays connections with an elite intellectual culture. The final chapter considers the fundamentally positive depiction of doctors and medicine found within literary and ecclesiastical works from the period and suggests that the high esteem for medicine in literate circles may have favoured the study and translation of medical texts.

What does drug addiction mean to us? What did it mean to others in the past? And how are these meanings connected? In modern society the idea of drug addiction is a given and commonly understood concept, yet this was not always the case in the past. This book uncovers the original influences that shaped the creation and the various interpretations of addiction as a disease, and of addiction to opiates in particular. It delves into the treatments, regimes, and prejudices that surrounded the condition, a newly emerging pathological entity and a form of 'moral insanity' during the nineteenth century. The source material for this book is rich and surprising. Letters and diaries provide the most moving material, detailing personal struggles with addiction and the trials of those who cared and despaired. Confessions of shame, deceit, misery and terror sit alongside those of deep sensual pleasure, visionary manifestations and blissful freedom from care. The reader can follow the lifelong opium careers of literary figures, artists and politicians, glimpse a raw underworld of hidden drug use, or see the bleakness of urban and rural poverty alleviated by daily doses of opium. Delving into diaries, letters and confessions this book exposes the medical case histories and the physician's mad, lazy, commercial, contemptuous, desperate, altruistic and frustrated attempts to deal with drug addiction. It demonstrates that many of the stigmatising prejudices arose from false 'facts' and semi-mythical beliefs and thus has significant implications, not only for the history of addiction, but also for how we view the condition today.

This book highlights the role of acute hunger in malaria lethality in colonial South Asia and investigates how this understanding came to be lost in modern medical, epidemic, and historiographic thought. Using the case studies of colonial Punjab, Sri Lanka, and Bengal, it traces the loss of fundamental concepts and language of hunger in the inter-war period with the reductive application of the new specialisms of nutritional science and immunology, and a parallel loss of the distinction between infection (transmission) and morbid disease. The study locates the final demise of the 'Human Factor' (hunger) in malaria history within pre- and early post-WW2 international health institutions - the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation and the nascent WHO's Expert Committee on Malaria. It examines the implications of this epistemic shift for interpreting South Asian health history, and reclaims a broader understanding of common endemic infection (endemiology) as a prime driver, in the context of subsistence precarity, of epidemic mortality history and demographic change. This book will be useful to scholars and researchers of public health, social medicine and social epidemiology, imperial history, epidemic and demographic history, history of medicine, medical sociology, and sociology.

Brilliant, volatile and invariably male, the surgeon stereotype is a widespread and instantly recognisable part of western culture. Setting out to anatomise this stereotype, Cold, hard steel offers an exciting new history of modern and contemporary British surgery. The book draws on archival materials and original interviews with surgeons, analysing them alongside a range of fictional depictions, from the Doctor in the House novels to Mills & Boon romances and the pioneering soap opera Emergency Ward 10. Presenting a unique social, cultural and emotional history, it sheds light on the development and maintenance of the surgical stereotype and explains why it has proved so enduring. At the same time, the book explores the more candid and compassionate image of the surgeon that has begun to emerge in recent years, revealing how a series of high-profile memoirs both challenge the surgical stereotype and simultaneously confirm it. -- .

As historians of science increasingly turn to work on recent (post 1945) science, the historiographical and methodological problems associated with the history of contemporary science are debated with growing frequency and urgency.

Bringing together authorities on the history, historiography and methodology of recent and contemporary science, this book reviews the problems facing historians of technology, contemporary science and medicine, and explores new ways forward.

With contributions from key researchers in the field, the text covers topics that will be of ever increasing interest to historians of post-war science, including the difficulties of accessing and using secret archival material, the interactions between archivists, historians and scientists, and the politics of evidence and historical accounts.

Images in medieval and early modern treatises on medicine, pharmacy, and natural history often confound our expectations about the functions of medical and scientific illustrations. They do not look very much like the things they purport to portray; and their actual usefulness in everyday medical practice or teaching is not obvious. By looking at works as diverse as herbals, jewellery, surgery manuals, lay health guides, cinquecento paintings, manuscripts of Pliny's Natural History, and Leonardo's notebooks, Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200-1550 addresses fundamental questions about the interplay of art and science from the thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth century: What counts as a medical illustration in the Middle Ages? What are the purposes and audiences of the illustrations in medieval medical, pharmaceutical, and natural history texts? How are images used to clarify, expand, authenticate, and replace these texts? How do images of natural objects, observed phenomena, and theoretical concepts amplify texts and convey complex cultural attitudes? What features lead us to regard some of these images as typically 'medieval' while other exactly contemporary images strike us as 'Renaissance' or 'early modern' in character? Art historians, medical historians, historians of science, and specialists in manuscripts and early printed books will welcome this wide-ranging, interdisciplinary examination of the role of visualization in early scientific inquiry.

The first part of this collection brings together a selection of Peregrine Horden's papers on the history of hospitals and related institutions of welfare provision from their origins in Late Antiquity to their medieval flourishing in Byzantium and the Islamic lands as well as in western Europe. The hospital is seen in a variety of original contexts, from demography and family history to the history of music and the liturgy. The second part turns to the history of healing and medicine, outside the hospital as well as within it. These studies cover a period from Hippocratic times to the Renaissance, but with a particular focus on the Mediterranean region - Byzantine, Middle Eastern and Western - in the Middle Ages.

Social Order/Mental Disorder represents a provocative and exciting exploration of social response to madness in England and the United States from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Scull, who is well-known for his previous work in this area, examines a range of issues, including the changing social meanings of madness, the emergence and consolidation of the psychiatric profession, the often troubled relationship between psychiatry and the law, the linkages between sex and madness, and the constitution, character, and collapse of the asylum as our standard response to the problems posed by mental disorder. This book is emphatically not part of the venerable tradition of hagiography that has celebrated psychiatric history as a long struggle in which the steady application of rational-scientific principles has produced irregular but unmistakable evidence of progress toward humane treatments for the mentally ill. In fact, Scull contends that traditional mental hospitals, for much of their existence, resembled cemeteries for the still breathing, medical hubris having at times served to license dangerous, mutilating, even life-threatening experiments on the dead souls confined therein. He argues that only the sociologically blind would deny that psychiatrists are deeply involved in the definition and identification of what constitutes madness in our world - hence, claims that mental illness is a purely naturalistic category, somehow devoid of contamination by the social, are taken to be patently absurd. Scull points out, however, that the commitment to examine psychiatry and its ministrations with a critical eye by no means entails the romantic idea that the problems it deals with are purely the invention of the professional mind, or the Manichean notion that all psychiatric interventions are malevolent and ill-conceived. It is the task of unromantic criticism that is attempted in this book.

This book develops a conception of student flourishing as the overarching aim of education. Taking as its basis the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia, it provides a theoretical study of the foundations of flourishing that goes well beyond Aristotle's approach. Flourishing as the Aim of Education argues that the 'good life' of the student, to which education should contribute, must involve engagement with self-transcendent ideals and ignite awe-filled enchantment. It allows for social, individual and educational variance within the concept of flourishing, and it engages with a host of socio-political as well as 'spiritual' issues that are often overlooked in literature discussing character education. Each chapter closes with food for thought for practitioners who can directly facilitate student flourishing. An outgrowth of the author's previous monograph Aristotelian Character Education, this book follows new directions in questioning how to educate young people towards a life of overall flourishing. It will be of great interest to researchers, academics and post-graduate students in the fields of character education, moral education and moral philosophy, as well as to educators and policy-makers.

Kathleen Long explores the use of the hermaphrodite in early modern culture wars, both to question traditional theorizations of gender roles and to reaffirm those views. These cultural conflicts were fueled by the discovery of a new world, by the Reformation and the backlash against it, by nascent republicanism directed against dissolute kings, and by the rise of empirical science and its subsequent confrontation with the traditional university system. For the Renaissance imagination, the hermaphrodite came to symbolize these profound and intense changes that swept across Europe, literally embodying these conflicts. Focusing on early modern France, with references to Switzerland and Germany, this work traces the symbolic use of the hermaphrodite across a range of disciplines and domains - medical, alchemical, philosophical, poetic, fictional, and political - and demonstrates how these seemingly disparate realms interacted extensively with each other in this period, also across national boundaries. This widespread use and representation of the hermaphrodite established a ground on which new ideas concerning sex and gender could be elaborated by subsequent generations, and on which a wide range of thought concerning identity, racial, religious, and national as well as gender, could be deployed.