The history of medicine has been a robust field of academic inquiry and popular discussion since the 1970s. The interest in it goes back much further, but it was then that it began to link up with social protest and the counter-culture movement, and with feminist politics in particular. Medicine was seen as a part of 'the Establishment', perceived to be anti-democratic and paternalistic. The blossoming of the social history of medicine was launched on this agenda, focusing on the historically disenfranchised: the mad, women, the disabled, 'unorthodox' healers, social medicine, and so on. The field expanded in the 1980s and 90s with a shift from 'the social' to the 'the cultural history of medicine', connecting it to an abiding interest in 'the body'. The centrality of medicine and the body to the work of Michel Foucault was a part of that move. Today, interest is sustained through the politics of biomedicine (including bioethics, and the turn to the 'neuro'), which render it one of the most vibrant areas in the academy and one of the most topical in popular culture.

First published in 1908, this book presents a study of tuberculosis. It looks first at its causes, before examining how the problem of mortality from illness had already been reduced. The third part of the book then focuses on measures for reducing and annihilating tuberculosis altogether. Being written in the earlier years of the twentieth century, the book will not only be of interest to medical students and practitioners, but also to historians.

First published in 1931, this book is the first of three volumes that describe the circumstances of medical work in several European countries at that time. Together, the three books look at public administration, local and national, in relation to the prevention of disease. This first volume focuses on the Dutch, Scandinavian and German speaking countries, as well as Switzerland. It shows that many of these countries have gone beyond most other countries in their in the socialization of medicine in several ways.

First published in 1931, this book is the second of a three volume set which focuses on medical work, and in particular, public administration in relation to the prevention of disease. This volume focuses on the medical circumstances of Belgium, France, Italy, Jugo-Slavia, Hungary, Poland and Czecho-Slovakia. It shows that many of these countries have gone beyond most other countries in their in the socialization of medicine in several ways.

First published in 1931, this book is the third of a three volume set which focuses on medical work, and in particular, public administration in relation to the prevention of disease. This volume provides the most in depth account of the countries it surveys: England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.

Ideas about the transmission of disease have long formed the core of modern biology and medicine. Heredity and Infection examines their development over the last century. Two scientific revolutions - the bacteriological revolution of the 1890s and the genetic revolution at the start of the twentieth century - acted as the catalysts of major change in our understanding of the causes of illness. As well as being great scientific achievements, these were social and political watersheds that reconfigured the medical and administrative means of intervention. By establishing a clear distinction between transmission by infection and genetic transmission, this shift was instrumental in separating hygiene from eugenism. The authors argue that the popular perception of such a sharp divide stabilized only after 1945 when the use of antibiotics to end epidemics became commonplace. For health professionals the separation has never become an absolute one, and the book examines the various blends of heredity and infection that have preoccupied biology, medicine and the social sciences. Heredity and Infection recontructs the changing epidemiology of such historically important pathologies as tuberculosis , cancer and AIDS. In doing so, it demonstrates the role of experimental models, medical practices and cultural images in the making of contemporary biochemical knowledge.

'Nerves' became a highly eligible illness in early Georgian London and Bath. What Freud was for Vienna at the end of the nineteenth-century, George Cheyne was for eighteenth-century fashionable ailments. The English Malady was one of the best known and most influential books of the Georgian age, dealing with what we would now call psychiatric disorders. Such disorders, he contended, should be regarded as diseases of 'civilization' and the product of the pressures and affluence of modern life. By making 'neurosis' acceptable, even fashionable, Cheyne's book assumed considerably wider significance during the Enlightenment. Prefaced by a scholarly introduction by Roy Porter, this reprint edition, originally published in 1991 as part of the Tavistock Classics in the History of Psychiatry series, places Cheyne and his work in the development of British psychiatry.

Sanitation and intestinal health is something we often take for granted today. However, people living in many regions of the developing world still suffer with debilitating diseases due to the lack of sanitation. Despite its clear impact upon health in modern times, sanitation in past populations is a topic that has received surprisingly little attention. This book brings together key experts from around the world to explore fascinating aspects of life in the past relevant to sanitation, and how that affected our ancestors. By its end readers will realize that toilets were in use in ancient Mesopotamia even before the invention of writing, and that flushing toilets with anatomic seats were a technology of ancient Greece at the time of the minotaur myth. They will see how sanitation compared in ancient Rome and medieval London, and will take a virtual walk around the sanitation of York at the time of the Vikings. Readers will also understand which intestinal parasites infected humans in different regions of the world over different time periods, what these parasites tell us about early human evolution, later population migrations, past diet, lifestyle, and the effects of sanitation technology. There is good evidence that over the millennia people in the past realized that sanitation mattered. They invented toilets, cleaner water supplies, drains, waste disposal and sanitation legislation. While past views on sanitation were very different to those of today, it is clear than many past societies took sanitation much more seriously than was previously thought.

Early modern Spain was a global empire in which a startling variety of medical cultures came into contact, and occasionally conflict, with one another. Spanish soldiers, ambassadors, missionaries, sailors, and emigrants of all sorts carried with them to the farthest reaches of the monarchy their own ideas about sickness and health. These ideas were, in turn, influenced by local cultures. This volume tells the story of encounters among medical cultures in the early modern Spanish empire. The twelve chapters draw upon a wide variety of sources, ranging from drama, poetry, and sermons to broadsheets, travel accounts, chronicles, and Inquisitorial documents; and it surveys a tremendous regional scope, from Mexico, to the Canary Islands, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, and Germany. Together, these essays propose a new interpretation of the circulation, reception, appropriation, and elaboration of ideas and practices related to sickness and health, sex, monstrosity, and death, in a historical moment marked by continuous cross-pollination among institutions and populations with a decided stake in the functioning and control of the human body. Ultimately, the volume discloses how medical cultures provided demographic, analytical, and even geographic tools that constituted a particular kind of map of knowledge and practice, upon which were plotted: the local utilities of pharmacological discoveries; cures for social unrest or decline; spaces for political and institutional struggle; and evolving understandings of monstrousness and normativity. Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire puts the history of early modern Spanish medicine on a new footing in the English-speaking world.

Dissection is a practice with a long history stretching back to antiquity and has played a crucial role in the development of anatomical knowledge. This absorbing book takes the story back to classical antiquity, employing a wide range of textual and material evidence. Claire Bubb reveals how dissection was practised from the Hippocratic authors of the fifth century BC through Aristotle and the Hellenistic doctors Herophilus and Erasistratus to Galen in the second century AD. She focuses on its material concerns and social contexts, from the anatomical subjects (animal or human) and how they were acquired, to the motivations and audiences of dissection, to its place in the web of social contexts that informed its reception, including butchery, sacrifice, and spectacle. The book concludes with a thorough examination of the relationship of dissection to the development of anatomical literature into Late Antiquity.

Covering the period from Antiquity to Early Modernity, A Historical Sociology of Disability argues that disabled people have been treated in Western society as good to mistreat and - with the rise of Christianity - good to be good to. It examines the place and role of disabled people in the moral economy of the successive cultures that have constituted 'Western civilisation'. This book is the story of disability as it is imagined and re-imagined through the cultural lens of ableism. It is a story of invalidation; of the material habituations of culture and moral sentiment that paint pictures of disability as 'what not to be'. The author examines the forces of moral regulation that fall violently in behind the dehumanising, ontological fait accompli of disability invalidation, and explores the ways in which the normate community conceived of, narrated and acted in relation to disability. A Historical Sociology of Disability will be of interest to all scholars, students and activists working in the field of Disability Studies, as well as sociology, education, philosophy, theology and history. It will appeal to anyone who is interested in the past, present and future of the 'last civil rights movement'.

In June 1941 a pair of British scientists boarded a plane for America with World War II raging all around them. They carried a precious commodity - penicillin - and the knowledge that it would change history. Once Washington understood its significance, the Office of Science Research and Development, in conjunction with British counterparts, assumed control; penicillin became a top-secret matter of national security, second only to the atomic bomb in importance. Because its patent was in the public domain, the American government decided to restrict the actual production of the antibiotic, rather than the drug itself. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union did everything possible to obtain penicillin of its own but ultimately fell short. In Cold War Resistance, Marc Landas uncovers the dark history behind the discovery, production, and distribution of antibiotics. In 1949 America embargoed any material deemed of “strategic importance” - including antibiotics - from going to Communist countries, effectively shutting off the Soviet Union from a modern medical miracle. This inadvertently created a system of Soviet satellite antibiotic factories among Warsaw Pact countries that produced sub-par antibiotics, which fostered an environment conducive to antibiotic resistance. Today the number of effective antibiotics available is dwindling, and the state of antibiotic resistance is worsening. While by no means the cause, the Cold War played a critical role in putting in place the oft-cited conditions that led to resistance - use in factory farms, over-prescription, and the non-existent antibiotic pipeline.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells-taken without her knowledge-became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they'd weigh more than 50 million metric tons-as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb's effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the "colored" ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta's small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia-a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo-to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. Henrietta's family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family-past and present-is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of. Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed

Dispatches from the AIDS Pandemic is a unique firsthand account from three public health leaders of CDC's early response to AIDS. Drawing on interviews from the CDC's AIDS Oral History Project, the authors highlight key individuals to trace the evolution of AIDS from newly recognized disease to pandemic. The first section outlines the earliest days of the epidemic within the United States and its initial prevention strategies. The second section expands the borders of the response to Africa and Thailand, where CDC conducted its first international work on AIDS. The final section closes with an overview of the scientific and public health advancements that followed and the historic community activism that spurred essential funding and partnerships for the development of life-saving interventions. Authentic and insightful, Dispatches from the AIDS Pandemic provides an authoritative account of an epidemic and its central role in the expansion of global public health.

Philosophic Whigs explores the links between scientific activity and politics in the early nineteenth century. Through a study of the Edinburgh medical school, L.S. Jacyna analyses the developments in medical education in the context of the social and political relationships within the local Whig community. Philosophic Whigs is a fascinating study of the links between science and the society that produces it.

In the age of HIV, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the Ebola Virus and BSE, metaphors and experience of contagion are a central concern of government, biomedicine and popular culture.
Contagion explores cultural responses of infectious diseases and their biomedical management over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also investigates the use of 'contagion' as a concept in postmodern reconceptualisations of embodied subjectivity.
The essays are written from within the fields of cultural studies, biomedical history and critical sociology. The contributors examine the geographies, policies and identities which have been produced in the massive social effort to contain diseases. They explore both social responses to infectious diseases in the past, and contemporary theoretical and biomedical sites for the study of contagion.

Sophia Jex-Blake led the campaign that won for British women the right to enter the medical profession. Before taking up this cause she had studied women's education in England, Germany and the United states, and rejected the popular contemporary view that higher education would be wasted on women. Her medical crusade in Britain resulted in women's rights to professional careers and financial independence being more widely accepted.
After years of extensive lobbying, she founded the London School of Medicine for Women in 1874 and two years later, largely due to her efforts, legislation was passed enabling women to take qualifying examinations in medicine. Shirley Roberts shows Sophia Jex-Blake to have been a determined and resourceful pioneer, skilful in winning over both public and political opinion. But she was also an impetuous and at times tactless woman, who could provoke hostility, as well as loyalty. Sophia Jex-Blake is a fascinating account of one woman's struggle for equality.

A History of the Brain tells the full story of neuroscience, from antiquity to the present day. It describes how we have come to understand the biological nature of the brain, beginning in prehistoric times, and progressing to the twentieth century with the development of Modern Neuroscience. This is the first time a history of the brain has been written in a narrative way, emphasizing how our understanding of the brain and nervous system has developed over time, with the development of the disciplines of anatomy, pharmacology, physiology, psychology and neurosurgery. The book covers: beliefs about the brain in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome the Medieval period, Renaissance and Enlightenment the nineteenth century the most important advances in the twentieth century and future directions in neuroscience. The discoveries leading to the development of modern neuroscience gave rise to one of the most exciting and fascinating stories in the whole of science. Written for readers with no prior knowledge of the brain or history, the book will delight students, and will also be of great interest to researchers and lecturers with an interest in understanding how we have arrived at our present knowledge of the brain.

This volume contains five chapters written by American, European and Central Asian scholars, who examine a range of issues critical to our understanding of health and healing in contemporary Central Asia. Grounded in the review of medical literature in Arabic, Persian and Chaghatay Turkic, extensive field work in the Central Asian republics, and the examination of state and Communist Party archival records, this book offers a range of insights and new perspectives on this area. The chapters of this edited volume survey largely unstudied medical texts produced and circulated in Central Asia from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, provide a detailed account of the administrative regulation of addiction and Stalinist repression of opium users in Soviet Badakhshan, explore the complex relationships between biomedicine and indigenous healing practices and discourses, and discuss the politics and epidemiology of HIV/AIDS in Central Asia. This book was published as a special issue of Central Asian Survey.

More people were killed by smallpox during the twentieth century-over 300 million-than by all of the wars of that period combined. In 1918 and 1919, influenza virus claimed over 50 million lives. A century later, influenza is poised to return, ongoing plagues of HIV/AIDS and hepatitis infect millions, and Ebola, Zika, and West Nile viruses cause new concern and panic. The overlapping histories of humans and viruses are ancient. Earliest cities became both the cradle of civilization and breeding grounds for the first viral epidemics. This overlap is the focus of virologist/immunologist Michael Oldstone in Viruses, Plagues and History. Oldstone explains principles of viruses and epidemics while recounting stories of viruses and their impact on human history. This fully updated second edition includes engrossing new chapters on hepatitis, Zika, and contemporary threats such as the possible return of a catastrophic influenza, and the impact of fear of autism on vaccination efforts. This is a fascinating panorama of humankind's longstanding conflict with unseen viral enemies, both human successes-such as control of poliomyelitis, measles, smallpox and yellow fever, and continued dangers-such as HIV and Ebola. Impeccably researched and accessibly written, Viruses, Plagues and History will fascinate all with an interest in how viral illnesses alter the course of human history.

Considering cases from Europe to India, this collection brings together current critical research into the role played by racial issues in the production of medical knowledge. Confronting such controversial themes as colonialism and medicine, the origins of racial thinking and health and migration, the distinguished contributors examine the role played by medicine in the construction of racial categories.

Drawing on original fieldwork, this book develops a fresh methodological approach to the study of indigenous understandings of disease as possession, and looks at healing rituals in different South Asian cultural contexts. Contributors discuss the meaning of 'disease', 'possession' and 'healing' in relation to South Asian religions, including Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism and Sikhism, and how South Asians deal with the divine in order to negotiate health and wellbeing. The book goes on to look at goddesses, gods and spirits as a cause and remedy of a variety of diseases, a study that has proved significant to the ethics and politics of responding to health issues. It contributes to a consolidation and promotion of indigenous ways as a method of understanding physical and mental imbalances through diverse conceptions of the divine. Chapters offer a fascinating overview of healing rituals in South Asia and provide a full-length, sustained discussion of the interface between religion, ritual, and folklore. The book presents a fresh insight into studies of Asian Religion and the History of Medicine.

England has traditionally been understood as a latecomer to the use of forensic medicine in death investigation, lagging nearly two-hundred years behind other European authorities. Using the coroner's inquest as a lens, this book hopes to offer a fresh perspective on the process of death investigation in medieval England. The central premise of this book is that medical practitioners did participate in death investigation although not in every inquest, or even most, and not necessarily in those investigations where we today would deem their advice most pertinent. The medieval relationship with death and disease, in particular, shaped coroners' and their jurors' understanding of the inquest's medical needs and led them to conclusions that can only be understood in context of the medieval world's holistic approach to health and medicine. Moreover, while the English resisted Southern Europe's penchant for autopsies, at times their findings reveal a solid understanding of internal medicine. By studying cause of death in the coroners' reports, this study sheds new light on subjects such as abortion by assault, bubonic plague, cruentation, epilepsy, insanity, senescence, and unnatural death."

"A remarkable addition to the literature of the science of the mind…Shenk has drawn together neurobiology, art history and psychology into a literary portrait of Alzheimer's perfectly balanced between sorrow and wonder, devastation and awe."
'LA Times'

Jonathan Swift once pointed to a diseased elm and declared 'I shall be like that tree, I shall die first at the top'. And, as our lifespans continue to expand, the illness he so dreaded has reached epidemic proportions. Today Alzheimer's afflicts on in twenty over the age of sixty-five. There are currently around twelve million sufferers worldwide, and this number is rising fast. Poignant and hopeful, 'The Forgetting' is the first book to record the history and explain the future of this difficult, frightening disease.

"[An] absorbing and enlightening book…and an engrossing story."
'TLS'

"A lucid, often moving book with an excellent preface from Adam Phillips…Shenk is a wonderful writer…His prose zings with apt metaphors. He has an eye for the social and financial forces that shape scientific interests and he brings key players, whether proteins or people, to dramatic life."
'Independent'

"'The Forgetting' is completely absorbing, fascinating, the best of writing, thought-provoking, socially important and imperative to read – with the narrative pull of a well-written murder mystery."
AMY TAN, author of 'The Bonesetter's Daughter'