This work offers a social and cultural history of Victorian
medicine "from below," as experienced by ordinary practitioners and
patients, often described in their own words. Health, Medicine, and
Society in Victorian England is a human story of medicine in
19th-century England. It's a story of how a diverse and competitive
assortment of apothecary apprentices, surgeons who learned their
trade by doing, and physicians schooled in ancient Greek medicine
but lacking in any actual experience with patients, was gradually
formed into a medical profession with uniform standards of
education and qualification. It's a story of how medical men
struggled with "new" diseases such as cholera and "old" ones known
for centuries, such as tuberculosis, syphilis, and smallpox,
largely in the absence of effective drugs or treatments, and so
were often reduced to standing helplessly by as their patients
died. It's a story of how surgeons, empowered first by anesthesia
and later by antiseptic technique, vastly expanded the field of
surgery—sometimes with major benefits for patients, but sometimes
with disastrous results. Above all, it's a story of how gender and
class ideology dominated both practitioners and patients. Women
were stridently excluded from medical education and practice of any
kind until the end of the century, but were hailed into the new
field of nursing, which was felt to be "natural" to the gentler
sex. Only the poor were admitted to hospitals until the last
decades of the century, and while they often received compassionate
care, they were also treated as "cases" of disease and experimented
upon with freedom. Yet because medical knowledge was growing by
leaps and bounds, Victorians were fascinated with this new field
and wrote novels, poetry, essays, letters, and diaries, which
illuminate their experience of health and disease for us. Newly
developed techniques of photography, as well as improved print
illustrations, help us to picture this fascinating world. This
vivid history of Victorian medicine is enriched with many literary
examples and visual images drawn from the period.
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