In this brilliant study, Charles Rosenberg uses the celebrated trial of Charles Guiteau, who assassinated President Garfield in 1881, to explore insanity and criminal responsibility in the Gilded Age. Rosenberg masterfully reconstructs the courtroom battle waged by twenty-four expert witnesses who represented the two major schools of psychiatric thought of the generation immediately preceding Freud. Although the idea that genetics could play a role in behavior was just beginning to take hold in their day, these psychiatrists fiercely debated whether heredity had predisposed Guiteau to assassinate Garfield. Rosenberg's account allows us to consider one of the classic moments in the controversy over the criminal responsibility of the insane, a debate that still rages today.

Medicine has always had its historians; but until recently it was a history written by and for practitioners. Charles Rosenberg has been one of the key figures in recent decades in opening up the history of medicine beyond parochial concerns and instead viewing medicine in the rich currents of intellectual and social change of the past two centuries. This book brings together for the first time in one place many of Professor Rosenberg's most important essays. The first two sections of essays, focusing on ideas and institutions, are meant at the same time to underline interactions between these realms. The essays treat such topics as therapeutics and its relationship to social change in the nineteenth century; the practice of medicine in New York a century ago; and the rise and fall of the dispensary. The third section of the book focuses on the attempt to use history as a resource for discussion of a medical world that often seems out of control and in a semi-permanent crisis, economic, organizational, and humane. The essays discuss themes that have become visible to the public - deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill and the status of psychiatry; the hospital as a social and economic problem; and the social negotiations surrounding AIDS.

This book is not about one glorious triumph after another, nor is it a series of complaints about doctors and hospitals. Rather, these essays examine American medicine within its context, sensitive to the role of medical knowledge, practitioners, and institutions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The selections not only cover general considerations of the social and cultural context in which American medicine developed but also analyze the relationship between science and medicine, the development of mental hospitals, nursing, and health insurance.

This is a book that goes beyond a mere examination of the role of the family in structuring sexual relationships, kinship relations, and child rearing practices. Here are historical examples of the family as a source of labor and capital accumulation, as a mechanism for the transmission of property, and as a means for the imposition of social control.

Erwin H. Ackerknecht's A Short History of Medicine is a concise narrative, long appreciated by students in the history of medicine, medical students, historians, and medical professionals as well as all those seeking to understand the history of medicine. Covering the broad sweep of discoveries from parasitic worms to bacilli and x-rays, and highlighting physicians and scientists from Hippocrates and Galen to Pasteur, Koch, and Roentgen, Ackerknecht narrates Western and Eastern civilization's work at identifying and curing disease. He follows these discoveries from the library to the bedside, hospital, and laboratory, illuminating how basic biological sciences interacted with clinical practice over time. But his story is more than one of laudable scientific and therapeutic achievement. Ackerknecht also points toward the social, ecological, economic, and political conditions that shape the incidence of disease. Improvements in health, Ackerknecht argues, depend on more than laboratory knowledge: they also require that we improve the lives of ordinary men and women by altering social conditions such as poverty and hunger. This revised and expanded edition includes a new foreword and concluding biographical essay by Charles E. Rosenberg, Ackerknecht's former student and a distinguished historian of medicine. A new bibliographic essay by Lisa Haushofer explores recent scholarship in the history of medicine.

Medicine has always had its historians; but until recently it was a history written by and for practitioners. Charles Rosenberg has been one of the key figures in recent decades in opening up the history of medicine beyond parochial concerns and instead viewing medicine in the rich currents of intellectual and social change of the past two centuries. This book brings together for the first time in one place many of Professor Rosenberg's most important essays. The first two sections of essays, focusing on ideas and institutions, are meant at the same time to underline interactions between these realms. The essays treat such topics as therapeutics and its relationship to social change in the nineteenth century; the practice of medicine in New York a century ago; and the rise and fall of the dispensary. The third section of the book focuses on the attempt to use history as a resource for discussion of a medical world that often seems out of control and in a semi-permanent crisis, economic, organizational, and humane. The essays discuss themes that have become visible to the public--deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill and the status of psychiatry; the hospital as a social and economic problem; and the social negotiations surrounding AIDS. Charles Rosenberg is the Janice and Julian Bers Professor of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author, most recently, of the widely acclaimed book, The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America's Hospital System (1987). He has served as president of the Society for the Social History of Medicine and is currently the president of the American Association for the History of Medicine.

Cholera was the classic epidemic disease of the nineteenth century, as the plague had been for the fourteenth. Its defeat was a reflection not only of progress in medical knowledge but of enduring changes in American social thought. Rosenberg has focused his study on New York City, the most highly developed center of this new society. Carefully documented, full of descriptive detail, yet written with an urgent sense of the drama of the epidemic years, this narrative is as absorbing for general audiences as it is for the medical historian. In a new Afterword, Rosenberg discusses changes in historical method and concerns since the original publication of The Cholera Years.
A major work of interpretation of medical and social thought . . . this volume is also to be commended for its skillful, absorbing presentation of the background and the effects of this dread disease.--I.B. Cohen, New York Times
The Cholera Years is a masterful analysis of the moral and social interest attached to epidemic disease, providing generally applicable insights into how the connections between social change, changes in knowledge and changes in technical practice may be conceived.--Steven Shapin, Times Literary Supplement
In a way that is all too rarely done, Rosenberg has skillfully interwoven medical, social, and intellectual history to show how medicine and society interacted and changed during the 19th century. The history of medicine here takes its rightful place in the tapestry of human history.--John B. Blake, Science

This widely acclaimed history traces every facet of the hospital's social and professional transformations. Many of today's obsessions with technology, rigid bureaucracy, and uncontrolled cost can be found in hospitals more than half a century ago. Illustrated.

"This rich array of essays shows how the lens of history can clarify contemporary health-policy dilemmas and enable the reader to see ahead more clearly." --Harvey V. Fineberg, President, Institute of Medicine "A refreshing antidote for those finding it difficult to envision a better future for health care in America. . . . This excellent book helps us all to better understand the subtle relationship among values, institutions, economics, and medicine that shapes our health system." --Stuart M. Butler, Vice President for Domestic Policy, The Heritage Foundation "An important book for those wrestling with the appropriate role of markets in U.S. health policy." --Karen Davis, President, The Commonwealth Fund In this book, seventeen leading scholars make the case for the usefulness of history in evaluating and formulating health policy today. In looking at issues as varied as the consumer economy and the plight of the uninsured, the contributors uncover the ways we think about technology, the role of government, and contemporary medicine. They show how historical perspectives can help policy makers avoid the pitfalls of partisan, outdated, or merely fashionable approaches, as well as how knowledge of previous systems can offer alternatives when policy directions seem unclear. Rosemary A. Stevens is DeWitt Wallace Distinguished Scholar in social medicine and public policy at Weill Cornell Medical College and professor emerita of the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania. Charles E. Rosenberg is a professor of the history of science and Ernest E. Monrad Professor in the social sciences at Harvard University. Lawton R. Burns is the James Joo-Jin Kim Professor of Health Care Systems at the University of Pennsylvania. A volume in the Critical Issues in Health and Medicine series, edited by Rima D. Apple and Janet Golden

Charles E. Rosenberg, one of the world's most influential historians of medicine, presents a fascinating analysis of the current tensions in American medicine.

Situating these tensions within their historical and social contexts, Rosenberg investigates the fundamental characteristics of medicine: how we think about disease, how the medical profession thinks about itself and its moral and intellectual responsibilities, and what prospective patients--all of us--expect from medicine and the medical profession. He explores the nature and definition of disease and how ideas of disease causation reflect social values and cultural negotiations. His analyses of alternative medicine and bioethics consider the historically specific ways in which we define and seek to control what is appropriately medical.

At a time when clinical care and biomedical research generate as much angst as they offer cures, this volume provides valuable insight into how the practice of medicine has evolved, where it is going, and how lessons from history can improve its prognosis.

"In some ways disease does not exist until we have agreed that it does, by perceiving, naming, and responding to it," writes Charles E. Rosenberg in his introduction to this stimulating set of essays. Disease is both a biological and a social phenomenon. Patient, doctor, family, and social institutions--including employers, government, and insurance companies--all find ways to frame the biological event in terms that make sense to them and serve their own ends. Many diseases discussed here--endstage renal disease, rheumatic fever, parasitic infectious diseases, coronary thrombosis--came to be defined, redefined, and renamed over the course of several centuries. As these essays show, the concept of disease has also been used to frame culturally resonant behaviors: suicide, homosexuality, anorexia nervosa, chronic fatigue syndrome. Disease is also framed by public policy, as the cases of industrial disability and forensic psychiatry demonstrate. Medicl institutions, as managers of people with disease, come to have vested interests in diagnoses, as the histories of facilities to treat tuberculosis or epilepsy reveal. Ultimately, the existence and conquest of disease serve to frame a society's sense of its own "healthiness" and to give direction to social reforms. The contributors include Steven J. Peitzman, Peter C. English, John Farley, Christopher Lawrence, Michael Macdonald, Bert Hansen, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Robert A. Aronowitz, Gerald Markowitz, David Rosner, Janet A. Tighe, Barbara Bates, Ellen Dwyer, John M. Eyler, and Elizabeth Fee. Charles Rosenberg is Janice and Julian Bers Professor of the History of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Janet Golden is an assistant professor of history at Rutgers University.

In its original edition, "No Other Gods" offered a pioneering and influential examination of the ways in which social institutions and values shaped American scientific practice and thought. In this revised and expanded edition, Rosenberg directs our attention to the dilemma posed by the social study of science: How can we reconcile the scientist's understanding of science as a quest for truth and knowledge with the historian's conviction that all knowledge bears the marks of the culture which gave it birth?