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This book explores the identity of the 'French disease' (alias the
'French pox' or 'Morbus Gallicus') in the German Imperial city of
Augsburg between 1495 and 1630. Rejecting the imposition of modern
conceptions of disease upon the past, it reveals how early modern
medical theory facilitated enormous flexibility in defining
disease, and how disease identification was a local matter, and one
of constant negotiation and renegotiation. Drawing on a wealth of
primary source material this work combines concern with the
conceptualisation of the disease with its practical application,
and argues for the inseparability of both. It focuses on how
theoretical understanding of the pox shaped the various therapeutic
reactions, and vice versa. It exemplifies this in the specific
socio-cultural context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Augsburg, through an investigation of the city's municipal and
private pox hospitals. Combining medical, religious, economic,
municipal and institutional history this book offers a fascinating
insight into how early modern society came to terms with disease
both in a practical and theoretical sense. This revised English
translation of Dr Stein's original German book adds new layers of
understanding to a fascinating but complex subject.
This book explores the identity of the 'French disease' (alias the
'French pox' or 'Morbus Gallicus') in the German Imperial city of
Augsburg between 1495 and 1630. Rejecting the imposition of modern
conceptions of disease upon the past, it reveals how early modern
medical theory facilitated enormous flexibility in defining
disease, and how disease identification was a local matter, and one
of constant negotiation and renegotiation. Drawing on a wealth of
primary source material this work combines concern with the
conceptualisation of the disease with its practical application,
and argues for the inseparability of both. It focuses on how
theoretical understanding of the pox shaped the various therapeutic
reactions, and vice versa. It exemplifies this in the specific
socio-cultural context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Augsburg, through an investigation of the city's municipal and
private pox hospitals. Combining medical, religious, economic,
municipal and institutional history this book offers a fascinating
insight into how early modern society came to terms with disease
both in a practical and theoretical sense. This revised English
translation of Dr Stein's original German book adds new layers of
understanding to a fascinating but complex subject.
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.
A noted medical historian explores the roles played by various
intellectual frameworks and trends in the writing of history A
collection of ten essays paired with substantial prefaces, this
book chronicles and contextualizes Roger Cooter's contributions to
the history of medicine. Through an analysis of his own work,
Cooter critically examines the politics of conceptual and
methodological shifts in historiography. In particular, he examines
the "double bind" of postmodernism and biological or neurological
modeling that, together, threaten academic history. To counteract
this trend, suggests Cooter, historians must begin actively
locating themselves in the problems they consider. The essays and
commentaries constitute a kind of contour map of history's recent
trends and trajectories-its points of passage to the present-and
lead both to a critical account of the discipline's historiography
and to an examination of the role of intellectual frameworks and
epistemic virtues in the writing of history.
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