Recent studies into the experiences and failures of health care services, along with the rapid development of patient advocacy, consumerism and pressure groups have led historians and social scientists to engage with the issue of the medical complaint. As expressions of dissatisfaction, disquiet and failings in service provision, past complaining is a vital antidote to progressive histories of health care. This book explores what has happened historically when medicine generated complaints. This multidisciplinary collection comprises contributions from leading international scholars and uses new research to develop a sophisticated understanding of the development of medicine and the role of complaints and complaining in this story. It addresses how each aspect of the medical complaint - between sciences, professions, practitioners and sectors; within politics, ethics and regulatory bodies; from interested parties and patients - has manifested in modern medicine, and how it has been defined, dealt with and resolved. A critical and interdisciplinary humanities and social science perspective grounded in historical case studies of medicine and bioethics, this volume provides the first major and comprehensive historical, comparative and policy-based examination of the area. It will be of interest to historians, sociologists, legal specialists and ethicists interested in medicine, as well as those involved in healthcare policy, practice and management.

Recent studies into the experiences and failures of health care services, along with the rapid development of patient advocacy, consumerism and pressure groups have led historians and social scientists to engage with the issue of the medical complaint. As expressions of dissatisfaction, disquiet and failings in service provision, past complaining is a vital antidote to progressive histories of health care. This book explores what has happened historically when medicine generated complaints. This multidisciplinary collection comprises contributions from leading international scholars and uses new research to develop a sophisticated understanding of the development of medicine and the role of complaints and complaining in this story. It addresses how each aspect of the medical complaint - between sciences, professions, practitioners and sectors; within politics, ethics and regulatory bodies; across nations and cultures; from interested parties and patients - has manifested in modern medicine, and how it has been defined, dealt with and resolved.A critical and interdisciplinary humanities and social science perspective grounded in historical case studies of medicine and bioethics, this volume provides the first major and comprehensive historical, comparative and policy-based examination of the area. It will be of interest to historians, sociologists, lawyers and ethicists interested in medicine, as well as those involved in healthcare policy, practice and management.

This is the first book to examine the history of the medical services provided by workhouses, both in Britain and its former colonies, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries workhouses were a key provider of medical care to the poor. Workhouse beds in Britain far outnumbered beds provided by charitable hospitals, and a high percentage of inmates wereelderly and infirm, needing not only accommodation and work but also medical relief. Historians of welfare, the English poor laws, and medicine have been aware of the importance of workhouse-based medicine, but the topic hasnot been studied in depth. This volume is the first to examine the history of the medical services provided by these institutions both in Britain and its former colonies, over the period covered by the Old and New Poor Laws. Written by prominent historians of medicine, welfare, and social policy, the essays document the experiences of those who received care or died in these houses, and form the critical foundation for a new historiography of workhouse medicine. Contributors: Jeremy Boulton, Virginia Crossman, Romola Davenport, Steven King, Angela Negrine, Susannah Ottaway, Rita Pemberton, Jonathan Reinarz, Alistair Ritch, Leonard Schwarz, Samantha Shave, Kevin Siena, Leonard Smith, Alannah Tomkins. Jonathan Reinarz is director of the History of Medicine Unit at the University of Birmingham, UK. He has published extensively on the history of English medical institutions, 1750-1950. Leonard Schwarz has recently retired as a reader in Urban History at the University of Birmingham, where he founded the Birmingham Eighteenth Century Centre.

In this comprehensive and engaging volume, medical historian Jonathan Reinarz offers a historiography of smell from ancient to modern times. Synthesizing existing scholarship in the field, he shows how people have relied on their olfactory sense to understand and engage with both their immediate environments and wider corporal and spiritual worlds. This broad survey demonstrates how each community or commodity possesses, or has been thought to possess, its own peculiar scent. Through the meanings associated with smells, osmologies develop--what cultural anthropologists have termed the systems that utilize smells to classify people and objects in ways that define their relations to each other and their relative values within a particular culture. European Christians, for instance, relied on their noses to differentiate Christians from heathens, whites from people of color, women from men, virgins from harlots, artisans from aristocracy, and pollution from perfume. This reliance on smell was not limited to the global North. Around the world, Reinarz shows, people used scents to signify individual and group identity in a morally constructed universe where the good smelled pleasant and their opposites reeked. With chapters including "Heavenly Scents," "Fragrant Lucre," and "Odorous Others," Reinarz's timely survey is a useful and entertaining look at the history of one of our most important but least-understood senses.

A history of the wide range of general and specialist hospitals associated with the University of Birmingham Medical School, set in the broader context of health care in Birmingham. In the middle of the eighteenth century, hospitals were unfamiliar institutions to the inhabitants of most English towns and cities. As early as the late nineteenth century, however, hospitals had become central to both the provision of health care and medical education in most large urban population centres. Drawing on hospital records, the publications of associated medical staff and a wealth of other local documents, Health Care in Birmingham carefully maps the evolution of nine voluntary hospitals, and their associated medical specialities in Birmingham, England over the century and a half before the introduction of the National Health Service, a period that witnessed significant social, economic and cultural change. From the emergence of the town's first General Hospital in 1779, the wealth of this key industrial centre in particular encouraged the development of a full range of medical institutions, including those established to treat afflictions of the bones and joints, eye, ear, teeth and skin, as well as ailments peculiar to women and children. Besides charting the local development of a wide range of specialist fields, Health Care in Birmingham firmly situates each hospital in its local and national contexts. Though greatly reorganised on the eve of the Second World War, these institutions influenced considerably the history and landscape of the city, and continue to do so today. This is the first time their history has been considered collectively in a single volume. Jonathan Reinarz is Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Birmingham.

In this comprehensive and engaging volume, medical historian Jonathan Reinarz offers a historiography of smell from ancient to modern times. Synthesizing existing scholarship in the field, he shows how people have relied on their olfactory sense to understand and engage with both their immediate environments and wider corporal and spiritual worlds.

This broad survey demonstrates how each community or commodity possesses, or has been thought to possess, its own peculiar scent. Through the meanings associated with smells, osmologies develop--what cultural anthropologists have termed the systems that utilize smells to classify people and objects in ways that define their relations to each other and their relative values within a particular culture. European Christians, for instance, relied on their noses to differentiate Christians from heathens, whites from people of color, women from men, virgins from harlots, artisans from aristocracy, and pollution from perfume.

This reliance on smell was not limited to the global North. Around the world, Reinarz shows, people used scents to signify individual and group identity in a morally constructed universe where the good smelled pleasant and their opposites reeked.

With chapters including "Heavenly Scents," "Fragrant Lucre," and "Odorous Others," Reinarz's timely survey is a useful and entertaining look at the history of one of our most important but least-understood senses.