Charitable Knowledge explores the interconnections between medical teaching, medical knowledge, and medical authority in eighteenth-century London. The metropolis lacked a university until the nineteenth century, so the seven major voluntary hospitals - St Bartholomew's, St Thomas's, Guy's, the Westminster, St George's, the Middlesex, and the London - were crucial sites for educating surgeons, surgeon-apothecaries, and visiting physicians. Lawrence explains how charity patients became teaching objects, and how hospitals became medical schools. She demonstrates that hospital practitioners gradually gained authority within an emerging medical community, transforming the old tripartite structure into a loosely unified group of de facto general practitioners dominated by hospital men. As hospital physicians and surgeons became the new elite, they profoundly shaped what counted as 'good' knowledge among medical men, both in the construction of clinical observations and in the proper use of science.

When the new HIPAA privacy rules regarding the release of health information took effect, medical historians suddenly faced a raft of new ethical and legal challenges - even in cases where their subjects had died years, or even a century, earlier. In Privacy and the Past, medical historian Susan C. Lawrence explores the impact of these new privacy rules, offering insight into what historians should do when they research, write about, and name real people in their work. Lawrence offers a wide-ranging and informative discussion of the many issues involved. She highlights the key points in research ethics that can affect historians, including their ethical obligations to their research subjects, both living and dead, and she reviews the range of federal laws that protect various kinds of information. The book discusses how the courts have dealt with privacy in contexts relevant to historians, including a case in which a historian was actually sued for a privacy violation. Lawrence also questions who gets to decide what is revealed and what is kept hidden in decades-old records, and she examines the privacy issues that archivists consider when acquiring records and allowing researchers to use them. She looks at how demands to maintain individual privacy both protect and erase the identities of people whose stories make up the historical record, discussing decisions that historians have made to conceal identities that they believed needed to be protected. Finally, she encourages historians to vigorously resist any expansion of regulatory language that extends privacy protections to the dead. Engagingly written and powerfully argued, Privacy and the Past is an important first step in preventing privacy regulations from affecting the historical record and the ways that historians write history.

While it is impossible to re-create the tumultuous Washington DC of the Civil War, Civil War Washington sets out to examine the nation's capital during the Civil War along with the digital platform (civilwardc.org) that reimagines it during those turbulent years. Among the many topics covered in the volume is the federal government's experiment in compensated emancipation, which went into effect when all of the capital's slaves were freed in April 1862. Another essay explores the city's place as a major center of military hospitals, patients, and medical administration. Other contributors reflect on literature and the war, particularly on the poetry published in hospital newspapers and Walt Whitman's formative experiences with the city and its wounded. The digital project associated with this book offers a virtual examination of the nation's capital from multiple perspectives. Through a collection of datasets, visual works, texts, and maps, the digital project offers a case study of the social, political, cultural, and scientific transitions provoked or accelerated by the Civil War. The book also provides insights into the complex and ever-shifting nature of ongoing digital projects while encouraging others to develop their own interpretations and participate in the larger endeavor of digital history.

Charitable Knowledge explores the interconnections among medical teaching, medical knowledge and medical authority in eighteenth-century London. The metropolis lacked a university until the nineteenth century, so the seven major voluntary hospitals--St. Bartholomew, St. Thomas, Guy, the Westminster, St. George, the Middlesex, and the London--were crucial sites for educating surgeons, surgeon-apothecaries and visiting physicians. Lawrence explains how charity patients became teaching objects, and how hospitals became medical schools. She demonstrates that hospital practitioners gradually gained authority within an emerging medical community, transforming the old tripartite structure into a loosely unified group of de facto general practitioners dominated by hospital men. Historians of science and medicine will want to read this book.