Constructing Paris Medicine

In this volume of essays, leading scholars take a fresh look at the meaning and significance of the Paris Clinical School for the history of medicine and reassess the analysis of the two most noted authors on the topic in the twentieth century, Erwin H. Ackernecht and Michel Foucault.

An innovative study that links the themes of Holmes's best-known literary works to his medical training in nineteenth-century Paris.

Examining the social and political history of workers and entrepreneurs engaged in constructing the French capital from 1763-1815, this book argues that Paris construction was a core sector in which 'archaic' and 'innovative' practices were symbiotically used by guilds, the state, and enterprises to launch the commercial revolution in France.

Diseases affecting the skin have tended to provoke a response of particular horror in society. This collection of essays uses case studies to chart the medical history of skin from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.

Stephen Gaukroger presents an original account of the development of empirical science and the understanding of human behaviour from the mid-eighteenth century. Since the seventeenth century, science in the west has undergone a unique form of cumulative development in which it has been consolidated through integration into and shaping of a culture. But in the eighteenth century, science was cut loose from the legitimating culture in which it had had a public rationale as a fruitful and worthwhile form of enquiry. What kept it afloat between the middle of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries, when its legitimacy began to hinge on an intimate link with technology? The answer lies in large part in an abrupt but fundamental shift in how the tasks of scientific enquiry were conceived, from the natural realm to the human realm. At the core of this development lies the naturalization of the human, that is, attempts to understand human behaviour and motivations no longer in theological and metaphysical terms, but in empirical terms. One of the most striking feature of this development is the variety of forms it took, and the book explores anthropological medicine, philosophical anthropology, the 'natural history of man', and social arithmetic. Each of these disciplines re-formulated basic questions so that empirical investigation could be drawn upon in answering them, but the empirical dimension was conceived very differently in each case, with the result that the naturalization of the human took the form of competing, and in some respects mutually exclusive, projects.

A bestselling history of medicine, enriched with a new foreword, concluding essay, and bibliographic essay. 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.

In What Nostalgia Was, historian Thomas Dodman traces the history of clinical "nostalgia" from when it was first coined in 1688 to describe deadly homesickness until the late nineteenth century, when it morphed into the benign yearning for a lost past we are all familiar with today. Dodman explores how people, both doctors and sufferers, understood nostalgia in late seventeenth-century Swiss cantons (where the first cases were reported) to the Napoleonic wars and to the French colonization of North Africa in the latter 1800s. A work of transnational scope over the longue duree, the book is an intellectual biography of a "transient mental illness" that was successively reframed according to prevailing notions of medicine, romanticism, and climatic and racial determinism. At the same time, Dodman adopts an ethnographic sensitivity to understand the everyday experience of living with nostalgia. In so doing, he explains why nostalgia was such a compelling diagnosis for war neuroses and generalized socioemotional disembeddedness at the dawn of the capitalist era and how it can be understood as a powerful bellwether of the psychological effects of living in the modern age.

From the 1770s through the 1820s the French scientific community predominated in the world to a degree that no other scientific establishment did in any period prior to the Second World War. In his classic Science and Polity in France: The End of the Old Regime, Charles Gillispie analyzed the cultural, political, and technical factors that encouraged scientific productivity on the eve of the Revolution. In the present monumental and elegantly written sequel to that work, which Princeton is reissuing concurrently, he examines how the revolutionary and Napoleonic context contributed to modernization both of politics and science. In politics, argues Gillispie, the central feature of this modernization was conversion of subjects of a monarchy into citizens of a republic in direct contact with a state enormously augmented in power. To the scientific community, attainment of professional status was what citizenship was to all Frenchmen in the republic proper, namely the license to self-governance and dignity within the respective contexts. Revolutionary circumstances set up a resonance between politics and science since practitioners of both were future oriented in their outlook and scornful of the past. Among the creations of the First French Republic were institutions providing the earliest higher education in science. From them emerged rigorously trained people who constituted the founding generation in the disciplines of mathematical physics, positivistic biology, and clinical medicine. That scientists were able to achieve their ends was owing to the expertise they provided the revolutionary and imperial authorities in education, medicine, warfare, empire building, and industrial technology.