Doctors And Patients History Representation Communication From Antiquity To The Present

For the first time, a book considers the doctor/patient relationship in the long period and from a broad geographical perspective. Historians, anthropologists and doctors reflect on the factors that, from the Classical age until the present, have altered the care relationship and the power relations embedded within it. The book also highlights that communication and narration, understood as constitutive aspects of care, are the elements which link the past to the present. From the encounter between religion and medicine to the centuries-long struggle between doctors and patients in defence of their respective positions, from medical dramas to efforts to humanize medicine, the book describes the doctor/patient relationship in all its cultural, transnational and transtemporal dimensions.

Michael Stolberg offers the first comprehensive presentation of medical training and day-to-day medical practice during the Renaissance. Drawing on previously unknown manuscript sources, he describes the prevailing notions of illness in the era, diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, the doctor–patient relationship, and home and lay medicine.

Forget the stereotype! Giacomo Casanova's (1725-1798) reputation as libertine has sadly eclipsed his talents as scholar, linguist, prolific writer and manqué doctor. Fortunately for us, he wrote his memoirs at the end of his life on the advice of his doctor to control his propensity to depression. Although these often have been harvested for information on political, cultural and social aspects of his time, the insights they give about medical practice and the lived experiences of illness have been largely neglected. This book addresses this deficiency through exploring in detail what Casanova wrote on a variety of conditions that include venereal disease and female complaints, duelling injuries, suicide, skin complaints and stroke and even piles. These descriptions provide alternately grim and amusing insights about public health measures, the doctor-patient relationship, medical etiquette and the dominant medical theories of the era. To help the reader understand the historical significance of the medical subjects covered, the author integrates throughout the book an extensive historical context drawn from contemporary sources of information and current history of medicine literature

This book tells the story of the thousands of corpses that ended up in the hands of anatomists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Composed as a travel story from the point of view of the cadaver, this study offers a full-blown cultural history of death and dissection, with insights that easily go beyond the history of anatomy and the specific case of Belgium. From acquisition to disposal, the trajectories of the corpse changed under the influence of social policies, ideological tensions, religious sensitivities, cultures of death and broader changes in the field of medical ethics. Anatomists increasingly had to reconcile their ways with the diverse meanings that the dead body held. To a certain extent, as this book argues, they started to treat the corpse as subject rather than object. Interweaving broad historical evolutions with detailed case studies, this book offers unique insights into a field dominated by Anglo-American perspectives, evaluating the similarities and differences within other European contexts.

The book investigates the diachronic dimension of contact-induced language change based on empirical data from Pennsylvania German (PG), a variety of German in long-term contact with English. Written data published in local print media from Pennsylvania (USA) between 1868 and 1992 are analyzed with respect to semantic changes in the argument structure of verbs, the use of impersonal constructions, word order changes in subordinate clauses and in prepositional phrase constructions. The research objective is to trace language change based on diachronic empirical data, and to assess whether existing models of language contact make provisions to cover the long-term developments found in PG. The focus of the study is thus twofold: first, it provides a detailed analysis of selected semantic and syntactic changes in Pennsylvania German, and second, it links the empirical findings to theoretical approaches to language contact. Previous investigations of PG have drawn a more or less static, rather than dynamic, picture of this contact variety. The present study explores how the dynamics of language contact can bring about language mixing, borrowing, and, eventually, language change, taking into account psycholinguistic processes in (the head of) the bilingual speaker.

What expectations did the women and men living in early monastic communities carry into relationships of obedience and advice? What did they hope to achieve through confession and discipline? To explore these questions, this study shows how several early Christian writers applied the logic, knowledge, and practices of Galenic medicine to develop their own practices of spiritual direction. Evagrius reads dream images as diagnostic indicators of the soul's state. John Cassian crafts a nosology of the soul using lists of passions while diagnosing the causes of wet dreams. Basil of Caesarea pits the spiritual director against the physician in a competition over diagnostic expertise. John Climacus crafts pathologies of passions through demonic family trees, while equipping his spiritual director with a physician's toolkit and imagining the monastic space as a vast clinic. These different appropriations of medical logic and metaphors not only show us the thought-world of late antique monasticism, but they would also have decisive consequences for generations of Christian subjects who would learn to see themselves as sick or well, patients or healers, within monastic communities.

This book addresses recent developments in medical and language education. Both fields have broadened their focus on clinical expertise and linguistic skills to address issues of cultural competence. The book re-imagines the language classroom in medical settings as an arena for the exploration of values and professional identity.

This work brings together Philip van der Eijk's previously published essays on the close connections that existed between medicine and philosophy throughout antiquity. Medical authors such as the Hippocratic writers, Diocles, Galen, Soranus and Caelius Aurelianus elaborated on philosophical methods such as causal explanation, definition and division and applied key concepts such as the notion of nature to their understanding of the human body. Similarly, philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle were highly valued for their contributions to medicine. This interaction was particularly striking in the study of the human soul in its relation to the body, as illustrated by approaches to specific topics such as intellect, sleep and dreams, and diet and drugs. With a detailed introduction surveying the subject as a whole and an essay on Aristotle's treatment of sleep, this wide-ranging and accessible collection is essential reading for the student of ancient philosophy and science.