Professionalizing Modern Medicine

Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine in Colonial Egypt investigates the use of medicine as a 'tool of empire' to serve the state building process in Egypt by the British colonial administration. It argues that the colonial state effectively transformed Egyptian medical practice and medical knowledge in ways that were decidedly gendered. On the one hand, women medical professionals who had once trained as 'doctresses' (hakimas) were now restricted in their medical training and therefore saw their social status decline despite colonial modernity's promise of progress. On the other hand, the introduction of colonial medicine gendered Egyptian medicine in ways that privileged men and masculinity. Far from being totalized colonial subjects, Egyptian doctors paradoxically reappropriated aspects of Victorian science to forge an anticolonial nationalist discourse premised on the Egyptian woman as mother of the nation. By relegating Egyptian women - whether as midwives or housewives - to maternal roles in the home, colonial medicine was determinative in diminishing what control women formerly exercised over their profession, homes and bodies through its medical dictates to care for others. By interrogating how colonial medicine was constituted, Hibba Abugideiri reveals how the rise of the modern state configured the social formation of native elites in ways directly tied to the formation of modern gender identities, and gender inequalities, in colonial Egypt.

The relation of the progress of medical science to the social history of humanity. Starting with the seventeenth century, the author analyzes the defeats as well as the triumphs that medicine has gone through to reach its present usefulness.

A comprehensive study of the entire range of medical practitioners in preindustrial and eraly industrial France.

The early decades of the eighteenth century saw the appearance of a completely new type of surgical practitioner in France: the dentiste. The use of this title was of the utmost significance, indicating not just the making of a new practitioner but of an entirely new practice - the dentiste was, quite literally, making a name for himself. Appearing on the back of dramatic changes within surgery in general, the practice of the dentiste, although it focused only on the teeth, was nevertheless extensive. In addition to extractions, there was also a wide-ranging field of operations on offer, the performance of which had only been hinted at by the surgeon of the seventeenth century. This new sphere of practice represented a radical departure from what had gone before and, as this book reveals, it was all built solidly on sound surgical foundations, with the dentiste occupying a respected position within society in general and the medical world in particular. This book places the making of the dentiste within social, political and technical contexts, and in so doing re-contextualises the purely progressive stories told in conventional histories of dentistry. In doing so, it brings surgery back to its central role in this story, and reveals for the first time the origins of the dentise in the French surgical profession.

Doctors and Rules is a unique and immensely scholarly book. It draws on material which has informed our civilization, including many of the social sciences-history, sociology, and psychology, as well as law. The author accesses the current importance of the Hippocratic tradition within medicine, and puts forward various models of its practice. He seeks to expose the often inarticulated foundation of contemporary debates about the law, medicine, and health, and to question some common assumptions of the functionsand structures of social and legal order. The book challenges the idea that legal rules should be respected merely because they exist and because they play a part in centralizing the organization of society. It rejects the notion that the courts always, or even often, offer useful mechanisms for defining and settling disputes. On the contrary, the author sees in their formalism many things which hinder the common cause of humanity. Only a skeptic trained in law but also deeply concerned by our fate and circumstances could have produced it. It also contributes both to the sociology of law and the sociology of medicine. Out of a reassertion of old ways, this book presents a new blueprint for future professional conduct. It is rich in questions and ideas for researchers, teachers, and professionals in the fields of law, medical sociology, and medicine and generally for those concerned with the place of professional conduct.

Medical ethics has been a constant adjunct of Western medicine from its origins in Greek times. Although the Hippocratic Oath has been intensely studied, until recently there has been very little historical work on medical ethics between the Oath and Thomas Percival's Medical Ethics of 1803, which is commonly thought of as the first treatise on modern medical ethics. This volume brings together original research which throws new light on how standards of behaviour for medical practitioners were articulated in the different religious, political and social as well as medical contexts from the classical period until the nineteenth century. Its ten essays will place the early history of medical ethics into the framework of the new social and intellectual history of medicine that has been developed in the last ten years.

Julien Offray de la Mettrie, best known as the author of L'Homme machine, appears as a minor character in most accounts of the Enlightenment. But in this intellectual biography by Kathleen Wellman, La Mettrie--physician-philosophe--emerges as a central figure whose medical approach to philosophical and moral issues had a profound influence on the period and its legacy. Wellman's study presents La Mettrie as an advocate of progressive medical theory and practice who consistently applied his medical concerns to the reform of philosophy, morals, and society. By examining his training with the Dutch physician Hermann Boerhaave, his satires lampooning the ignorance and venality of the medical profession, and his medical treatises on subjects ranging from vertigo to veneral disease, Wellman illuminates the medical roots of La Mettrie's philosophy. She shows how medicine encouraged La Mettrie to undertake an impiricist critique of the philosophical tradition and provided the foundation for a medical materialism that both shaped his understanding of the possibilities of moral and social reform and led him to espouse the cause of the philosophers. Elucidating the medical view of nature, human beings, and society that the Enlightenment and La Mettrie in particular bequethed to the modern world, La Mettrie makes an important contribution to our understanding of both that period and our own.