The Practice Of Reform In Health Medicine And Science 1500 2000

Histories of medicine and science are histories of political and social change, as well as accounts of the transformation of particular disciplines over time. Taking their inspiration from the work of Charles Webster, the essays in this volume consider the effect that demands for social and political reform have had on the theory and, above all, the practice of medicine and science, and on the promotion of human health, from the Renaissance and Enlightenment up to the present. The eighteen essays by an international group of scholars provide case studies, covering a wide range of locations and contexts, of the successes and failures of reform and reformers in challenging the status quo. They discuss the impact of religious and secular ideologies on ideas about the nature and organization of health, medicine, and science, as well as the effects of social and political institutions, including the professions themselves, in shaping the possibilities for reform and renewal. The Practice of Reform in Health, Medicine, and Science, 1500-2000 also addresses the afterlife of reforming concepts, and describes local and regional differences in the practice and perception of reform, culminating in the politics of welfare in the twentieth century. The authors build up a composite picture of the interaction of politics and health, medicine, and science in western Europe over time that can pose questions for the future of policy as well as explaining some of the successes and failures of the past.

Folk, alternative and complementary health care practices in contemporary Western society are currently experiencing a renaissance, albeit with features that are unique to this historical moment. At the same time biomedicine is under scrutiny, experiencing a number of distinct and multifaceted crises. In this volume the authors draw together cutting edge cross-cultural, interdisciplinary research in Britain and Ireland, focusing on exploring the role and significance of healing practices in diverse local contexts, such as the use of crystals, herbs, cures and charms, potions and lotions.

Communities great and small across Europe for eight centuries have contracted with doctors. Physicians provided citizen care, helped govern, and often led in public life. Civic Medicine stakes out this timely subject by focusing on its golden age, when cities rivaled territorial states in local and global Europe and when civic doctors were central to the rise of shared, organized written information about the human and natural world. This opens the prospect of a long history of knowledge and action shaped more by community and responsibility than market or state, exchange or power.

England has traditionally been understood as a latecomer to the use of forensic medicine in death investigation, lagging nearly two-hundred years behind other European authorities. Using the coroner's inquest as a lens, this book hopes to offer a fresh perspective on the process of death investigation in medieval England. The central premise of this book is that medical practitioners did participate in death investigation – although not in every inquest, or even most, and not necessarily in those investigations where we today would deem their advice most pertinent. The medieval relationship with death and disease, in particular, shaped coroners' and their jurors' understanding of the inquest's medical needs and led them to conclusions that can only be understood in context of the medieval world's holistic approach to health and medicine. Moreover, while the English resisted Southern Europe's penchant for autopsies, at times their findings reveal a solid understanding of internal medicine. By studying cause of death in the coroners' reports, this study sheds new light on subjects such as abortion by assault, bubonic plague, cruentation, epilepsy, insanity, senescence, and unnatural death.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Medicine in an Age of Revolution is the first major attempt since the 1970s to challenge the idea that the essential engine of medical (and scientific) change in seventeenth-century Britain was puritanism. While Peter Elmer seeks to reaffirm the crucial role of the period of the civil wars and their aftermath in providing the most congenial context for a re-evaluation of traditional attitudes to medicine, he rejects the idea that such initiatives were the special preserve of a small religious elite (puritans), claiming instead that enthusiasm for change can be found across the religious spectrum. At the same time, Elmer seeks to show that medical practitioners were increasingly drawn into contemporary religious and political debates in a way that led to a fundamental politicization of the 'profession'. By the end of the seventeenth century, it was commonplace to see doctors, apothecaries, and surgeons fully engaged in everyday political and civic life. At the same time, religious and political orientation often became an important factor in the career development of medics, especially in towns and cities, where substantial benefits might accrue to those who found themselves in favour with the ruling elites, be they Whig or Tory. The body politic, a Renaissance commonplace, was now peopled by medical practitioners who often claimed a special authority when it came to diagnosing the ills of late seventeenth century society.

The authors focus on four major thematic areas – the reform of church, the reform of theology, the reform of perspective, and the reform of method – which together encompasses the breadth and depth of Cusanus’ own reform initiatives.

What was the medical marketplace? This book provides the first critical examination of medicine and the market in pre-modern England, colonial North America and British India. Chapters explore the most important themes in the social history of medicine and offer a fresh understanding of healthcare in this time of social and economic transformation.

Simon Forman (1552-1611) is one of London's most infamous astrologers. He stood apart from the medical elite because he was not formally educated and because he represented, and boldly asserted, medical ideas that were antithetical to those held by most learned physicians. He survived the plague, was consulted thousands of times a year for medical and other questions, distilled strong waters made from beer, herbs, and sometimes chemical ingredients, pursued the philosopher's stonein experiments and ancient texts, and when he was fortunate spoke with angels. He wrote compulsively, documenting his life and protesting his expertise in thousands of pages of notes and treatises. This highly readable book provides the first full account of Forman's papers, makes sense of hisnotorious reputation, and vividly recovers the world of medicine and magic in Elizabethan London.