For more than 20 years The History of Medicine in Context series, edited by Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell, provided a unique platform for the publication of research pertaining to the study of medicine from broad social, cultural, political, religious and intellectual perspectives. Offering cutting-edge scholarship on a range of medical subjects that cross chronological, geographical and disciplinary boundaries, the series consistently challenges received views about medical history and shows how medicine has had a much more pronounced effect on western society than is often acknowledged. As medical knowledge progresses, throwing up new challenges and moral dilemmas, The History of Medicine in Context series offers the opportunity to evaluate the shifting role and practice of medicine from the long perspective, not only providing a better understanding of the past, but often an intriguing perspective on the present.
By Angela Montford
May 16, 2017
Health, Sickness, Medicine and the Friars in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries explores the attitudes and responses of the mendicant orders to illness, their contribution to medical history, the influence of health and sickness as a factor in the orders' decision making, the extent of their ...
By Ole Peter Grell, Andrew Cunningham
May 16, 2017
Throughout history governments have had to confront the problem of how to deal with the poorer parts of their population. During the medieval and early modern period this responsibility was largely borne by religious institutions, civic institutions and individual charity. By the eighteenth century...
By Ole Peter Grell, Andrew Cunningham
June 29, 2017
The poor and the sick-poor have always presented a problem to the governments and churches of Europe. Whose responsibility are they? Are they a wilful burden on the honest working population, or are they a necessary presence for the true Christian to live the true Christian life? In the 18th and ...
By Eric Gruber von Arni
May 16, 2017
In the popular imagination, the notion of military medicine prior to the twentieth century is dominated by images of brutal ignorance, superstition and indifference. In an age before the introduction of anaesthetics, antibiotics and the sterilisation of instruments, it is perhaps unsurprising that...
By Roger King
June 29, 2017
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, ...
By Ann Bradshaw
May 16, 2017
The British apprenticeship model of nurse training, developed under Florence Nightingale’s influence from 1860 at St Thomas’s Hospital, gained national and world-wide recognition. Its end was heralded with the publication of the last national syllabus from the General Nursing Council for England ...
By Marcos Cueto
May 16, 2017
Historians have long recognized epidemics to be a significant, though sometimes hidden, factor in the fortunes of societies and civilizations. The study of epidemics heightens our understanding of relationships between economic systems and living conditions. It illuminates the ideologies and ...
By Jharna Gourlay
February 27, 2017
Florence Nightingale and the Health of the Raj presents in detail Nightingale's involvement with India and Indians, and shows how she progressed from being concerned with the narrow sphere of army sanitation to the socio-economic condition of the whole of India. Despite her interest in the ...
Edited
By Paul Weindling
May 03, 2017
Representing a new wave of research and analysis on Nazi human experiments and coerced research, the chapters in this volume deliberately break from a top-down history limited to concentration camp experiments under the control of Himmler and the SS. Instead the collection positions extreme ...
By Elizabeth A. Williams
August 26, 2016
One of the key themes of the Enlightenment was the search for universal laws and truths that would help illuminate the workings of the universe. It is in such attitudes that we trace the origins of modern science and medicine. However, not all eighteenth century scientists and physicians believed...
By Sarah Hodges
February 27, 2017
Birth control holds an unusual place in the history of medicine. Largely devoid of doctors or hospitals, only relatively recently have birth control histories included tales of laboratory-based therapeutic innovation. Instead, these histories elucidate the peculiar slippages between individual ...
By Jennifer Keelan, Kenton Kroker
November 15, 2016
Immunity is as old as illness itself, yet historians have only just begun to take up the challenge of reconstructing the modern transformation of attempts to protect against disease. Crafting Immunity assembles in one volume the most recent efforts of an international group of scholars to place the...