1st Edition

Medicine, Health and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1600-2000

Edited By Steve Sturdy Copyright 2002
    304 Pages
    by Routledge

    304 Pages
    by Routledge

    Medicine is concerned with the most intimate aspects of private life. Yet it is also a focus for diverse forms of public organization and action. In this volume, an international team of scholars use the techniques of medical history to analyse the changing boundaries and constitution of the public sphere from early modernity to the present day.
    In a series of detailed historical case studies, contributors examine the role of various public institutions - both formal and informal, voluntary and statutory - in organizing and coordinating collective action on medical matters. In so doing, they challenge the determinism and fatalism of Habermas's overarching and functionalist account of the rise and fall of the public sphere.
    Of essential interest to historians and sociologists of medicine, this book will also be of value to historians of modern Britain, historical sociologists, and those engaged in studying the work of Jürgen Habermas.

    Steve Sturdy Introduction: Medicine, Health and the Public Sphere Part I: Public-Private Interactions 1. Margaret Pelling Public and Private Dilemmas: the College of Physicians in Early Modern London 2. Pamela K. Gilbert Producing the Public: Public Medicine in Private Spaces 3. Andrew A. G. Morrice 'Should the Doctor Tell?' Medical Secrecy in Early Twentieth Century Britain Part II: Voluntary Institutions and the Public Sphere 4. Adrian Wilson The Birmingham General Hospital and its Public 1765-1779 5. Elaine Thomson Between Separate Spheres: Medical Women, Moral Hygiene and the Edinburgh Hospital for Women and Children 6. Martin Gorsky, John Mohan and Martin Powell British Voluntary Hospitals and the Public Sphere: Contribution and Participation Before the National Health Service 7. David Cantor Representing 'the Public': Medicine, Charity and Emotion in Twentieth-Century Britain Part III: The State and the Public Sphere 8. Deborah Brunton Policy, Powers and Practice: the Public Response to Public Health in the Scottish City 9. Christopher Hamlin Public Sphere to Public Health: the Transformation of 'Nuisance' 10. Logie Barrow In the Beginning was the Lymph; the Hollowing of Stational Vaccination in England and Wales, 1840-98 11. Bill Luckin The Shaping of a Public Environmental Sphere in Late Nineteenth-Century London 12. Steve Sturdy Alternative Publics: the Development of Government Policy on Personal Health Care 1905-1911 13. Naomi Pfeffer Fertility Counts: from Equity to Outcome

    Biography

    Steve Sturdy