Unlocking potential with the best learning and research solutions

Patients and Practitioners
Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-industrial Society

Part of Cambridge Studies in the History of Medicine

Editor: Roy Porter

Roy Porter, Vivian Nutton, Andrew Wear, Lucinda McCray Beier, Adrian Wilson, Jonathan Barry, Johanna Geyer-Kordesch, Joan Lane, Ginnie Smith, Ghada Karmi

View all contributors

Date Published: February 2003
availability: Available
format: Paperback
isbn: 9780521530613

Rate & review

Paperback

Add to wishlist

Other available formats:
eBook

Looking for an examination copy?

This title is not currently available for examination. However, if you are interested in the title for your course we can consider offering an examination copy. To register your interest please contact [email protected] providing details of the course you are teaching.

Description

Contents

Resources

Courses

About the Authors

The essays in this volume provide an unusual historical perspective on the experience of illness: they try to reconstruct what being ill (from a minor ailment to fatal sickness) was like in pre-industrial society from the point of view of the sufferers themselves. The authors examine the meanings that were attached to sickness; popular medical beliefs and practices; the diffusion of popular medical knowledge; and the relations between patients and their doctors (both professional and 'fringe') seen from the patients' point of view. This is an important work, for illness and death dominated life in earlier societies to an enormous degree. Yet almost no studies of this kind have ever been carried out before, practically all previous treatments having been written from the traditional point of view of the doctor, the hospital, or medical science. It will accordingly interest a wide range of readers interested in social history as well as the history of medicine itself.

Customer reviews

Not yet reviewed
Be the first to review

Log in to review

Review was not posted due to profanity
×

, create a review

(If you're not , sign out)

Please enter the right captcha value

Please enter a star rating.

Your review must be a minimum of 12 words.

How do you rate this item?

Reviews must contain at least 12 words about the product.

×

Product details
- Date Published: February 2003
- format: Paperback
- isbn: 9780521530613
- length: 364 pages
- dimensions: 229 x 152 x 24 mm
- weight: 0.532kg
- availability: Available
Table of Contents
1. Introduction Roy Porter
2. Murders and miracles: lay attitudes towards medicine in classical antiquity Vivian Nutton
3. Puritan perceptions of illness in seventeenth century England Andrew Wear
4. In sickness and in health: a seventeenth century family's experience Lucinda McCray Beier
5. Participant or patient? seventeenth century childbirth from the mother's point of view Adrian Wilson
6. Piety and the patient: medicine and religion in eighteenth century Bristol Jonathan Barry
7. Cultural habits of illness: the Enlightened and the Pious in eighteenth century Germany Johanna Geyer-Kordesch
8. 'The doctor scolds me': the diaries and correspondence of patients in eighteenth century England Joan Lane
9. Prescribing the rules of health: self-help and advice in the late eighteenth century Ginnie Smith
10. Laymen, doctors and medical knowledge in the eighteenth century: the evidence of the Gentleman's Magazine Roy Porter
11. The colonisation of traditional Arabic medicine Ghada Karmi
Index.
Look Inside
Editor
Roy Porter
Contributors
Roy Porter, Vivian Nutton, Andrew Wear, Lucinda McCray Beier, Adrian Wilson, Jonathan Barry, Johanna Geyer-Kordesch, Joan Lane, Ginnie Smith, Ghada Karmi