Patients Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England - Couverture rigide

Porter, Dorothy; Porter, Roy

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0804717443 ISBN 13 : 9780804717441

Editeur : Stanford University Press, 1989

Synopsis

Premodern society in England was overshadowed by illness and the threat of death. Disease descended suddenly, selecting individual victims or attacking entire households and the community at large. What did people do when they fell sick? The authors investigate the well-established tradition of self-diagnosis and medication, called 'family medicine' or 'kitchen physic'; the use of traditional healers, such as midwives, itinerants, and 'wise women'; and the flourishing world of quacks whose nostrums promised to restore one's youth or to cure cancer. Doctors and the medical profession were not held in especially high regard ('If the world knew the villainy and knavery - besides ignorance - of the physicians and apothecaries, the people would throw stones at 'em as they walked in the streets'). The authors examine the problems and opportunities of practitioners in terms of treatments, renumeration, and social status and describe how practitioners tried to achieve ascendancy over their often suspicious patients. What did doctors have to offer the sick in the centuries before Victorian professionalization and the birth of scientific medicine? This question is analyzed against the background of the cultural and religious attitudes of the time and in the context of existing medical knowledge, with special attention paid to the interaction between women patients and doctors. Throughout, the authors emphasize the personal relations between sick people and their doctors - what the sick thought of their doctors and how doctors regarded their patients. Their analysis is based on firsthand attitudes and experiences, as recorded in letters, diaries, journals, and autobiographies.<

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

Pre–modern society was overshadowed by illness and the threat of death. This outstanding new book examines what people did when they fell sick in Britain between 1650 – 1850. The authors investigate the well–established and flourishing tradition of self–medication, as practised by individuals, within the family and in the wider community. They look at what kinds of medical services could be obtained, both from the regular profession and among quacks and other healers. Above all they explore the personal and sociological bonds developed between patients and their doctors, examining in particular the economic and ethical dimensions of this privileged but precarious relationship. What precisely did doctors have to offer the sick in an age before scientific medicine could promise near–certain cures? This fundamental question is analysed against the background of the cultural and religious attitudes of Enlightenment England and in the context of the development of the medical profession.

Drawing on the letters, journals and autobiographies of individual sufferers and from the papers of doctors, this remarkable investigation opens up new issues and offers interpretations which will certainly stimulate controversy among historians, anthropologists and sociologists and lead the way to further research in this area.

Revue de presse

′The Porters have written a very important work that helps balance the conventional physician–driven accounts of eighteenth–century medicine with a richly documented examination of the sick person′s ideas about health ... Henceforth, no one writing on this subject will be able to ignore this key contribution.′ Journal of Social History

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Stanford University Press
• Date d'édition: 1989
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0804717443
• ISBN 13: 9780804717441
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 316
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible