The social history of medicine has become recognized as a major field of historical enquiry. Aspects of health, disease, and medical care now attract the attention not only of social historians but also of researchers in a broad spectrum of historical and social science disciplines. The Society for the Social History of Medicine, founded in 1969, is an interdisciplinary body, based in Great Britain but international in membership. It exists to forward a wide-ranging view of the history of medicine, concerned equally with biological aspects of normal life, experience of and attitudes to illness, medical thought and treatment, and systems of medical care. Although frequently bearing on current issues, this interpretation of the subject makes primary reference to historical context and contemporary priorities. The intention is not to promote a sub-specialism but to conduct research according to the standards and intelligibility required of history in general.
By Joseph Melling, Bill Forsythe
February 14, 2014
The discovery and treatment of insanity remains one of the most debated and discussed issues in social history. Focusing on the second half of the nineteenth century, The Politics of Madness provides a new perspective on this important topic, based on research drawn from both local and national ...
Edited
By Steve Sturdy
September 03, 2013
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...
Edited
By David M. Turner, Kevin Stagg
August 07, 2013
Collecting together essays written by an international set of contributors, this book provides an important contribution to the emerging field of disability history. It explores changes in understandings of deformity and disability between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, and reveal the ways ...
Edited
By Roger Cooter
November 01, 2011
In the Name of the Child explores a variety of professional, social, political and cultural constructions of the child in the crucial decades around the First World War when modern notions of `the child' were elaborated and widely institutionalised.In essays specially written for the book, the ...
Edited
By Marijke Gijswit-Hofstra, Hilary Marland, Hans de Waardt
August 13, 1997
Despite the recent upsurge in interest in alternative medicine and unorthodox healers, Illness and Healing Alternatives in Western Europe is the first book to focus closely on the relationship between belief, culture, and healing in the past. In essays on France, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, ...
Edited
By Bill Forsythe, Joseph Melling
January 11, 2013
This comprehensive collection provides a fascinating summary of the debates on the growth of institutional care during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Revising and revisiting Foucault, it looks at the significance of ethnicity, race and gender as well as the impact of political and cultural...
Edited
By Jenny Stanton
May 31, 2002
This volume brings together cutting edge research by historians from Britain, Germany, France, the US, Japan and New Zealand. Innovative in its approach to innovation, it focuses on diffusion and resistance, and organization as well as technology. The collection features issues such as control and ...
By Waltraud Ernst
October 19, 2012
This fascinating volume tackles the history of the terms 'normal' and 'abnormal'. Originally meaning 'as occurring in nature', normality has taken on significant cultural gravitas and this book recognizes and explores that fact. The essays engage with the concepts of the normal and the ...
Edited
By Lutz Sauerteig, Roger Davidson
October 10, 2012
The history of sex education enables us to gain valuable insights into the cultural constructions of what different societies have defined as 'normal' sexuality and sexual health. Yet, the history of sex education has only recently attracted the full attention of historians of modern sexuality. ...
Edited
By Virginia Berridge, Kelly Loughlin
September 25, 2012
This collection opens up the post war history of public health to sustained research-based historical scrutiny. Medicine, the Market and the Mass Media examines the development of a new view of 'the health of the public' and the influences which shaped it in the post war years. Taking a broad ...
Edited
By Pamela Dale, Joseph Melling
March 21, 2012
Taking forward the debate on the role and power of institutions for treating and incarcerating the insane, this volume challenges recent scholarship and focuses on a wide range of factors impacting on the care and confinement of the insane since 1850, including such things as the community, Poor ...
By Helen M. Sweet, with Rona Dougall
February 23, 2012
This book takes a fresh look at community nursing history in Great Britain, examining the essentially generalist and low profile, domiciliary end of the professional nursing spectrum throughout the twentieth century. It charts the most significant changes affecting the nurse’s work on the district ...