1st Edition
Medical Fringe and Medical Orthodoxy 1750-1850
First published in 1987. Even as the professionalism of medicine progressed, many sufferers continued to rely on what would now be termed "fringe" practitioners – quacks, backstreet surgeons, bone-setters, Thomsonian botanists, holists and naturalists. Many types of fringe medicine were popular in particular circles or reflected the political or religious preoccupations of their practitioners. Anti-establishment radicals might favour natural medicine, Christian Scientists would reject the medical aid, "Physical Puritans" would concentrate on homeopathy, hydropathy and vegetarianism to create health rather than counter disease. Some diseases, particularly venereal ones, allowed practitioners to play unscrupulously on the guilt of their patients. The end of the period saw professionalism establish itself in many areas, for example with the foundation in 1852 of the Pharmaceutical Society, and conflicts of fringe and orthodoxy became the fiercer.
The essays collected in this volume all present new research on this fascinating and diverse period in the history of medicine.
Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Treating the Wages of Sin: Venereal Disease and Specialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain W. F. Bynum 2. Publicity and the Public Good: Presenting Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Bristol Jonathan Barry 3. Orthodoxy and Fringe: Medicine in Late Georgian Bristol Michael Neve 4. ‘I Think Ye both Quacks’: The Controversy between Dr Theodor Myersbach and Dr John Coakley Lettsom Roy Porter 5. Property Rights and the Right to Health: The Regulation of Secret Remedies in France, 1789-1815 Matthew Ramsey 6. ‘The Vile Race of Quacks with which this Country Infested’ Irvine Loudon 7. The Orthodox Fringe: The Origins of the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain S. W. F. Holloway 8. Bones of Contention? Orthodox Medicine and the Mystery of the Bone-setter’s Craft Roger Cooter 9 . Physical Puritanism and Sanitary Science: Material and Immaterial Beliefs in Popular Physiology, 1650-1840 Virginia Smith 10. Early Victorian Radicals and the Medical Fringe J. F. C. Harrison 11. Social Context and Medical Theory in the Demarcation of Nineteenth-century Boundaries P. S. Brown 12. Medical Sectarianism, Therapeutic Conflict, and the Shaping of Orthodox Professional Identity in Antebellum American Medicine John Harley Warner; Index
Biography
W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter
