Cambridge studies in population, economy, and society in past time ;

The traditional demographic regime of ancient Greece and Rome is almost entirely unknown; but our best chance for understanding its characteristics is provided by the three hundred census returns that survive on papyri from Roman Egypt. These returns, which date from the first three centuries AD, list the members of ordinary households living in the Nile valley: not only family members, but lodgers and slaves. The demography of Roman Egypt has a complete and accurate catalogue of all demographically relevant information contained in the returns. On the basis of this catalogue, the authors use modern demographic methods and models in order to reconstruct the patterns of mortality, marriage, fertility, and migration that are likely to have prevailed in Roman Egypt. They recreate a more or less typical Mediterranean population as it survived and prospered nearly two millennia ago, at the dawn of the Christian era. The material presented in this book will be invaluable to scholars in a wide variety of disciplines: ancient historians - especially those working on social and family history - historical demographers, papyrologists, and social historians generally.

English population history from family reconstitution 1580-1837 represents the culmination of work carried out at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure over the past quarter-century. This work demonstrates the value of the technique of family reconstitution as a means of obtaining accurate and detailed information about fertility, mortality, and nuptiality in the past. Indeed, more is now known about many aspects of English demography in the parish register period than about the post-1837 period when the Registrar-General collected and published information. Using data from 26 parishes, the authors show clearly that their results are representative not only of the demographic situation of the parishes from which the data were drawn, but also of the country as a whole.

How did doctors make a living? Making a Medical Living explores the neglected socio-economic history of medical practice, beginning with the first voluntary hospital in 1720 and ending with national health insurance in 1911. It looks at private practice and how this was supplemented by public appointments. In this innovative study, Anne Digby makes use of new archival sources of information to produce a compelling picture of ordinary rather than elite doctors, and of the dynamics of provincial rather than metropolitan practice. From the mid-eighteenth century doctors travelled to see ordinary patients, developed specialisms and expanded institutions. Despite limitations in treatment, doctors raised demand for their services as illuminating case studies of women, children, the poor and the affluent show. But doctors did not limit their own numbers, and were largely unsuccessful in restricting competition from other practitioners, with the significant exception of women. Consequently, many GPs struggled to make a living by seeing numerous patients at low fees. Doctors' entrepreneurial activity thus helped shape English medicine into a distinctive pattern of general and specialist practice, and of public and private health care.