The Wellcome Institute series in the history of medicine

"Nowadays medicine and literature are widely seen as falling on different sides of the 'two cultures' divide. This was not so in the eighteenth century when doctors, scientists, writers and artists formed a well-integrated educated elite and often collaborated with each other. Physicians like Erasmus Darwin doubled as poets; novelists such as Tobias Smollett were medically qualified. This close interplay of medicine and literature in the Enlightenment showed in literary ideas and expression - debates raged as to whether writing was itself therapeutic, or possibly a disease. And poets and novelists for their part drew heavily on medical language and learning for their models of human nature, of the action of the emotions and the dialectic of body and psyche." "Written by leading historians of medicine and eighteenth-century literary critics, Literature and Medicine During the Eighteenth Century takes up these themes, paying special attention to questions of body language and the representation of the inner life. The chapters include an analysis of dreams and the unconscious; a discussion of the medical theories concerning the prolongation of life, and the way in which novelists picked up on this theme; and the cults of invalidism and hypochondria." "In addition, broader-ranging social historical discussions investigate the relations between the medical colleges and Grub Street, between the emergent professional doctor and the new breed of writers, and the way medicine contributed towards informing a gendered view of the world. A major new exploration of the unity of Enlightenment culture, Literature and Medicine During the Eighteenth Century will be of interest to intellectual historians, literary scholars and medical historians alike."--BOOK JACKET.

"How have we come to hold our present attitudes towards health, sickness and the medical profession? Roy Porter argues that the outlooks of the age of the Enlightenment were crucially important in the creation of modern thinking about disease, doctors and society. In order to probe the origins, interpretation and significance of such views, he focuses upon one prominent doctor active in England at the close of the eighteenth century, Thomas Beddoes, and examines his challenging, pugnacious, radical and often amusing views on a wide range of issues concerned with the place of illness and medicine in society. Beddoes is particularly interesting, since he was a leading medical scientist, an active political radical, a prolific author, and centre of an intellectual circle that included Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the young Humphry Davy." "Successive chapters examine Beddoes's views about the progress of medical science, the social and psychological causes of sickness in advanced commercial and industrial societies, amongst both the upper and the working classes, the prevalence of quackery, the ills of the medical profession and their reform, and the meaning of sickness for the individual. Beddoes posed the question of what kind of medicine would be needed for a future enlightened, urban society, and the place of the doctor within a democratic order. The failure of the French Revolution gave a pessimistic as well as a progressive cast to Beddoes's vision. Many debates within medicine today continue to echo the topics which Beddoes himself discussed in his ever-trenchant and provocative manner."--BOOK JACKET.

"It is generally assumed that tropical medicine only emerged as a medical specialism in the late nineteenth century under the aegis of men like Patrick Manson and Ronald Ross. However, recent research (much of it brought together for the first time in this volume) shows that a distinctive medicine of 'warm climates' came into existence much earlier in the areas like the West Indies, Indonesia and India. Europeans health needs were one imperative, but this was more than just the medicine of Europe shipped overseas. Contact with non-Western medical ideas and practices was also a stimulus, as was Europe's encounter with unfamiliar environments and peoples." "These essays provide valuable insights into the early history of tropical medicine and from the standpoint of several European powers. They examine the kinds of medicine practised, the responses to local diseases and environments and diseases, and the relationship between the old medicine of 'warm climates' and the emerging tropical medicine of the late nineteenth century. The volume as a whole expands the parameters for the discussion of the evolution of Western medicine and opens up new perspectives on European science and society overseas."--BOOK JACKET.

In the early modern centuries disease was rampant, medicine had few powerful weapons in its armoury, and the provision of professional medical care was patchy. Under such circumstances it is no surprise that a body of popularized medical writings appeared, aiming to explain how ordinary people could best take care of their own health, in the absence of, or by way of supplement to, professional medical care. The Popularization of Medicine explores the rise of this form of people's medicine, from the early days of printing to the Victorian age, focusing upon the different experiences of Britain and France, more marginal European nations like Spain and Hungary, and upon North America. It assesses the wider social and cultural history contexts of the tradition: its religious rationales in radical Protestantism, conflicts between elite and popular culture, challenges to medical monopoly and the spread of medical hegemony. It also addresses the problems of the historical interpretation of medical texts that were probably read and used in ways unfamiliar to us nowadays. The history of the popularization of regular medicine has hitherto been neglected. This pioneering book charts for the first time a major dimension of the history of medicine in culture.