Description
Book SynopsisAlthough articles in this volume fall into three thematic clusters, each of those groups exemplifies three general themes: micro-social processes; innovations and the question of continuity versus discontinuity; and the relationship between ideas and practice. Most of these essays touch upon, and some of them are exclusively concerned with, small scale social processes: e.g. the routines of the all-female early-modern childbirth ritual, the different ways that male practitioners were summoned to such occasions, the functioning of voluntary hospitals, the protocols underlying patient records. Such social practices are well worth studying as both the sites and drivers of larger-scale historical change. Whenever there comes into being something new - whether an institution (a hospital), a social practice (the summoning of men as midwives) or a concept (a new approach to disease) - the question arises as to its relationship with what went before. This concept resonates throughout these
Table of ContentsContents: Introduction. Part 1 Childbirth and Midwifery: William Hunter and the varieties of man-midwifery; The ceremony of childbirth and its interpretation; A memorial of Eleanor Willughby, a seventeenth-century midwife. Part 2 Medical Institutions: The politics of medical improvement in early Hanoverian London; Conflict, consensus and charity: politics and the provincial voluntary hospitals in the eighteenth century; The Birmingham General Hospital and its public, 1765-79. Part 3 Medical Concepts and Practices: On the history of disease-concepts: the case of pleurisy; Porter versus Foucault on the ’birth of the clinic’. Index.
