This book takes a look at the 'age of reform', from 1780 when reform became a common object of aspiration, to the 1830s - the era of the 'Reform Ministry' and of the Great Reform Act of 1832 - and beyond, when such aspirations were realized more frequently. It pays close attention to what contemporaries termed 'reform', identifying two strands, institutional and moral, which interacted in complex ways. Particular reforming initiatives singled out for attention include those targeting parliament, government, the law, the Church, medicine, slavery, regimens of self-care, opera, theatre, and art institutions, while later chapters situate British reform in its imperial and European contexts. An extended introduction provides a point of entry to the history and historiography of the period. The book will therefore stimulate fresh thinking about this formative period of British history.

A revisionist account of the story of the foundations of public health in industrial revolution Britain.

The social history of medicine over the last fifteen years has redrawn the boundaries of medical history. Specialised papers and monographs have contributed to our knowledge of how medicine has affected society and how society has shaped medicine. This book synthesises, through a series of essays, some of the most significant findings of this 'new social history' of medicine. The period covered ranges from ancient Greece to the present time. While coverage is not exhaustive, the reader is able to trace how medicine in the West developed from an unlicensed open market place, with many different types of practitioners in the classical period, to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century professionalised medicine of State influence, of hospitals, public health medicine, and scientific medicine. The book also covers innovatory topics such as patient-doctor relationships, the history of the asylum, and the demographic background to the history of medicine.

Sir Charles Bell (1774–1842) was a medical reformer in a great age of reform—an occasional and reluctant vivisectionist, a theistic popularizer of natural science, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a surgeon, an artist, and a teacher. He was among the last of a generation of medical men who strove to fashion a particularly British science of medicine; who formed their careers, their research, and their publications through the private classrooms of nineteenth-century London; and whose politics were shaped by the exigencies of developing a living through patronage in a time when careers in medical science simply did not exist. A decade after Bell’s death, that world was gone, replaced by professionalism, standardized education, and regular career paths. In Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform, Carin Berkowitz takes readers into Bell’s world, helping us understand the life of medicine before the modern separation of classroom, laboratory, and clinic. Through Bell’s story, we witness the age when modern medical science, with its practical universities, set curricula, and medical professionals, was born.

Christopher Lawrence's critical overview of medicine's place in the development of modern Britain examines the significance of the clinical encounter in contemporary society. * first short synoptic study of its kind * breaks new ground by bringing together specialised scholarship into a broad argument * shows how the medical profession created a very specific role for itself * relates medicine to general social policy

Professional education forms a key element in the transmission of medical learning and skills, in occupational solidarity and in creating and recreating the very image of the practitioner. Yet the history of British medical education has hitherto been surprisingly neglected. Building upon papers contributed to two conferences on the history of medical education in the early 1990s, this volume presents new research and original synthesis on key aspects of medical instruction, theoretical and practical, from early medieval times into the present century. Academic and practical aspects are equally examined, and balanced attention is given to different sites of instruction, be it the university or the hospital. The crucial role of education in medical qualifications and professional licensing is also examined as is the part it has played in the regulation of the entry of women to the profession. Contributors are Juanita Burnby, W.F. Bynum, Laurence M. Geary, Faye Getz, Johanna Geyer-Kordesch, S.W.F. Holloway, Stephen Jacyna, Peter Murray Jones, Helen King, Susan C. Lawrence, Irvine Loudon, Margaret Pelling, Godelieve Van Heteren, and John Harley Warner.