Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-industrial SocietyRoy Porter Cambridge University Press, 1985 - 364 pages The essays in this volume provide an unusual historical perspective on the experience of illness: they try to reconstruct what being ill (from a minor ailment to fatal sickness) was like in pre-industrial society from the point of view of the sufferers themselves. The authors examine the meanings that were attached to sickness; popular medical beliefs and practices; the diffusion of popular medical knowledge; and the relations between patients and their doctors (both professional and 'fringe') seen from the patients' point of view. This is an important work, for illness and death dominated life in earlier societies to an enormous degree. Yet almost no studies of this kind have ever been carried out before, practically all previous treatments having been written from the traditional point of view of the doctor, the hospital, or medical science. It will accordingly interest a wide range of readers interested in social history as well as the history of medicine itself. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Murders and miracles Lay attitudes towards medicine in classical antiquity | 23 |
Puritan perceptions of illness in seventeenth century England | 55 |
In sickness and in health A seventeenth century familys experience | 101 |
Participant or patient? Seventeenth century childbirth from the mothers point of view | 129 |
Piety and the patient Medicine and religion in eighteenth century Bristol | 145 |
Cultural habits of illness The Enlightened and the Pious in eighteenth century Germany | 177 |
The doctor scolds me The diaries and correspondence of patients in eighteenth century England | 205 |
Prescribing the rules of health Selfhelp and advice in the late eighteenth century | 249 |
Laymen doctors and medical knowledge in the eighteenth century The evidence of the Gentlemans Magazine | 283 |
The colonisation of traditional Arabic medicine | 315 |
341 | |
Other editions - View all
Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-industrial ... Roy Porter,Ray Porter No preview available - 1985 |
Common terms and phrases
advice books ailments Anglican apothecary Arabic medicine autobiography Bath Baxter behaviour belief birth body Bristol Cambridge Catcott century England Cheyne childbirth Christian Church cold correspondence culture cure death diarists diary disease divine doctors Dyer Dyer's E.g. ibid early Ebenezer Sibly eighteenth century English Enlightenment essay evidence example experience Farington friends Galen Gentleman's Magazine God's Greek healers healing historians History of Medicine Hutchinsonian idem illness interest Islamic Islamic Medicine Jane Jewson John Journal Karl Philipp Moritz later laymen letters London Longolius Medical History medical knowledge Methodist midwife modern mother nature nineteenth century Oxford pain particular patient physical physicians Pietists plague political popular practice profession professional providence providential Puritan Ralph Josselin recorded regimen religion religious remedies Richard Richard Baxter ritual Roy Porter seventeenth century sick Society soul Spangenberg spirit suffered surgeon Thomas traditional treatment Wesley William women writing wrote
References to this book
Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine Between the ... L. J. Jordanova Limited preview - 1993 |
Nurses and Doctors at Work: Rethinking Professional Boundaries Deidre Wicks No preview available - 1999 |