Health, Medicine, and Society in Victorian England (Victorian Life and Times)

New
Hardcover
2009
$71.68

This work offers a social and cultural history of Victorian medicine from below, as experienced by ordinary practitioners and patients, often described in their own words.

* Offers a chronology of medical history in Victorian England
* Includes illustrations in every chapter, such as images from 19th-century medical textbooks, magazine cartoons, portraits, and paintings

Synopsis

This work offers a social and cultural history of Victorian medicine from below, as experienced by ordinary practitioners and patients, often described in their own words.

* Offers a chronology of medical history in Victorian England

* Includes illustrations in every chapter, such as images from 19th-century medical textbooks, magazine cartoons, portraits, and paintings

$71.68

Quantity

20+ in stock

More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 214
Publisher: Praeger Publishers Inc
Published: 30 Nov 2009
ISBN 10: 0275989526
ISBN 13: 9780275989521
Book Overview: In 1800, infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, cholera, syphilis, and smallpox were the primary causes of illness and death, but no one knew what caused them-they were generally believed to be inherited or to be the result of bad air. By 1905, the bacteria that causes tuberculosis, cholera, and syphilis had been identified, and an effective method of preventing smallpox, had dramatically cut the number of cases. Science had begun to transform medicine.

Media Reviews

A book that is a pleasure to read and that provides a well-informed, wide-ranging, and intelligent social history of medicine for the general or student reader. . . . An elegant and able introduction to the ways in which several significant diseases, blindness and deafness, the experience of illness, and the medical profession writ large operated in, affected, and were shaped by the culture and politics of the nineteenth-century British Empire. Like the best of such books, it also provides a useful starting point for the Victorianist seeking information about particular health issues-or pubic health in general. - Victorian Review
In a volume in a series designed to give a more accurate picture of life in the Victorian era, Carpenter (emeritus, English, Queen's U., Kingston, Ontario, Canada) presents a sociocultural history of evolving 19th century medicine in the UK interwoven with period medical and literary writing. Among the themes discussed are attitudes and practices toward: women as patients; tuberculosis, venereal, and other diseases; education of the handicapped (deaf and dumb, blind); and especially timely, vaccination. The book includes a public health chronology, glossary, and period medical illustrations. - SciTech Book News
... a welcome addition to a field not abundantly stocked with short, relatively inexpensive texts and will be useful for undergraduates beginning their study of the subject. It is elegantly written, and Carpenter's use of literary sources broadens the appeal of the subject to students in other disciplines approaching the history of medicine for the first time. - Social History of Medicine

Author Bio

Mary Wilson Carpenter is professor emerita of the Department of English at Queen's University in Kingston, ON.