Medicine in Society: Historical Essays

The social history of medicine over the past fifteen years has redrawn the boundaries of medical history. Specialized papers and monographs have contributed to our knowledge of how medicine has affected society and how society has shaped medicine. This book synthesizes, 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 professionalized medicine of State influence, of hospitals, public health medicine, and scientific medicine. The book also covers innovative topics such as patient-doctor relationships, the history of the asylum, and the demographic background to the history of medicine.