An excellent biography of John Haygarth, an important 18th-century physician who is most well known for his visionary plan to eliminate smallpox from Great Britain through the careful practice of inoculation & isolation. Haygarth made many more innovative & far-reaching contributions to medicine & to philanthropy. He became a physician in Chester in 1767. There he introduced separate wards in the Chester Infirmary where patients with fever could be isolated & cared for. It was the stimulus for the development of the fever hospitals of 19th cent. England. He also played a major role in the foundation of the Bath Provident Institution for savings, a model for the savings-bank movement in England. Black & white illustrations.

A revealing look at how the memory of the plague held the poor responsible for epidemic disease in eighteenth-century Britain Britain had no idea that it would not see another plague after the horrors of 1666, and for a century and a half the fear of epidemic disease gripped and shaped British society. Plague doctors had long asserted that the bodies of the poor were especially prone to generating and spreading contagious disease, and British doctors and laypeople alike took those warnings to heart, guiding medical ideas of class throughout the eighteenth century. Dense congregations of the poor—in workhouses, hospitals, slums, courtrooms, markets, and especially prisons—were rendered sites of immense danger in the public imagination, and the fear that small outbreaks might run wild became a profound cultural force. Extensively researched, with a wide body of evidence, this book offers a fascinating look at how class was constructed physiologically and provides a new connection between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and the ravages of plague and cholera, respectively.

This book explores the improbable rise of medical hypnotism in Victorian Britain and its subsequent assimilation and neglect. It follows the careers of the ‘New Hypnotists’: Charles Lloyd Tuckey, John Milne Bramwell, George Kingsbury and Robert Felkin. This loosely knit group all trained with the Suggestion School of Nancy and published books on hypnotism. They had to confront the many public and medical prejudices against the trance state which had persisted after the scandalous disgrace of John Elliotson and medical mesmerism, fifty years before. Hypnotism was a highly contested technology and in the 1890s the debates about safety and utility were fought in the national newspapers as well as the medical journals. The new hypnotists took on the might of the medical institutions personified by Ernest Hart, Editor of the British Medical Journal. However their timing was propitious, as the rise of faith-healing forced the medical profession to confront the non-physical therapeutic aspects of the doctor-patient relationship. The hypnotic discourse was shaped by these developments, but also by the fascination of the general public, novelists, occultists, psychic investigators, educationalists and spiritualists in the myriad possibilities of the trance state. Despite growing interest in the prehistory of British psychology and talking therapies, and the recent challenges to the primacy of Freudian histories, there are few accounts of the development of British ‘eclectic therapy’. This book uses the New Hypnotists as a lens to examine Victorian medicine and society, exploring their role in establishing the term ‘psychotherapy,’ and legitimising medical hypnotism, a precursor of psychological therapies.

Considering its importance, the history of fetal health and mortality remains a neglected area. Medical historians have tended to focus on maternal mortality and professional conflicts between midwives rather than on the unborn, while among the social scientists demographers and epidemiologists have until recently devoted most of their attention to infants and children. Death before Birth redresses this imbalance, redirecting attention to the fetus. A study of fetal health from the seventeenth century to the present day, it is the first book to offer an historical perspective on the subject and to combine both medical history and epidemiological and demographic research, using long-term and comparative perspectives, including a strong international comparative element, across both Europe and North America. The book not only provides an account of how fetal health and the risks facing the unborn (miscarriages, abortions, stillbirths etc) have changed, it also offers an interpretation of the causes, one that focuses on the role of obstetrics and the epidemiology of maternal infections. Along the way, it pays detailed attention to a host of related themes, such as varying cultural practices in the recognition of stillbirths; the age pattern of mortality risk between conception and live birth; comparative trends in late-fetal mortality and their causes; fetal mortality and obstetric care during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries; and the contrasting approaches of the pathologists and 'social epidemiologists' to the causes of fetal death. The book concludes with a study of the 'fetus as patient', focusing on issues surrounding the legalization of abortion in many Western countries and the public health challenges of persistently high mortality in less developed countries.

In the decades before the Revolution, Americans and Britons shared an imperial approach to helping those in need during times of disaster and hardship. They worked together on charitable ventures designed to strengthen the British empire, and ordinary men and women made donations for faraway members of the British community. Growing up in this world of connections, future activists from the British Isles, North America, and the West Indies developed expansive outlooks and transatlantic ties. The schism created by the Revolution fractured the community that nurtured this generation of philanthropists. In From Empire to Humanity, Amanda Moniz tells the story of a generation of American and British activists who transformed humanitarianism as they adjusted to being foreigners. American independence put an end to their common imperial humanitarianism, but not their friendships, their far-reaching visions, or their belief that philanthropy was a tool of statecraft. In the postwar years, these philanthropists, led by doctor-activists, collaborated on the anti-drowning cause, spread new medical charities, combatted the slave trade, reformed penal practices, and experimented with relieving needy strangers. The nature of their cooperation, however, had changed. No longer members of the same polity, they adopted a universal approach to their benevolence, working together for the good of humanity, rather than empire. Making the care of suffering strangers routine, these British and American activists laid the groundwork for later generations' global undertakings. From Empire to Humanity offers new perspectives on the history of philanthropy, as well as the Atlantic world and colonial and postcolonial history.

Why do we still have nits? What exactly are 'purity rules'? And why have baths scarcely changed in 200 years? The long history of personal hygiene and purity is a fascinating subject that reveals how closely we are linked to our deeper past. In this pioneering book, Virginia Smith covers the global history of human body-care from the Neolithic to the present, using first-hand accounts and sources. From pre-historic grooming rituals to New Age medicine, from ascetics to cosmetics, Smith looks at how different cultures have interpreted and striven for personal cleanliness and shows how, throughout history, this striving for purity has brought great social benefits as well as great tragedies. It is probably safe to say that no-one who reads this book will look at his or her body (or bathroom) in quite the same way again.

Michael Bennett provides the first history of the global spread of vaccination during the Napoleonic Wars, offering a new assessment of the cowpox discovery and Edward Jenner's achievement in making cowpox inoculation a viable and universally available practice. He explores the networks that took the vaccine around the world, and the reception and establishment of vaccination among peoples in all corners of the globe. His focus is on the human story of the horrors of smallpox, the hopes invested in vaccination by medical men and parents, the children put arm-to-arm across the world, and the early challenges, successes and disappointments. He presents vaccination as a quiet revolution, genuinely emancipatory, but also the sharp end of growing state power. By the end of the war in 1815, millions of children had been vaccinated. The early success of the war against smallpox paved the way to further advances towards eradication.

Dr. Edward Jenner was a man who has saved millions of lives due to his discovery of cowpox as the most effective treatment for the killer disease of smallpox. Born in 1749, he was orphaned at the age of five years, his parents both dying within two months of each other in 1754. He was sent away to boarding school at the age of eight years, and whilst there was subjected to be inoculated with a small amount of smallpox which was the standard treatment of the day, although it was a matter of luck as to whether the patient survived or not. He suffered side effects that haunted him to his dying day. Luckily for us, he survived his ordeal, and as an adult, he dedicated his life to finding a more effective and much safer cure for smallpox and despite a great deal of opposition from some of his medical colleagues, found the cure and in 1980, the World Health Organisation officially announced that smallpox had finally been eliminated. There is a statue of him in Gloucester Cathedral and sadly visitors to the cathedral know little or nothing about him. As the 200th anniversary of his death in 1823 approaches, this book attempts to show the reader how much we owe him.