This study is concerned not with famous doctors, but with the rank and file practitioners of the 18th and 19th centuries. Some common assumptions about the history of the medical profession are challenged in this book, based largely on manuscript sources.

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.

Before World War II, the great majority of practicing doctors in England and Wales were general practitioners. They performed their own surgery, and were accustomed to treating a wide variety of illnesses and symptoms. Specialists were few in number, tended to practice in large towns, and were often associated with major hospitals. But rapidly changing medical institutions and services in the twentieth century have compelled specialization even among more modest doctors and hospitals. While medical specialization was not new-for centuries physicians were differentiated from surgeons-twentieth-century science and technology emphasized and accelerated this difference rapidly. Medical care began to shift from services rendered by the general practitioner to the employment of those doctors with a special interest-for example, pathology, neurology, or cardiology. Author Rosemary Stevens, an expert in public health, traces, especially within the last two centuries, the patterns of English medical practice, institutions, staffing, and training, and their influence on specialization, the British National Health Service Act, and post-World War II developments. Stevens discusses the ever-relevant issues of income determination, medical education, and the future of the general practitioner in an age of specialization. Along with its companion volume, Medical Practice in Modern England is a book that will be of lasting value to scholars of medicine, medical care organization, economics, and modern social history. It is of special importance at a time of crisis in the health care systems of many European Societies. "A fine book. Carefully constructed, factual, elaborately researched, gracefully written."-George A. Silver, M.D., professor emeritus of epidemiology and public health, Yale University. Rosemary Stevens is professor emeritus of history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsyvlania. Educated at Oxford, Yale, and Manchester, she has also taught at Yale University and Tulane University. She is the author of American Medicine and the Public Interest and In Sickness and in Wealth: American Hospitals in the Twentieth Century.

'McWhinney's Textbook of Family Medicine' is one of the seminal texts in the field, defining the principles and practices of family medicine as a distinct field of practice. The fourth edition presents six new clinical chapters of common problems in family medicine.

This is a history of general practice under the National Health Service, covering the whole of the first 50 years, from 1948 to the present.

The first collective record of the evolution of general medical practice as an academic discipline over half a century. This anthology captures the stories of the early struggles to set up university departments between visionary supporters and traditionalist blockers as well as the steadily increasing successes aided by a dedicated funding system. The accounts are written where possible by the people involved in the early developments of their subject. These tales are of vision, commitment and resilience and are interesting both in their own right and for the more general lessons they tell us about the processes of creating institutional change within a modern democracy.

This book focuses on a formative period in the development of modern general practice. The foundations of present-day health care in Britain were created in the century before the National Health Service of 1948, when medicine was transformed in its structure, professional status, economic organization, and therapeutic power. In the first full-length study of general practice for these years, Anne Digby deploys an impressive range of hitherto unused archival material and oral testimony to probe the character of general practitioners careers and practices, and to assess their relationships with local communities, a wider society, and the state. An evolutionary approach is adopted to explain the origins and nature of the many changes in medical practice, and the lives of ordinary doctors. The study also explores the gendered nature of medical practice as reflected in the experience of a golden band of women GPs, and examines the hidden role of the doctors wife in the practice.

Conflicting models of selfhood have become central to debates over modern medicine. Yet we still lack a clear historical account of how this psychological sensibility came to be established. The Transformation of the Psyche in British Primary Care, 1880-1970 will remedy this situation by demonstrating that there is nothing inevitable about the current connection between health, identity and personal history. It traces the changing conception of the psyche in Britain over the last two centuries and it demonstrates how these changes were rooted in transformed patterns of medical care. The shifts from private medicine through to National Insurance and the National Health Service fostered different kinds of relationship between doctor and patient and different understandings of psychological distress. The Transformation of the Psyche in British Primary Care, 1880-1970 examines these transformations and, in so doing, provides new critical insights into our modern sense of identity and changing notions of health that will be of great value to anyone interested in the modern history of British medicine.