You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Tracing the history of four English case studies, this book explores how, from outward appearance to interior furnishings, the material worlds of reform institutions for ‘fallen’ women reflected their moral purpose and shaped the lived experience of their inmates. Variously known as asylums, refuges, magdalens, penitentiaries, Houses or Homes of Mercy, the goal of such institutions was the moral ‘rehabilitation’ of unmarried but sexually experienced ‘fallen’ women. Largely from the working-classes, such women – some of whom had been sex workers – were represented in contradictory terms. Morally tainted and a potential threat to respectable family life, they were also worthy o...
This book is the first to explore memory, misremembering, forgetting, and anniversaries in the history of psychiatry and mental health. It challenges simplistic representations of the callous nature of mental health care in the past, while at the same time eschewing a celebratory and uncritical marking of anniversaries and individuals. Asking critical questions of the early Whiggish histories of mental health care, the book problematizes the idea of a shared professional and institutional history, and the abiding faith placed in the reform of medicine, administration, and even patients. It contends that much post-1800 legislation drafted to ensure reform, acted to preserve beliefs about the ...
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book explores how the body was investigated in the late nineteenth-century asylum in Britain. As more and more Victorian asylum doctors looked to the bodily fabric to reveal the ‘truth’ of mental disease, a whole host of techniques and technologies were brought to bear upon the patient's body. These practices encompassed the clinical and the pathological, from testing the patient's reflexes to dissecting the brain. Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum takes a unique approach to the topic, conducting a chapter-by-chapter dissection of the body. It considers how asylum doctors viewed and investigated the skin, muscles, bones, brain, and bodily fluids. The book demonstrates the importance of the body in nineteenth-century psychiatry as well as how the asylum functioned as a site of research, and will be of value to historians of psychiatry, the body, and scientific practice.
Medical therapy, research and technology enable us to make our bodies, or parts of them, available to others in an increasing number of ways. This is the case in organ, tissue, egg and sperm donation as well as in surrogate motherhood and clinical research. Bringing together leading scholars working on the ethical, social and cultural aspects of such bodily exchanges, this cutting-edge book develops new ways of understanding them. Bodily Exchanges, Bioethics and Border Crossing both probes the established giving and selling frameworks for conceptualising bodily exchanges in medicine, and seeks to develop and examine another, less familiar framework: that of sharing. A framework of sharing ca...
A pioneering study of children's social care in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, A Home From Home? presents new information and develops conceptual thinking about the history of children's care by investigating the centrality of key ideas about home, family, and nurture that shaped welfare provision for children at this time.
Still Not Safe is the story of the rise of the patient-safety movement- and how an "epidemic" of medical errors was derived from a reality that didn't support such a characterization. Physician Robert Wears and organizational theorist Kathleen Sutcliffe trace the origins of patient safety to the emergence of market trends that challenged the place of doctors in the larger medical ecosystem: the rise in medical litigation and physicians' aversion to risk; institutional changes in the organization and control of healthcare; and a bureaucratic movement to "rationalize" medical practice- to make a hospital run like a factory. Weaving together narratives from medicine, psychology, philosophy, and human performance, Still Not Safe offers a counterpoint to the presiding, doctor-centric narrative of contemporary American medicine.--book jacket
The nineteenth-century asylum was the scene of both terrible abuses and significant advancements in treatment and care. The essays in this collection look at the asylum from the perspective of the place itself – its architecture, funding and purpose – and at the experience of those who were sent there.
The period from 1830 to 1937 was transformative for modern Quakerism. Practitioners made significant contributions to world culture, from their heavy involvement in the abolitionist and women’s rights movements and creation of thriving communities of Friends in the Global South to the large-scale post–World War I humanitarian relief efforts of the American Friends Service Committee and Friends Service Council in Britain. The Creation of Modern Quaker Diversity, 1830–1937 explores these developments and the impact they had on the Quaker religion and on the broader world. Chapters examine the changes taking place within the denomination at the time, including separations, particularly in...
We all rely on doctors and they go through one of the most vigorous training regimes on the planet, but it wasn't always this way. The tremendous scale of medical ethics which now exists has benefited doctors and wider society, but few know how these rules came to be. Andreas-Holger Maehle, Professor of History of Medicine and Medical Ethics at Durham University's Department of Philosophy, Centre for the History of Medicine and Disease, and Wolfson Research Institute, has written this engaging and often riveting history of British medical ethics. From communication with patients all the way through to hard moral choices, this book will provoke debate amongst doctors, nurses, lawyers, academics and other interested people all around the world.
Sick Note shows how the question of 'who is really sick?' has never been straightforward and will continue to perplex the British state. Sick Note is a history of how the British state asked, 'who is really sick?' Tracing medical certification for absence from work from 1948 to 2010, Gareth Millward shows that doctors, employers, employees, politicians, media commentators, and citizens concerned themselves with measuring sickness. At various times, each understood that a signed note from a doctor was not enough to 'prove' whether someone was really sick. Yet, with no better alternative on offer, the sick note survived in practice and in the popular imagination - just like the welfare state i...