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This book charts the journey of British General Practitioners (GPs) towards professional self-realisation through the development of a political consciousness manifested in a series of bruising encounters with government. GPs are an essential part of the social fabric of modern Britain but as a group have always felt undervalued, clashing with successive governments over the terms on which they offered their services to the public. Explaining the background to these disputes and the motives of GPs from a sociological perspective, this research casts new light on some defining moments in the creation of the modern British state, from National Health Insurance to the National Health Service, a...
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Prior to the nineteenth century, the practice of medicine in the Western world was as much art as science. But, argues W. F. Bynum, 'modern' medicine as practiced today is built upon foundations that were firmly established between 1800 and the beginning of World War I. He demonstrates this in terms of concepts, institutions, and professional structures that evolved during this crucial period, applying both a more traditional intellectual approach to the subject and the newer social perspectives developed by recent historians of science and medicine. In a wide-ranging survey, Bynum examines the parallel development of biomedical sciences such as physiology, pathology, bacteriology, and immunology, and of clinical practice and preventive medicine in nineteenth-century Europe and North America. Focusing on medicine in the hospitals, the community, and the laboratory, Bynum contends that the impact of science was more striking on the public face of medicine and the diagnostic skills of doctors than it was on their actual therapeutic capacities.
A shrewd politician whose private life was one of bizzare and obsessive drives, sex life, love affairs, seances.
Sir Charles Bell was among the last of a generation medical men who formed their careers, their research, and their publications through the private classrooms of early-nineteenth-century London; whose ambitions for reform were fundamentally about conserving something quintessentially British; and whose politics were shaped by the exigencies of developing a living through various kinds of patronage in a time when careers in medical science simply did not exist. Within a decade or two that world was gone. Professionalization and regularized educationthe ambitions of reformershad been realized, along with regular career paths. With that change, the classroom shattered, its functions divided among other spaces, each with its own audience and function: the laboratory, the clinic, the classroom. They are the spaces of modern medicine, the ones we recognize today, and we see them as the hallmark of medical science. Through Bell s story, artfully told by the author, we witness medical science and medical reform in London s classrooms at a time when modern medicine, with its practical universities with set curricula, staffed by medical professionals, was being born. "
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