Overview
- Uncovers and charts the great variations in knowledge and skill among doctors, nurses and midwives who treated venereal diseases across a wide range of medical institutions
- Deconstructs the notion of medicine as monolithic, revealing the uneven adoption of new ideas, diagnostic innovations and therapeutic technologies
- Contributes significantly to broader debates in the history of medicine and the sociology of scientific knowledge
Part of the book series: Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History (MBSMH)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
This book reveals the ever-present challenges of patient care at the forefront of medical knowledge. Syphilis and gonorrhoea played upon the public imagination in Victorian and Edwardian England, inspiring fascination and fear. Seemingly inextricable from the other great 'social evil', prostitution, these diseases represented contamination, both physical and moral. They infiltrated respectable homes and brought terrible suffering and stigma to those afflicted. Medicine, Knowledge and Venereal Diseases takes us back to an age before penicillin and the NHS, when developments in pathology, symptomology and aetiology were transforming clinical practice. This is the first book to examine systematically how doctors, nurses and midwives grappled with new ideas and laboratory-based technologies in their fight against venereal diseases in voluntary hospitals, general practice and Poor Law institutions. It opens up new perspectives on what made competent and safe medical professionals;how these standards changed over time; and how changing attitudes and expectations affected the medical authority and autonomy of different professional groups.
Reviews
“This book considers the societal, legislative, scientific and medical changes that influenced our understanding of, and responses to, syphilis and gonorrhoea. … it richly illustrates the problems faced by healthcare professionals and contains a wealth of information of interest to the more general reader.” (Tim Mason, BSHM British Society for the History of Medicine, bshm.org.uk, July, 2017)
“This meticulous and solid work adds substantially to our understanding of the medical and other health professions’ knowledge of venereal diseases during a period of significant debate about these ailments, with changing understandings of their significance to individual and national health, and major advances in diagnosis and treatment. Hanley also reminds us how very far from monolithic the medical profession has always been and of the significance of financial factors in the uptake of new developments.” (Lesley A. Hall, Wellcome Library Research Fellow, UK)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Anne Hanley is a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. After completing her PhD in History at the University of Cambridge, she worked with the Centre for History and Philosophy of Science and the Museum of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Leeds. Her research interests are in the social history of medicine and healthcare during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, along with closely related themes in gender, political and economic history. She has published on the history of infertility, midwifery, medical education and nineteenth-century clinical experimentation.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Medicine, Knowledge and Venereal Diseases in England, 1886-1916
Authors: Anne R. Hanley
Series Title: Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32455-5
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-32454-8Published: 11 November 2016
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-81290-8Published: 27 June 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-32455-5Published: 04 November 2016
Series ISSN: 2947-9142
Series E-ISSN: 2947-9150
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 318
Number of Illustrations: 7 b/w illustrations, 2 illustrations in colour
Topics: History of Britain and Ireland, History of Science, Cultural History