Physicians, Peasants, and Modern Medicine

Physicians, Peasants, and Modern Medicine
Author: Constantin Bărbulescu
Publisher: Central European University Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2019-04-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 963386268X

This monograph, a coherent and consistent historical narrative about Romania's modernization, focuses on one section of the country's elites of the late nineteenth century, namely the health professionals, and on the imagery they constructed as they interacted with the peasant and his world. Doctors ventured out of cities and became a familiar sight on dusty country roads in of Moldavia and Wallachia. Beyond a charitable impulse they did so thru patriotism as the rural world became ever more prominent within the national ideology. Furthermore, new health legislation required the district general practitioner (medicul de plasă) to visit the villages in his catchment area twice a month. Based on solid original research, the book describes rural conditions of the time and the efforts aiming to improve peasants' way of life with abundant quotes from doctors' public health reports and memoirs. The book sheds light on a variety of microscale realities of social life in the medical discourse on the peasant and the rural world in the mirror of medical discourse. Themes include general hygiene, clothing, dwellings, nutrition, drinking habits and healing practices of the peasantry, in the eye of medical specialists. Related official measures, laws, regulations, norms about public health are also discussed in the frame of wider modernizing processes.

Modern Death

Modern Death
Author: Haider Warraich
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2017-02-07
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1250104580

A contemporary exploration of death and dying by a young Duke Fellow who investigates the hows, whys, wheres, and whens of modern death and their cultural significance.

Modern Medicine

Modern Medicine
Author: Sanjeev Mangrulkar
Publisher:
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2020-08-27
Genre:
ISBN:

Modern Medicine, also called as Allopathic Medicine happens to be the chief, scientific mainstream system looking after the health of the societies all over the world. It boasts of its true scientific culture, transparency in approach, it is progressive all the while and is quick to respond to the needs of society from time to time. The last few decades have witnessed a great progress in medical science through research and technological innovations. Along with this growth, the modern medicine has also developed many weaknesses, its chief scientific foundation is getting corroded. It is failing in its goal to deliver health to the society and has started generating phobia of diseases in the minds of people. It is getting less cost-effective and less pragmatic. This book covers the pathology of this process, it shows how the science is getting perverted, how statistics is being misused, how the technological and scientific progress is being used to generate business. The health care system is getting heavily monetized. Hospital industry is getting corporatized. The Mediclaim insurance policies are being projected as the need of society. Medicine thus has become a business of money. This has led to moral degradation. The book discusses all these issues, suggests some innovative solutions wherever possible. It intends to put forth two important points- how morality is a product of social values and finally; how mind is responsible for many of the human reactions.This book aims at readers, medicos or otherwise, who love reading thought provoking material and who believe that reading is equally an active intelligent process as writing is. Starting from technical aspects of medicine, it escalates to discuss social, economic, moral, ethical, philosophical issues as seen through the narrow window of medical science. Any science in its highest evolved form has to embrace philosophy, this book attempts at that. The book should be treated as a frank introspection of medical practice in modern times by an active medical practitioner, chiefly in the Indian context. It intends to introduce non-medical persons to the intricacies of medical science, medical practice and medical decision making. Simultaneously, it challenges the thought process of medical practitioners and wants to create an awareness in their sensitive minds regarding the possible shortcomings of the modern medical science. The aim is not only to generate conscientious, humane pragmatic medical practitioners; but also, to generate intelligently curious patients who would help their doctors in improving their practicing skills and standards. A combination of good doctors and equally good patients is needed to maintain the highest standards in medical practice. The aim of medical practice is not only to alleviate bodily suffering, to prevent and treat deformities or merely to prolong life; but it is also to add happiness to everyone's life. This book kindles the quest for the same.

Medicine and the Inquisition in the Early Modern World

Medicine and the Inquisition in the Early Modern World
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2019-07-01
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9004386467

Medicine and the Inquisition offers a wide-ranging and subtle account of the role played by the Roman, Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions in shaping medical learning and practice in the early modern world.

Medicine in Rural China

Medicine in Rural China
Author: C. C. Chen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 1989-01-01
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9780520062986

Medical Miracles

Medical Miracles
Author: Jacalyn Duffin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2009
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 019533650X

Modern culture tends to separate medicine and miracles, but their histories are closely intertwined. The Roman Catholic Church recognizes saints through canonization based on evidence that they worked miracles, as signs of their proximity to God. Physicianhistorian Jacalyn Duffin has examined Vatican sources on 1400 miracles from six continents and spanning four centuries. Overwhelmingly the miracles cited in canonizations between 1588 and 1999 are healings, and the majority entail medical care and physician testimony. These remarkable records contain intimate stories of illness, prayer, and treatment, as told by people who rarely leave traces: peasants and illiterates, men and women, old and young. A woman's breast tumor melts away; a man's wounds knit; a lame girl suddenly walks; a dead baby revives. Suspicious of wishful thinking or na ve enthusiasm, skeptical clergy shaped the inquiries to identify recoveries that remain unexplained by the best doctors of the era. The tales of healing are supplemented with substantial testimony from these physicians. Some elements of the miracles change through time. Duffin shows that doctors increase in number; new technologies are embraced quickly; diagnoses shift with altered capabilities. But other aspects of the miracles are stable. The narratives follow a dramatic structure, shaped by the formal questions asked of each witness and by perennial reactions to illness and healing. In this history, medicine and religion emerge as parallel endeavors aimed at deriving meaningful signs from particular instances of human distress -- signs to explain, alleviate, and console in confrontation with suffering and mortality. A lively, sweeping analysis of a fascinating set of records, this book also poses an exciting methodological challenge to historians: miracle stories are a vital source not only on the thoughts and feelings of ordinary people, but also on medical science and its practitioners.

Modern Colonization by Medical Intervention

Modern Colonization by Medical Intervention
Author: Nicole Trujillo-Pagan
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2013-09-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004243712

Modern Colonization by Medical Intervention adds to our understanding of the political and economic transformations establishing colonial modernity in Puerto Rico. By focusing on influential physicians’ clinical work and their access to a remote and inaccessible rural population, this volume details how rural areas suffered the ravages of social dislocation, unemployment and hunger. The colonial administration’s hookworm campaign involved many Puerto Rican physicians in complex struggles with other elites, rural peasants and U.S. colonial administrators for political legitimacy. Puerto Rican physicians did not gain the professional autonomy their counterparts in the United States enjoyed. Instead, they became centrally implicated in the struggle between labor and capital enforcing the island’s subordination to a colonial modernity and the development of capitalism on the island.

Divine Doctors and Dreadful Distempers

Divine Doctors and Dreadful Distempers
Author: Christi Sumich
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2013-10-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 9401209472

Divine Doctors and Dreadful Distempers examines the discourse of seventeenth-century English physicians to demonstrate that physicians utilized cultural attitudes and beliefs to create medical theory. They meshed moralism with medicine to self-fashion an image of themselves as knowledgeable health experts whose education assured good judgment and sage advice, and whose interest in the health of their patients surpassed the peddling of a single nostrum to everyone. The combination of morality with medicine gave them the support of the influential godly in society because physicians’ theories about disease and its prevention supported contemporary concerns that sinfulness was rampant. Particularly disturbing to the godly were sins deemed most threatening to the social order: lasciviousness, ungodliness, and unruliness, all of which were most clearly and threateningly manifested in the urban poor. Physicians’ medical theories and suggestions for curbing some of the most feared and destructive diseases in the seventeenth century, most notably plague and syphilis, focused on reforming or incarcerating the sick and sinful poor. Doing so helped propel physicians to an elevated position in the hierarchy of healers competing for patients in seventeenth-century England.