The Medical Trade Catalogue in Britain, 1870-1914

The Medical Trade Catalogue in Britain, 1870-1914
Author: Claire L. Jones
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2016-08-05
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0822981750

By the late nineteenth century, advances in medical knowledge, technology and pharmaceuticals led to the development of a thriving commercial industry. The medical trade catalogue became one of the most important means of promoting the latest tools and techniques to practitioners. Drawing on over 400 catalogues produced between 1870 and 1914, Jones presents a study of the changing nature of medical professionalism. She examines the use of the catalogue in connecting the previously separate worlds of medicine and commerce and discusses its importance to the study of print history more widely.

Medicine, Knowledge and Venereal Diseases in England, 1886-1916

Medicine, Knowledge and Venereal Diseases in England, 1886-1916
Author: Anne R. Hanley
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2016-11-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 3319324551

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.

Victorian Material Culture

Victorian Material Culture
Author: Boris Jardine
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 607
Release: 2022-07-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1315400332

From chatelaines to whale blubber, ice making machines to stained glass, this six-volume collection will be of interest to the scholar, student or general reader alike - anyone who has an urge to learn more about Victorian things. The set brings together a range of primary sources on Victorian material culture and discusses the most significant developments in material history from across the nineteenth century. The collection will demonstrate the significance of objects in the everyday lives of the Victorians and addresses important questions about how we classify and categorise nineteenth-century things. This second volume, ‘Science and Medicine’, will examine objects (from the most significant to the most obscure) that played a part in nineteenth-century scientific developments.

Spectacles and the Victorians

Spectacles and the Victorians
Author: Gemma Almond-Brown
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2023-09-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526161362

This is the first full-length study of spectacles in the Victorian period. It examines how the Victorians shaped our understanding of functional visual capacity and the concept of 20:20 vision. Demonstrating how this unique assistive device can connect the histories of medicine, technology and disability, it charts how technology has influenced our understanding of sensory perception, both through the diagnostic methods used to measure visual impairment and the utility of spectacles to ameliorate its effects. Taking a material culture approach, the book assesses how the design of spectacles thwarted ophthalmologists’ attempts to medicalise their distribution and use, as well as creating a mainstream marketable device on the high street.

Life, Death, and Consciousness in the Long Nineteenth Century

Life, Death, and Consciousness in the Long Nineteenth Century
Author: Lucy Cogan
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2022-11-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3031133633

This book explores how the writers, poets, thinkers, historians, scientists, dilettantes and frauds of the long-nineteenth century addressed the “limit cases” regarding human existence that medicine continuously uncovered as it stretched the boundaries of knowledge. These cases cast troubling and distorted shadows on the culture, throwing into relief the values, vested interests, and power relations regarding the construction of embodied life and consciousness that underpinned the understanding of what it was to be alive in the long nineteenth century. Ranging over a period from the mid-eighteenth century through to the first decade of the twentieth century—an era that has been called the ‘Age of Science’—the essays collected here consider the cultural ripple effects of those previously unimaginable revolutions in science and medicine on humanity’s understanding of being.

Uncommon Contexts: Encounters between Science and Literature, 1800-1914

Uncommon Contexts: Encounters between Science and Literature, 1800-1914
Author: Ben Marsden
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2016-09-12
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0822981874

Britain in the long nineteenth century developed an increasing interest in science of all kinds. Whilst poets and novelists took inspiration from technical and scientific innovations, those directly engaged in these new disciplines relied on literary techniques to communicate their discoveries to a wider audience. The essays in this collection uncover this symbiotic relationship between literature and science, at the same time bridging the disciplinary gulf between the history of science and literary studies. Specific case studies include the engineering language used by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the role of physiology in the development of the sensation novel and how mass communication made people lonely.

Victorian Medicine and Popular Culture

Victorian Medicine and Popular Culture
Author: Louise Penner
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2016-09-12
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0822981890

This collection of essays explores the rise of scientific medicine and its impact on Victorian popular culture. Chapters include an examination of Charles Dickens's involvement with hospital funding, concerns over milk purity and the theatrical portrayal of drug addiction, plus a whole section devoted to the representation of medicine in crime fiction. This is an interdisciplinary study involving public health, cultural studies, the history of medicine, literature and the theatre, providing new insights into Victorian culture and society.

The Cult of Youth

The Cult of Youth
Author: James F. Stark
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2020-03-19
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 1108484158

The first account of anti-ageing and rejuvenation in modern Britain, exploring hormones, diet, electrotherapy, exercise and skin care.

Myth and (mis)information

Myth and (mis)information
Author: Allan Ingram
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2024-06-25
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1526166836

This collection draws together original scholarship from international contributors on a range of aspects of professional and semi-professional medical work and its relations to British culture. It combines a diverse spectrum of scholarly approaches, from medical history to book history, exploring literary and scientific texts, such as satiric poetry, essays, anatomies, advertisements, and the novel, to shed light on the mythologisation and transmission of medical (mis)information through literature and popular culture. It analyses the persuasive and sometimes deceptive means by which myths, as well as information and beliefs, about medicine and the medical professions proliferated in English literary culture of this period, from early eighteenth-century household remedies to the late nineteenth-century concerns with vaccination that are still relevant today.

The Making of British Anthropology, 1813-1871

The Making of British Anthropology, 1813-1871
Author: Efram Sera-Shriar
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2016-08-03
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0822981734

Victorian anthropology has been derided as an "armchair practice," distinct from the scientific discipline of the twentieth century. But the observational practices that characterized the study of human diversity developed from the established sciences of natural history, geography and medicine. Sera-Shriar argues that anthropology at this time went through a process of innovation which built on scientifically grounded observational study. Far from being an evolutionary dead end, nineteenth-century anthropology laid the foundations for the field-based science of anthropology today.