The Midwives of Seventeenth-Century London

The Midwives of Seventeenth-Century London
Author: Doreen Evenden
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2006-11-02
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0521027853

This book is the first comprehensive and detailed study of early modern midwives in seventeenth-century London. Midwives, as a group, have been dismissed by historians as being inadequately educated and trained for the task of child delivery. The Midwives of Seventeenth-Century London rejects these claims by exploring the midwives' training and their licensing in an unofficial apprenticeship by the Church. Dr. Evenden also offers an accurate depiction of the midwives in their socioeconomic context by examining a wide range of seventeenth-century sources. This expansive study not only recovers the names of almost one thousand women who worked as midwives in the twelve London parishes, but also brings to light details about their spouses, their families and their associates.

Charitable Knowledge

Charitable Knowledge
Author: Susan C. Lawrence
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2002-06-27
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9780521525183

Charitable Knowledge explores the formation of the teaching hospital in eighteenth-century London.

Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform

Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform
Author: Carin Berkowitz
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2015-11-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 022628042X

Sir Charles Bell (1774–1842) was a medical reformer in a great age of reform—an occasional and reluctant vivisectionist, a theistic popularizer of natural science, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a surgeon, an artist, and a teacher. He was among the last of a generation of medical men who strove to fashion a particularly British science of medicine; who formed their careers, their research, and their publications through the private classrooms of nineteenth-century London; and whose politics were shaped by the exigencies of developing a living through patronage in a time when careers in medical science simply did not exist. A decade after Bell’s death, that world was gone, replaced by professionalism, standardized education, and regular career paths. In Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform, Carin Berkowitz takes readers into Bell’s world, helping us understand the life of medicine before the modern separation of classroom, laboratory, and clinic. Through Bell’s story, we witness the age when modern medical science, with its practical universities, set curricula, and medical professionals, was born.