Patients, Power and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Bristol

An inquiry into the causes and effects of the decline in popular medicine.

Mary E. Fissell (Author)

9780521400473, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 October 1991

282 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.566 kg

"This work adds to the prevailing wisdom that an important change occurred in the medical profession and medical practice around the middle of the eighteenth century. This book adds to our understanding of early modern medical institutions, while corroborating the work of others, notably Roy Porter, on the changing nature of medicine over the eighteenth century." The Eighteenth Century

In early modern England, housewives, clergymen, bloodletters, herb women, and patients told authoritative tales about the body. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, medicine had begun to drown out these voices. This book uses patients' perspectives to argue that changes in the relationship between rich and poor underlay this rise in medicine's authority. In a detailed examination of health, healing, and poor relief in eighteenth-century Bristol, the author shows how the experiences of the hospitalized urban poor laid the foundations for modern doctor-patient encounters. Within the hospital, charity patients were denied the power to interpret their own illnesses, as control of the institution shifted from lay patrons to surgeons. Outside the hospital, reforms of popular culture stigmatized ordinary people's ideas about their own bodies. Popular medicine became working-class medicine, associated with superstition and political unrest.

List of tables, figures, and maps
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Everyone their own physician
3. The marketplace of medicine
4. charity universal?
5. The client
6. The abdication of the governors
7. Surgeons and the medicalization of the hospital
8. The patient's perspective
9. The reform of popular medicine
10. Conclusions
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: History of medicine [MBX]