Professional and Popular Medicine in France 1770–1830
The Social World of Medical Practice

A comprehensive study of the entire range of medical practitioners in preindustrial and eraly industrial France.

Matthew Ramsey (Author)

9780521524605, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 6 June 2002

428 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm, 0.683 kg

This is the first comprehensive study on a national scale of the entire range of medical practitioners who flourished in preindustrial and early industrial societies. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, it provides a richly detailed examination of medical practice as it existed in France during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Professor Ramsey argues that to penetrate this world, in many ways strangely different from our own, we must join two lines of inquiry: the history of the professions and the history of popular culture. The book considers not only the immediate ancestors of the modern medical profession - university-trained physicians who followed a liberal calling and surgeons who practiced a manual craft - but also the highly diverse group of practitioners who worked without legal authorization: traveling charlatans, local 'urine scanners,' folk healers using herbs and charms, counterwitches, and a great many ordinary people in other trades.

List of tables, maps, and illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Professional Medicine: 1. The regular medical network at the end of the Old Regime
2. The medical profession in the early nineteenth century
Part II. Popular Medicine: 3. Irregulars: itinerants
4. Irregulars: sedentary empirics
5. Folk healers: maiges and witches
Part III. Toward a Social Interpretation: 6. The structure of medical practice: an overview
Afterword
Appendices
Notes
Glossary and note on French money
Index.

Subject Areas: History of science [PDX]