In his short but authoritative study, Roy Porter examines the impact of disease upon the English and their responses to it before the widespread availability and public provision of medical care. Professor Porter incorporates into the revised second edition new perspectives offered by recent research into provincial medical history, the history of childbirth, and women's studies in the social history of medicine. He begins by sketching a picture of the threats posed by disease to population levels and social continuity from Tudor times to the Industrial Revolution, going on to consider the nature and development of the medical profession, attitudes to doctors and disease, and the growing commitment of the state to public health. Drawing together a wide range of often fragmentary material, and providing a detailed annotated bibliography, this book is an important guide to the history of medicine and to English social history.

First published in 1960, Richard Harrison Shryock's Medicine and Society in America: 1660-1860 remains a sweeping and informative introduction to the practice of medicine, the education of physicians, the understanding of health and disease, and the professionalization of medicine in the Colonial Era and the period of the Early Republic. Shryock details such developments as the founding of the first medical school in America (at the College of Philadelphia in 1765); the introduction of inoculation against smallpox in Boston in 1721; the creation of the Marine Hospital Service in 1799, under which all merchant marines were required to take out health insurance; and the state of medical knowledge on the eve of the Civil War.

The period from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment constitutes a vital phase in the history of European medicine. Elements of continuity with the classical and medieval past are evident in the ongoing importance of a humor-based view of medicine and the treatment of illness. At the same time, new theories of the body emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to challenge established ideas in medical circles. In recent years, scholars have explored this terrain with increasingly fascinating results, often revising our previous understanding of the ways in which early modern Europeans discussed the body, health and disease. In order to understand these and related processes, historians are increasingly aware of the way in which every aspect of medical care and provision in early modern Europe was shaped by the social, religious, political and cultural concerns of the age.

This 1998 book contains historical essays about how diseases change their meaning.

Before the nineteenth century, travellers who left Britain for the Americas, West Africa, India and elsewhere encountered a medical conundrum: why did they fall ill when they arrived, and why - if they recovered - did they never become so ill again? The widely accepted answer was that the newcomers needed to become 'seasoned to the climate'. Suman Seth explores forms of eighteenth-century medical knowledge, including conceptions of seasoning, showing how geographical location was essential to this knowledge and helped to define relationships between Britain and her far-flung colonies. In this period, debates raged between medical practitioners over whether diseases changed in different climes. Different diseases were deemed characteristic of different races and genders, and medical practitioners were thus deeply involved in contestations over race and the legitimacy of the abolitionist cause. In this innovative and engaging history, Seth offers dramatically new ways to understand the mutual shaping of medicine, race, and empire.