This open access book investigates psychiatry in Uganda during the years of decolonisation. It examines the challenges facing a new generation of psychiatrists as they took over responsibility for psychiatry at the end of empire, and explores the ways psychiatric practices were tied to shifting political and development priorities, periods of instability, and a broader context of transnational …
This book presents a collection of short biographies and works of the pioneers in pathology. The alphabetically arranged entries allow readers to quickly and easily find the information they need.
Negotiating nursing explores how the Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service (Q.A.s) salvaged men within the sensitive gender negotiations of what should and could constitute nursing work and where that work could occur. The book argues that the Q.A.s, an entirely female force during the Second World War, were essential to recovering men physically, emotionally and spiritually …
By examining all the prevalent varieties of therapy from self-care to religious ritual, this book explores health care practices in China, before modern times. In ancient China most people were unable to afford a doctor, even in the unlikely case that one lived near their village and was willing to treat peasants. What did they do when their children got sick? The answer is to be found in this …
This book is open access under a CC BY license and charts the rise and fall of various self-harming behaviours in twentieth-century Britain. It puts self-cutting and overdosing into historical perspective, linking them to the huge changes that occur in mental and physical healthcare, social work and wider politics.
In medical terms, 'mineral water' was, in the early nineteenth century, any water that appeared to have an effect on human health. British physicians often prescribed mineral waters from particular locations - most commonly those at Bath - for a variety of illnesses. However, there was little available information on the chemical composition of these waters, and extant manuals were often inaccu…
This book reproduces and comments John Woodall’s handbook which was used as standard text for medical treatment at sea in the seventeenth century and was the first instruction for medical service aboard on the whole. In 1612 the East India Company, founded in London 1600 and invested with special royal privileges and authority, appointed John Woodall as its first surgeon-general, who had g…
Medical history offers us many wise thoughts, a few misguided notions, and a host of intriguing back-stories. On the Shoulders of Medicine’s Giants presents a selection of these, and tells how the words of medicine’s “giants”—such as Hippocrates, Sir William Osler, Francis Weld Peabody, and Elizabeth Kübler-Ross—are relevant to medical science and practice in the 21st century. Whi…
This book examines the health/fitness interaction in an historical context. Beginning in primitive hunter-gatherer communities, where survival required adequate physical activity, it goes on to consider changes in health and physical activity at subsequent stages in the evolution of “civilization.” It focuses on the health impacts of a growing understanding of medicine and physiology, and t…
This book considers the evolution of medical education over the centuries, presents various theories and principles of learning (pedagogical and andragogical) and discusses different forms of medical curriculum and the strategies employed to develop them, citing examples from medical schools in developed and developing nations. Instructional methodologies and tools for assessment and evaluation…