Medicine, Madness and Social History

Honoring and extending the work of historian Roy Porter, this volume offers lively, accessible and often topical chapters presenting orginal research on the social history of medicine, madness and the Enlightenment.

Written in honour of eminent historian Roy Porter by twenty of his colleagues and students, the collection renders cutting edge scholarship accessible. Historians from the three fields that Porter made his own – the histories of medicine, madness, and the Enlightenment – illustrate his influence while tackling major themes ranging from disability rights to the popularization of science. In their accounts, artisan gardeners jostle with anarchists, dentists, and hypnotists in a lively, and very Porterian, parade.

ROBERTA BIVINS is Wellcome Lecturer in the History of Medicine at Cardiff University, UK. She is currently researching the impact of postcolonial immigration on medical research programmes and healthcare delivery in the US and the UK for a monograph entitled Contagious Communities, Model Minorities: Immigration, Ethnicity and Medicine. Other work has examined the cross-cultural transmission of medical expertise: Acupuncture, Expertise and Crosscultural Medicine, and understandings of global medicine: Alternative Medicine? A History.
JOHN V. PICKSTONE has practised the history of medicine in UMIST and the University of Manchester, UK, since 1974. He is now a Research Professor in the Wellcome Unit and the Centre of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, which he directed from 1986-2002. His present work is mostly on the contemporary history of medicine, including cancer, medical technologies and the NHS. He is the author of Ways of Knowing. A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine and co-editor with Roger Cooter of the Companion to Twentieth Century Medicine.

Note on Contributors/Remembering Roy Porter * Introduction: ‘De omni scribili’–J.Pickstone & R.Bivins * Roy Porter and the Persons of History–H.Cook * PART 1: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY AND THE POLITICS OF SCIENCE * Porter vs. Foucault on ‘Birth of the clinic’–A.Wilson * The New History of the Enlightenment: An essay in the social history of social history–P.Burke * The Politics of Particularism: Medicalization and Medical Reform in 19th century Britain–I.Burney * Charles Babbage and George Birkbeck: Science, Reform and Radicalism–D.Porter * PART 2: BODIES, COMMODITIES AND SOCIAL DIFFERENCE * French Dentists and English Teeth in the Long 18th Century–C.Jones * Hotbeds and Cool Fruits: The Unnatural Cultivation of the Eighteenth Century Cucumber–A.Secord * Arguing disability: ex-servicemen’s own stories in early modern England, 1590-1790–G.Hudson * Lunacy and Labouring Men: Narratives of Male Vulnerability in Mid-Victorian London–A.Suzuki * “Arrows of Desire”: British Sexual Utopians and the Politics of Health–L.Hall * “Twenty centuries of Christianity weigh heavily on women’s brains”: Anarchism, Female Education, and Women’s Nature at the turn of the Twentieth Century–K.Rowold * “A band of lunatics down Camberwell way”: Percy Lane Oliver and Voluntary Blood Donation in Interwar Britain–K.Pelis * PART 3: MINDS, IDENTITIES AND SOCIAL ORDER * Mind, Body and the Insanity Defence in 18th c. Hamburg–M.Lindemann * “One of the best known identity crises in history”? John Stuart Mill’s Mental Crisis and its Meaning–C.Sengoopta * Murder by Hypnosis? Altered States and the Mental Geography of Science–E.Lafferton * Maladies of the Will: Freedom, Fetters and the Fear of Freud–D.Pick * Two cultures revisited: the case of the fin de siecle–M.Micale * Roy–B.Bynum