Health, Medicine, and Society in Victorian England (Victorian Life and Times)
• Offers a comprehensive examination of medicine in the Victorian era• Focuses on the impact of disease at different levels of society—specifically on the lives of ordinary men and women, practitioners, and patients• Includes a chapter on how Victorian women were molded into a special class of patient, and how they eventually broke into the medical profession as doctors for female patients• Offers in-depth studies of two major disabilities, deafness and blindness, and Victorian innovations in the education and medical treatment of the "deaf-and-dumb" and the blind• Offers a chronology of medical history in Victorian England• Includes illustrations in every chapter, such as images from 19th-century medical textbooks, magazine cartoons, portraits, and paintings"In a volume in a series designed to give a more accurate picture of life in the Victorian era, Carpenter (emeritus, English, Queen's U., Kingston, Ontario, Canada) presents a sociocultural history of evolving 19th century medicine in the UK interwoven with period medical and literary writing. Among the themes discussed are attitudes and practices toward: women as patients; tuberculosis, venereal, and other diseases; education of the handicapped (deaf and dumb, blind); and especially timely, vaccination. The book includes a public health chronology, glossary, and period medical illustrations."-SciTech Book News"… a welcome addition to a field not abundantly stocked with short, relatively inexpensive texts and will be useful for undergraduates beginning their study of the subject. It is elegantly written, and Carpenter's use of literary sources broadens the appeal of the subject to students in other disciplines approaching the history of medicine for the first time."-Social History of Medicine