- Publisher:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Online publication date:
- September 2012
- Print publication year:
- 2009
- Online ISBN:
- 9781846157158
- Subjects:
- British History after 1450, History
Last updated 10th July 2024: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
A survey of the changes in medical care for those approaching death in the early modern period. From the sixteenth century onwards, medical strategies adopted by the seriously ill and dying changed radically, decade by decade, from the Elizabethan age of astrological medicine to the emergence of the general practitioner in the early eighteenth century. It is this profound revolution, in both medical and religious terms, as whole communities' hopes for physical survival shifted from God to the doctor, that this book charts. Drawing on more than eighteen thousand probate accounts, it identifies massive increases in the consumption of medicines and medical advice by all social groups and in almost all areas. Most importantly, it examines the role of the towns in providing medical services to rural areas and hinterlands [using the diocese of Canterbury as a particular focus], and demonstrates the extending ranges of physicians', surgeons' and apothecaries' businesses. It also identifies a comparable revolution in community nursing, from its unskilled status in 1600 to a more exclusive one by 1700. IAN MORTIMER is an independent historian and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter.
The results of this meticulous and painstaking research are persuasive and have far-reaching implications for the social history of medical care of the dying.'
Source: Social History of Medicine
Mortimer's book is a feat of statistical organisation. He has deftly and meticulously analysed thousands of probate records, using complex and subtle quantities techniques. [...] It is a valuable contribution to the history of medicine, and succeeds in its aim to draw attention to the hitherto acknowledged rise in the employment of doctors at times of grave illness.'
Source: Local Population Studies
A work of great clarity and elegance, and provides the bedrock on which social history must be based.'
Source: Times Higher Education Supplement
* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.
Usage data cannot currently be displayed.