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ISSN 1749-8155

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Review Date: 
26 Jan 2017

In Disability and the Welfare State in Britain. Changes in Perception and Policy 1948–1979, Jameel Hampton provides a scholarly account of the development of disability policy after the Second World War.

Review Date: 
15 Dec 2016

Ten years after its publication, A History remains relevant. The epidemic continues to rage. The context of its historical and relational trajectories continues to shape both its evolution and the responses to it.

Review Date: 
8 Dec 2016

Randall Packard’s The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria, published in 2007, was a timely overview of the history of one of the most complex and ancient of all diseases. Indeed, Packard’s sub-title: ‘a short history of malaria’ is a modest one considering the depth and breadth of the range of topics relating to the history of malaria that Packard covers.

Review Date: 
17 Nov 2016

From a public health perspective the disease of smallpox was officially declared eradicated in 1980 – the result of a successful global initiative led by the World Health Organization (WHO), the first and to date only success against a disease in humans. The world could celebrate its freedom from a dreaded disease.

Review Date: 
27 Oct 2016

The history of narcotics in Asia in the last century and a half has been the subject of considerable controversy and significant revision over the last 20 years or so.

Review Date: 
16 Jun 2016

With The Royal Touch in Early Modern England: Politics, Medicine and Sin, Stephen Brogan offers a new understanding of the royal touch – the ability of kings and queens to miraculously heal their subjects of particular diseases in 16th and especially 17th-century England.

Review Date: 
5 May 2016

Much has been written about the UK’s National Health Service but as Martin Gorsky pointed out in a detailed review of its historiography published to coincide with its 60th anniversary in 2008, accounts of its past have tended to privilege traditional political narratives focused on national politics and the workings of the civil service.(1) In the case of Charles Webs

Review Date: 
25 Feb 2016

Between school and university I worked for a year as a lab technician in Dulwich Hospital in south London. After some months, I had developed sufficient expertise to be asked to make extra blood tests on a patient whose illness had proved impossible to diagnose.

Review Date: 
21 Jan 2016

This is a hugely ambitious book about the movement in Italy, inspired by the legendary psychiatric reformer, Franco Basaglia, involving a whole host of actors and groups from diverse walks of life, that got under way in the 1960s to transform the institutional landscape of Italian mental health care, dominated by repressive and decaying lunatic asylums, or manicomi, and, still more dar

Review Date: 
3 Sep 2015

This collection of essays by Donnacha Seán Lucey and Virginia Crossman, which emanates from two workshops held in Dublin in 2011 and 2012, is a worthwhile contribution to the history of healthcare and voluntarism in Britain and Ireland, with chapters from a range of well-known scholars in the fields of healthcare and welfare history.

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