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ISSN 1749-8155

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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: 
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.

Review Date: 
19 Feb 2015

Barry Doyle’s new study addresses a subject area that has lately attracted much interest from social, political and medical historians. The reasons why Britain’s inter-war health services have become such a hot topic are not hard to discern.

Review Date: 
18 Dec 2014

The human, the person as a category, may become a historical subject. To take this step, however, is to begin to destabilise the basic terms with which to think about experience and agency. Hence the need for recourse to a portmanteau term, which does not have to be and perhaps could not be clearly defined, like ‘the psyche’.

Review Date: 
11 Sep 2014

In 1862, Henry Littlejohn was appointed to the newly created position of Medical Officer of Health (MOH) for Edinburgh. Three years later, he published a Report on the Sanitary Condition of Scotland’s capital city, then home to more than 170,000 people.

Review Date: 
4 Sep 2014

Alcohol policy never ceases to be controversial.

Review Date: 
29 May 2014

Sometime, around the middle of the 20th century, the British began to think differently about the well-being of children. Where anxieties had once dwelt on malnourished and disease-ridden bodies, they now shifted to contemplate the civilizational consequences of young disordered minds.

Review Date: 
13 Feb 2014

In the late 19th century, the issue of infanticide captured the attention of a significant number of journalists, psychiatric and medical writers and social commentators. The act of intentionally killing an infant within 24 hours of its birth was by no means new to this period.

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