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ISSN 1749-8155

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Review Date: 
1 Oct 2010

Historians of nursing in Britain have long been fighting for a place in the history of medicine. For example, of the 718 pages of text in Roy Porter’s best-selling The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, only five are concerned with nursing, and these, inevitably, with Florence Nightingale and 19th-century hospital reform.

Review Date: 
1 Sep 2010

The concept of contagion is entangled with so many themes in the history of medicine that any on-line collection on the subject can hardly fail to generate interest among the scholarly community. Harvard University’s Contagion: Historical Views of Disease and Epidemics does not disappoint.

Review Date: 
1 Sep 2010

Modern British nursing, based on formal training and skilled work, emerged within a tradition of religious sisterhoods (both Protestant and Catholic) and military reforms from the mid 18th century.

Review Date: 
1 Sep 2010

As its title suggests, this book covers developments in the medical service of the Royal Navy and among people who travelled aboard ships, whether as serving seamen, convicts, slaves or migrants.

Review Date: 
30 Nov 2009

The co-authors of this volume are David Haslam, the Chair and Clinical Director of the National Obesity Forum and Fiona Haslam, a former physician, art historian, and the author of a distinguished study of From Hogarth to Rowlandson: Medicine and Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain.(1) This summarizes both the strength and the weakness of this comprehensive stud

Review Date: 
31 Oct 2009

Small and Special is the database of the historic admission records for the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children.

Review Date: 
1 Dec 2008

Sandra Cavallo’s Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy will appeal to scholars interested in the social history of medicine for more than one reason.

Review Date: 
30 Sep 2008

Once upon a time there was smallpox. One of the most loathsome diseases ever to afflict human kind, smallpox not only killed but maimed. Death rates were typically between 25 and 30 per cent, and survivors might not only be blinded and their skins scarred and pitted from the pocks, but they also suffered internal tissue damage that affected lung function and other life processes.

Review Date: 
31 Aug 2008

This collection of 12 essays originated in a number of conference papers addressing the theme 'History from Below: the Urban Poor and the Reception of Medicine and Charity in Western European Cities'. The essays in the book examine the consumption of health and welfare in Britain, or more accurately, in England, with the main chronological focus being on the 19th and 20th centuries.

Review Date: 
31 Jan 2008

In the past decade Britain has finally relaxed the strict controls on the movement of dogs and cats across its borders. The most potent and compelling arguments used for the retention of quarantine regulations could be found in the pictures of rabid dogs posted at marinas and other embarkation points.

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