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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.

In her introduction the author emphasizes that her book, Operations Without Pain: The Practice and Science of Anaesthesia in Victorian Britain, is ‘In no way … intended to be a linear history of discoveries, techniques, or famous men’ (p. 4).

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.

‘It happened once in Paris that a certain sorceress impeded a man who had left her so that he could not have intercourse with another woman whom he had married. So she made an incantation over a closed lock and threw the lock into a well, and the key into another well, and the man was made impotent.

Psychological Subjects ‘is a book about how twentieth-century Britons viewed both themselves and their world in psychological terms.

Alison Bashford's latest edited collection, Medicine at the Border: Disease, Globalization, and Security, 1850 to the Present, brings together papers from a 2004 conference on the same broad topic.

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

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

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.

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.