More ‚Marginal Men: A Prosopography of Scottish Shop-keeping Doctors in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
This article traces the class background, educational pathways and career profiles of over 100 Scottish medical practitioners who owned dispensary, and more general, retail, stores in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It demonstrates that such doctors were often experienced practitioners who held a range of additional medical appointments. It also outlines the inter-connections between the professions of medicine and pharmacy with many sample doctors having experience as chemists and druggists before entering medicine. Following the work of Inkster on ‘marginal men’, it suggests that the medical community at the turn of the twentieth century was more heterogeneous than has hitherto been acknowledged by historians of the medical profession. The article concludes that keeping a dispensary shop was common into the twentieth century and was not a throwback to an era when professionalisation was at an early stage.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/29/1/89?rss=1
British Romantic Generalism in the Age of Specialism, 1870-1990
This essay explores the impact of ‘generalism’ and ‘general practice’ on the specialisation of British medicine using the case of neurology in Britain to reveal characteristics of British ‘generalist medical culture’ from 1870 to 1990. It argues that ‘generalism’ represented a particular epistemological position in Victorian medicine, one that then created a natural bridge between science and medicine over which almost all physicians and scientists were comfortable walking. The legacies of that Victorian ‘generalist preference’ exerted an enduring impact on the specialisation process as physicians experienced it in the twentieth century and as this case of neurology reveals so clearly. Neurologists and general physicians would still be arguing about the relative merits of a general medical education into the 1980s. By then, however, the emergence of government bodies promoting specialist labour conditions would have rendered the process seemingly inexorable.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/29/1/154?rss=1
Accidents and Apathy: The Construction of the ‚Robens Philosophy of Occupational Safety and Health Regulation in Britain, 1961-1974
The 1972 Robens Report is widely regarded to have provided the underlying rationale for the ‘modern’ system of occupational health and safety regulation in Britain, embodied in the Health and Safety at Work Act (HSW Act) 1974. The HSW Act advanced a new, more flexible system of regulation, premised on the ideal of self-regulation by industry. This article advances a more nuanced historical understanding of the Report and its ethos—the ‘Robens philosophy’—than hitherto developed, situating its assumptions about accidents, regulation and the role of the state in the social, economic and political context of Britain in the 1960s and early 1970s. Highlighting the interaction between these trends and long-established regulatory practices, the article argues that the turn to ‘self-regulation’ heralded by the Robens Report was highly convincing from a political and regulatory perspective at the time it was promulgated.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/29/1/66?rss=1
Liberalism and the Crisis of Health Care in Harlem in the 1960s
In 1961 New York City (NYC) brokered more than ten "affiliation" agreements between private academic medical centers (AMCs) and 18 of the City's 21 public hospitals, to fix crises in both sectors. For nearly 50 years NYC poured millions of dollars into the AMCs to run the public hospitals, giving private institutions enormous power and advantage in deciding how to spend the money; thus placing the delivery of healthcare to the public primarily in the hands of the private sector. This article examines the Columbia University/Harlem Hospital affiliation in the 1960s. It brings the discussion to 2010 when the Health and Hospitals Corporation dissolved the relationship after years of mismanagement, carelessness and tragedy; and entered a corporate phase of privatization.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/29/1/44?rss=1
Patronage and Enlightened Medicine in the Eighteenth-century British Military: The Rise and Fall of Dr John Pringle, 1707-1782
In 1752, the Scottish-born physician John Pringle (1707–1782) published his Observations on the Diseases of the Army in Camp and Garrison based on his experiences as an army physician during the War of the Austrian Succession. The work was to propel him to the position of personal physician to King George III and President of the Royal Society. This paper examines Pringle's contribution in the light of his Scottish origins and the interests of his Hanoverian patrons. It explores his effort to apply his physician's expertise to the protection of groups subject to outbreaks of epidemic fever and traces his approach from the locally-oriented investigations of the Edinburgh medical community towards an experimental study of putrefaction that was embraced by the Royal Society. Finally, it explores Pringle's resignation as President when his contribution became associated with an emerging radical natural philosophy incompatible with the desires of his patron.
Quelle: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/29/1/21?rss=1