Medical Practice, Urban Politics and Patronage: The London ‚Commonalty‘ of Physicians and Surgeons of the 1420s

Medical practice in fifteenth-century England is often seen as suffering from the low status and unregulated practice of which Thomas Linacre later complained. Unlike in many European cities, the provision of physic was uncontrolled, and while urban guilds oversaw surgery as a manual art, no comprehensive system of medical organisation or regulation existed. However, in a remarkable episode of the 1420s, a group of university-trained physicians and elite surgeons associated with Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, briefly established just such a system. While their efforts initially secured approval for a national scheme, it was only in the City of London that they succeeded in implementing their plans. The detailed ordinances of the collegiate ‘commonalty’ they founded provide a unique insight into their attitudes. Drawing on continental models, they attempted to control all medicine within the city by establishing a hierarchy of practitioners, preventing illicit and incompetent practice, and offering treatment to even the poorest Londoners. Yet they failed to appreciate the vested interests of civic politics: achieving these aims meant curtailing the rights of the powerful Grocers and the Barbers, a fact made clear by their adjudication of a case involving two members of the Barbers’ Company, and the Barbers’ subsequent riposte—a mayoral petition that heralded the commonalty’s end. Its founder surgeons went on to revitalise their Surgeons’ Fellowship, which continued independently of the Barbers until a merger in 1540; in contrast, the physicians withdrew from civic affairs, and physic remained entirely unregulated until episcopal licensing was instituted in 1511.

Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/130/546/1102?rss=1

‚Till these Experiments be Made‘: Senegambia and British Imperial Policy in the Eighteenth Century

Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/130/546/1132?rss=1

Keynes, Liberalism, and ‚The Emancipation of the Mind‘

This article offers a more systematic assessment of John Maynard Keynes’s attitude to Liberalism, and his engagement with the Liberal Party, than has previously been attempted. It does so as a means of exploring how the study of ideologies should be approached. To Keynes, ideologies were not simply constellations of fixed principles; in his view, policies were always contingent on circumstances, and thus what was appropriate now would become outdated in the future. The Liberal, therefore, needed a flexible and experimental psychological attitude, in order to devise solutions that were appropriate to changing conditions. Using his 1925 lecture ‘Am I a Liberal?’ as a starting point, it is argued here that Keynes saw Liberalism primarily as a discursive practice in the public sphere, that is to say as a technique for ‘doing politics’. We need not take Keynes’s evaluation of his own Liberal mind-set at face value, but it nonetheless casts light on the nature of Liberalism in this period. In spite of the Liberal party’s electoral decline, the political conditions of the 1920s were particularly well suited to Keynes’s vision. For him, Liberalism depended upon, but would also help to facilitate, what he referred to as ‘the emancipation of the mind.’

Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/130/546/1162?rss=1

The Church on its Past (Studies in Church History, Vol. 49), ed. Peter D. Clarke and Charlotte Methuen

Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/130/546/1192?rss=1

Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia: A Study of Manuscript Transmission and Monastic Culture, by Felice Lifshitz

Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/130/546/1194?rss=1

Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England, by Emily V. Thornbury

Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/130/546/1195?rss=1

Changing Perspectives on England and the Continent in the Early Middle Ages, by Anton Scharer

Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/130/546/1197?rss=1

The Place-Name Evidence for a Routeway Network in Early Medieval England, by Ann Cole

Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/130/546/1199?rss=1

The Open Fields of England, by David Hall * Champion: The Making and Unmaking of the English Midland Landscape, by Tom Williamson, Robert Liddiard and Tracey Partida

Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/130/546/1201?rss=1

The Historia Ierosolimitana of Baldric of Bourgueil, ed. Steven Biddlecombe

Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/130/546/1203?rss=1