Browsing by Subject "History of Medicine"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Communities Of Healing: Domestic Medicine And Society In Early Modern Italy
    (2018-04) Beck, Emily
    Many scholars have employed a variety of means to investigate the interactions between the range of people who practiced medicine in the early modern period, from charlatans and midwives to physicians and surgeons. These non-academic practitioners have been marginalized by previous histories of medicine, which reflect both their absence in contemporary printed works as well as the origins of the history of medicine as a field that prioritized finding the roots of modern medical practice. Recovering lay histories requires looking beyond printed treatises to working texts such as formularies, recipe collections, and other ephemera. This project investigates the form, movements, and activities of lay healers and their practices in the medical marketplace of early modern northern and central Italy. In this project, I propose that the anonymous manuscript medical recipe books of laypeople can be dissected to provide further information about not only interactions between healers, but also the theories, supplies, context, and educational practices of non-professional healers. Influenced by works in microhistory, chapters one, two, and three present focused investigations of small groups of manuscripts in order to contextualize the practice of medicine in northern and central Italy. Chapter one examines three manuscript recipe books written by a Capuchin monk, showing how laypeople drew on the rhetoric of printed medical books and offered medical education to their brethren. Chapter three also draws on these manuscripts, but turns to questions of the patient population that the author anticipated his practice would treat. Although information about specific patients is generally lacking in manuscript recipe books, focusing on recipes for women provides a rich set of information from which to draw conclusions about the medical interactions between clerical men and women in surrounding communities. Chapter two is a comparison of recipe writings in manuscript recipe books and in the first pharmacopoeia in Florence, the Ricettario Fiorentino. This comparison lends itself to enlivening how historians understand the ways knowledge changed, circulated, was adopted, or was ignored by both professional and lay healers from the late fifteenth to mid-sixteenth centuries. In chapter four, I claim that manuscript recipe books provide a rich source of information about the material context in which laypeople created medicines and healed their patients. Rather than allowing incongruent themes like veterinary medicine, beauty aids, and mischief to fall to the side for thematic consistency, this chapter asserts that examining all these manuscript recipe book entries together leads to a more holistic picture of the landscape of lay healing in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy.
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    Defining the Physician's Duty: Medical Professionalization in America and the Politics of Prostitution Reform Activism, 1870s-1910s
    (2017-10) Luepke, Laura
    Historians have identified the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries as a period of intensified professionalization in American medicine, marked by the growth of professional associations and specialization, the development of licensing standards, and efforts to improve medical education. This dissertation intervenes in that literature by moving beyond this focus on institutional structures to instead address how extra-professional intervention shaped professionalization processes. Focusing on physicians’ prostitution reform activism from the 1870s-1910s, this study demonstrates that professionalization was often the product of unplanned actions in unexpected areas of intervention, not of a clear plan with a predetermined direction. As doctors entered prostitution reform, confluences of circumstances and actions beyond physicians’ control generated opportunities that individuals exploited for many reasons besides professionalization, but nonetheless shaped how physicians claimed professional status and identity. This dissertation contends that to understand medical professionalization, it must be situated in its Christian, sexual, and imperial politics because it was at the crossroads of faith, gender, and empire that balances of power between groups of physicians, and with it their ability to shape the trajectory of their profession, could tilt. Prostitution reform activism thus became a key battleground upon which doctors worked collectively for expanded authority and power, even as they engaged in internecine conflicts over professional duty and its areas of social, political, moral, and spiritual purview. Attending to these relations of power reveals women physicians, eccentric male health reformers, military surgeons, venereal specialists, and other assumed-to-be marginal groups playing leading roles in defining the physician’s duty.
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    Penitentiary practice: healthcare and medicine in Minnesota State Prison, 1855-1930
    (2013-11) Charleroy, Margaret Lynn
    Medicine in American prisons came to be defined by a characteristic set of health concerns and treatment challenges through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Foremost among them was the essential tension between the prison's retributive, disciplinary, or reformatory objectives and the ideals of care at the core of medical practice. This dissertation examines the history of the American prison and its population by considering the prison as a medically therapeutic and rehabilitative institution constrained by its punitive mission, using the Minnesota State Prison at Stillwater as a primary case study. It situates the prison within a historiography of medical institutions that has heretofore focused on hospitals and asylums. Quantitative data and methods help to expose the demographic characteristics of the prison population between1850 and 1930. Using institutional medical records, I show how population-level characteristics shaped medical practice in American prisons. Additionally, I employ statistical methods to analyze quantitative material available in the state archives of Minnesota to contextualize the stories of individual prisons and prisoners. These qualitative and quantitative data sustain a historical narrative and a sociological depiction of the prison as a medical institution.