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Just as science, in general, was becoming a source of societal advancement and cultural awe during the Georgian and Victorian periods, so was medical science advancing alongside it. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the advent of some of the most important medical findings in history. The Industrial Revolution had resulted in a massive change in living conditions -- city centers became crammed with people, while public sanitization procedures struggled to keep up -- this influx resulted in a surge of maladies, most detailed below. The following is a list of books that examine these the medical breakthroughs in a highly engaging that attempted to solve the medical problems that this new wayof living presented.
I’ve arranged this list in order from the most popular, “fun” medical history books, to the more scholarly, academic books.
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5. Jennifer Lee Carrell: ''The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox'' -- Smallpox is a disease that has been around for approximately 2000 years. Carrell’s study tells the tale of Edward Jenner, the English physician who developed the first version of an inoculation in 1796. Inoculation, which means the introduction of a antigenic substance in an effort to boost immunity to a certain disease, eventually became known as vaccination. Carrell also includes crucial discoveries primer prior to Jenner’s – including the Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who contracted the disease and was among the first to have her child inoculated, and later spread the word about the efficacy of inoculation.
4. Ruth Richardson: ''Death, Dissection, and the Destitute'' – This book falls a bit outside the “popular medical history” category due to its academic prose, but it is, nonetheless, a highly readable, fascinating work for anyone interested in medical history and the poor. In the 1830s, the field of medicine was burgeoning, and dissectible corpses were perhaps the most crucial teaching mechanism for future doctors. The problem was, most nineteenth-century people were not amenable to having their corpses used for medical purposes. This meant that other means of obtaining fresh bodies must be considered…
8. W.F. Bynum & Roy Porter: ''Medical Fringe and Medical Orthodoxy 1750-1850'' – During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was no consensus as to what constituted “accepted” medicine, and what constituted “alternative” medicine – they simply blended together. This work studies this important time when demarcations between scientifically-validated medicine, and holistic/alternative medicine were being made.
9. Mary Fissell: ''Patients, Power, and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Bristol'' – Fissell’s work was one of the first academic medical history books studies to deal with medicine and sickness from a societal point of view, rather than from the purview of upper-class physicians and the like. During the time that Fissell deals with, there was no consensus as to which type of medical practitioners were the most effective – this resulted in a medical marketplace full of questionable characters and dubious remedies.
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10. Mike Saks: ''Alternative Medicine in Britain'' – This book is a collection of essays on the place of “alternative” medicine in Britain, from the nineteenth century to the present day. In Victorian Britain, there was no consensus on what constituted “real” medicine, and what constituted “alternative” medicine. This work deals with such practices as acupuncture, osteopathy, and spiritual healing, and it also focuses on the professionalization of medicine during the nineteenth century.
