1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910254764403321

Autore

DeLacy Margaret

Titolo

Contagionism Catches On [[electronic resource] ] : Medical Ideology in Britain, 1730-1800 / / by Margaret DeLacy

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cham : , : Springer International Publishing : , : Imprint : Palgrave Macmillan, , 2017

ISBN

3-319-50959-4

Edizione

[1st ed. 2017.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (IX, 347 p.)

Disciplina

941

Soggetti

Great Britain—History

Social history

History

History of Britain and Ireland

Social History

History of Science

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

1. Introduction -- 2. Fever Theory and British Contagionism in the Mid-Eighteenth Century -- 3. Contagionism after 1750: John Pringle and James Lind -- 4. Animate Disease after 1750: The “Exanthemata Viva” -- 5. Counting and Classifying Disease: Contagion, Enumeration and Cullen’s Nosology -- 6. John Haygarth and the Campaign for Contagion -- 7. Contagionism, Politics and the Public in Manchester -- 8. Institutionalizing Contagionism: The Manchester House of Recovery.

Sommario/riassunto

This book shows how contagionism evolved in eighteenth century Britain and describes the consequences of this evolution. By the late eighteenth century, the British medical profession was divided between traditionalists, who attributed acute diseases to the interaction of internal imbalances with external factors such as weather, and reformers, who blamed contagious pathogens. The reformers, who were often “outsiders,” English Nonconformists or men born outside England, emerged from three coincidental transformations: transformation in medical ideas, in the nature and content of medical education, and in the sort of men who became physicians. Adopting



contagionism led them to see acute diseases as separate entities, spurring a process that reoriented medical research, changed communities, established new medical institutions, and continues to the present day. .