A collection of essays focused largely on the 19th century when alternative medicine as opposed to orthodox medicine was not accepted as "professional". Historians in this book explore the dissent which arose in various local and national contexts.
Before the fringe - "Quackery" and the eighteenth-century medical market, R.Porter; the commodity water - hydropath in Matlock, K.Rees; professional organization and the development of medical knowledge - two interpretations of homeopathy, G.Ranklin; alternative medicine, alternative cosmology, R.Cooter; the nineteenth-century afterlife of paracelsus, C.Webster; an imponderable liberator - J.J.Garth Wilkinson, L.Barrow; theatre and laboratory - medical attitudes to animal magnetism in late nineteenth-century Italy- P.Guarnieri; medical botany around 1850 - American medicine in industrial Britain, U.Miley and J.Pickstone; Andrew Taylor Still and the social origins of osteopathy, N.Gevitz.
