Dora B. Weiner – författare

In The Citizen-Patient in Revolutionary and Imperial Paris, Dora B. Weiner examines the experiences of the sick and handicapped indigent men, women, and children in Paris during the French Revolution and Empire. Weiner argues that significant groups of Revolutionary physicians and reformers interpreted equality to include every citizen's right to health care. These reformers faced political, religious, and professional opposition, and daunting problems of funding. And they needed the participation of the poor as "citizen-patients," patients with both rights and duties, who acted as responsible partners in the pursuit and maintenance of public and personal health. Weiner surveys the 20,000 patients institutionalized in twenty Paris hospitals and hospices and explains how the Revolution changed the status and work of nurses, pharmacists, midwives, and students, as well as doctors. Clinical teaching, professional specialization, and approaches to public health were all affected. Weiner emphasizes health care for children, deaf and blind people, and mentally ill patients and underscores the role of women as administrators and dispensers of hospital care.

This collection of essays by historians, historians of science and medicine, and literary and textual scholars—from the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Spain—analyzes the achievements of Dr. Francisco Hernández (1515-87) in the history of medicine and science in Europe and the Americas. Celebrated in his own day as one of Spain's leading physicians and naturalists, he is now best remembered for his monumental work on the native plants and materia medica of central Mexico.Sent to New Spain in 1570 by King Philip II to research and describe the natural history of the region, to assess the medical usefulness of the natural resources, and to gather ethnographic materials for an anthropological history, Hernández was the first trained scientist to undertake scientific work in the New World. For seven years he gathered information throughout the Valley of Mexico, learning Nahuatl, recording local medical customs, studying indigenous medicines, and writing down all his observations. The result was The Natural History of New Spain, written in Latin, which consisted of six folio volumes filled with descriptions of over 3,000 plants previously unknown in Europe (along with descriptions of a much smaller number of animals and minerals) and ten folio volumes of paintings by Mexican artists illustrating the plants and animals he described.Hernández died before he could publish his Natural History, and the materials were placed in the Escorial, where they were extensively consulted, copied, abstracted, and translated by generations of scientists, medical specialists, and natural philosophers before they were destroyed by fire in 1671. Hernández's work was still regarded as authoritative on a number of New World botanical topics as late as the nineteenth century, and his writings remain in use in popular form in Mexico today.The sixteen essays in this volume treat the most important aspects of Hernández's experience, including his education, his heterodox beliefs, and the state of medicine in both Spain and New Spain during his era. Other essays show the dissemination of the knowledge Hernández accumulated, including his contributions to European botany and materia medica, his relationship to Spanish Baroque painting, the "globalization" of his work in the eighteenth century, and his place in nineteenth-century debates among Spanish scientists.