Margaret Pelling – författare

Physicians have had a major role in framing the middle-class values of modern western society, especially those relating to the professions. This book questions the bases of this hegemony, by looking first at the early modern physician's insecurities in terms of status and gender, and then at the wider world of medicine in London which the College of Physicians sought to suppress. The College's proceedings against irregular practitioners constitute a case-study in the regulation of an occupation critical for the well-being of contemporary Londoners. However, the College was, it is argued, an anomalous body, detached from most other forms of male authority in the urban context, and its claims lacked social recognition. It used stereotyping to construct an account designed for higher authority, but at the same time, its regulatory efforts were constantly undermined by the effects of patronage. The so-called irregular practitioners emerge as extremely diverse in country of origin, religious belief, and levels of formal education, yet the full analysis provided here also shows that most were literate, and that a significant number later became members of the College. Many were London artisans, barber-surgeons and apothecaries who can be seen as the 'excluded middle' between the two better-known extremes of the physician and the quack. In suppressing artisan practitioners, the College was also seeking to suppress contractual or 'citizen' medicine, an alternative system of structuring relations between the active patient and the practitioner which was fully integrated in contemporary urban custom and practice, but which has since disappeared. The College's selective account also inadvertently reveals the existence of female artisans who practised medicine outside the household routinely and for payment. Although distorted by the College's proximity to the Crown and to élite patrons, the Annals of the College give access to the rich variety of medical practice in early modern London and to the forms of resistance and self-presentation with which those outside the College justified, or denied, their identity as practitioners.

Debates on policy concerning medical care and social welfare of the elderly become ever more pressing, and many of the assumptions on which they are based are now open to question. This study sets out to provide a historical perspective on the economic, medical, class and gender relations of the elderly, which until now have received relatively little attention. In particular, the position of the elderly is linked to the fundamental issues of health, disability and medical care. With attention currently focused on the setting of the retirement age, community and family care, and pensions, as well as wider debates on the rights of the elderly, this volume aims to supply a historical context for such issues.

This important collection of Margaret Pelling's essays brings together her key studies of health, medicine and poverty in Tudor and Stuart England - including a number published here for the first time. They show that - then as now - health and medical care were everyday obsessions of ordinary people in the Tudor and Stuart era. Margaret Pelling's book brings this vital dimension of the early modern world in from the periphery of specialist study to the heart of the concerns of social, economic and cultural historians.

Histories of medicine and science are histories of political and social change, as well as accounts of the transformation of particular disciplines over time. Taking their inspiration from the work of Charles Webster, the essays in this volume consider the effect that demands for social and political reform have had on the theory and, above all, the practice of medicine and science, and on the promotion of human health, from the Renaissance and Enlightenment up to the present. The eighteen essays by an international group of scholars provide case studies, covering a wide range of locations and contexts, of the successes and failures of reform and reformers in challenging the status quo. They discuss the impact of religious and secular ideologies on ideas about the nature and organization of health, medicine, and science, as well as the effects of social and political institutions, including the professions themselves, in shaping the possibilities for reform and renewal. The Practice of Reform in Health, Medicine, and Science, 1500-2000 also addresses the afterlife of reforming concepts, and describes local and regional differences in the practice and perception of reform, culminating in the politics of welfare in the twentieth century. The authors build up a composite picture of the interaction of politics and health, medicine, and science in western Europe over time that can pose questions for the future of policy as well as explaining some of the successes and failures of the past.