The social history of medicine over the last fifteen years has redrawn the boundaries of medical history. Specialised papers and monographs have contributed to our knowledge of how medicine has affected society and how society has shaped medicine. This book synthesises, through a series of essays, some of the most significant findings of this 'new social history' of medicine. The period covered ranges from ancient Greece to the present time. While coverage is not exhaustive, the reader is able to trace how medicine in the West developed from an unlicensed open market place, with many different types of practitioners in the classical period, to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century professionalised medicine of State influence, of hospitals, public health medicine, and scientific medicine. The book also covers innovatory topics such as patient-doctor relationships, the history of the asylum, and the demographic background to the history of medicine.

"This book makes the recent work of medical historians available to a wider audience of nonspecialists who are interested in the historical roots of modern health care. The essays are comprehensive in their sweep, are informed in their assessments, and take full account of modern currents of scholarship. The work thus deserves a wide readership among health care professionals, who--if they do not know where current medical trends will lead them--will at least learn where they began and how they have developed." Gary B. Ferngren, New England Journal of Medicine

"Medicine in Society is an important book that will help teachers and students of society and culture better understand the development of what has become a contemporary preoccupation." Fred R. van Hartesveldt, Teaching History

"...includes essays that cover the social history of medicine from antiquity to the present in Western Europe...generally first-rate introductions to their subject matter and so are useful for students and scholars alike...many of the most important themes discussed in the Anglo-American world medical history are treated in a clear, lively, and inclusive manner. Harold J. Cook, ISIS