Medicine, Madness and Social History: Essays in Honour of Roy Porter - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0230525490 ISBN 13: 9780230525498

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Synopsis

Written in honour of eminent historian Roy Porter by twenty of his colleagues and students, the collection renders cutting edge scholarship accessible. Historians from the three fields that Porter made his own - the histories of medicine, madness, and the Enlightenment - illustrate his influence while tackling major themes ranging from disability rights to the popularization of science. In their accounts, artisan gardeners jostle with anarchists, dentists, and hypnotists in a lively, and very Porterian, parade.

About this title

Review:

'...Roberta Bivins and John Pickstone are to commended in bringing together the various contributors; and the latter are likewise to be praised for the thoughtful and appreciative essays.  This is a fine volume and a fine Tribute.' - John Stewart, Social History of Medicine
 
'The editors and contributors also convey something of what it was about Porter's way of being a historian which touched, encouraged and in some cases inspired their lives and work. It makes for an attractive combination of the scholarly and the personal. There are eighteen essays, each short and making a point, and the result is a very readable, accessible collection.' - Roger Smith, British Journal for the History of Science 

'Within these contributions, there is much that is both informative and thought-provoking. This is exactly what one would expect from disciples of Roy Porter, a man who would never allow himself to be tied down by historical, spatial, cultural or intellectual categories.' - Leonard Smith, History of Psychiatry
 
'...this collection does a tremendously good job of summoning an image of Porter's interests and methods in the social history of medicine and their impact.' - Andrew Hull, Medical History
 
'[With a] strong commitment to delimiting the type of historian that Porter was and was not ... [the essays show] how engagement with Porter's style of social history can and will continue to produce stimulating and "enlightening" work.'
- Karen Buckle, Journal of Contemporary History

About the Author:

ROBERTA BIVINS is Wellcome Lecturer in the History of Medicine at Cardiff University, UK. She is currently researching the impact of postcolonial immigration on medical research programmes and healthcare delivery in the US and the UK for a monograph entitled Contagious Communities, Model Minorities: Immigration, Ethnicity and Medicine. Other work has examined the cross-cultural transmission of medical expertise: Acupuncture, Expertise and Crosscultural Medicine, and understandings of global medicine: Alternative Medicine? A History.

JOHN V. PICKSTONE has practised the history of medicine in UMIST and the University of Manchester, UK, since 1974. He is now a Research Professor in the Wellcome Unit and the Centre of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, which he directed from 1986-2002. His present work is mostly on the contemporary history of medicine, including cancer, medical technologies and the NHS. He is the author of Ways of Knowing. A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine and co-editor with Roger Cooter of the Companion to Twentieth Century Medicine.

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0230525490
• ISBN 13: 9780230525498
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 305
• Editor: Bivins R., Pickstone J.