Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain 1650-1900 (Picturing History (Reaktion Books)) - Softcover

Porter, Robert

4.11

18 ratings by Goodreads

9781861891655: Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain 1650-1900 (Picturing History (Reaktion Books))

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1861891652 ISBN 13: 9781861891655

Publisher: Reaktion Books, 2003

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In a historical tour de force, Roy Porter takes a critical look at representations of the body in death, disease and health, and at images of the healing arts in Britain from the mid-seventeenth to the twentieth century. Porter's key assumptions are that the human body is the chief signifier and communicator of all manner of meanings religious, moral, political and medical and that pre-scientific medicine was an art which depended heavily on ritual, rhetoric and theatre. Porter argues that great symbolic weight was attached to contrasting conceptions of the healthy and diseased body, and that such ideas were mapped onto antithetical notions of the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. With these images in mind, he explores aspects of being ill alongside the practice of medicine, paying special attention to self-presentations by physicians, surgeons and quacks, and to changes in practitioners' public identities over time. Porter also examines the wider symbolic meanings of disease and doctoring and the 'body politic'. Porter's book is packed with outrageous and amusing anecdotes portraying diseased bodies and medical practitioners alike.

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Product Description:

Pre-owned / Spine intact / Surface scuffs / edges frayed / See images for book description. (ISBN 186189094X. 9781861890948).

Review:

"This superb study explores the origins of that ironic definition of democracy as 'universal freedom and racial inequality.' . . . Sophisticated and engaging. . . . Highly recommended."--"Choice"

"At once detailed and sweeping, social and political, archival and synthetic. . . . This book is the best application yet to early American history of postcolonial theory."--"American Historical Review"

"An ambitious and persuasive account of the ways the political inclusion of some groups and not others connected the colonial era through the Revolution to the early American republic."--"Journal of American History"

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