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Time: 10 hours Level: Intermediate
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Introduction Resource
- This unit examines the roles of Scots who contributed to the comprehensive transformation of medicine in the nineteenth century. It begins by observing how laboratory practices led to improved techniques...
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| | 1 The rise of laboratory medicine
1.1 Transforming practice Resource
- ‘Laboratory medicine’ represented a fundamental shift away from the established view of the body and disease. Where hospital medicine saw disease as a collection of symptoms in life, which related to changes...
1.2 The laboratory in diagnosis Resource
- Different fields of laboratory research offered a range of new diagnostic techniques. Bacteriological research into the identity of disease-causing microorganisms provided practitioners with a new and...
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| | 2 The emergence of a modern profession?
2.1 Introduction Resource
- In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, fundamental and sweeping changes took place in medical training and practice. Apprenticeships, which were once the most common form of medical training,...
2.2 Unity and conflict Resource
- In the nineteenth century, licensing reform and developments in medical education brought a new unity to the profession. Students had a similar education, trained in large groups and developed a strong...
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| | 3 Women in medicine: doctors and nurses, 1850–1920
3.1 Introduction Resource
- Women have always cared for the sick. They have nursed family members within the home and worked as nurses, healers and midwives within the community. In the eighteenth century, a few women worked as ‘doctresses’...
3.2 The push for – and opposition to – women in medicine Resource
- In Britain, the campaign for access to the medical profession began at Edinburgh University in 1869, and was led by Sophia Jex-Blake (1840–1913). Influenced by the feminist movement of the time, Jex-Blake...
3.3 The reasons for – and emergence of – women working in medicine Resource
- Why in the face of such resistance did women wish to become doctors at all? Until recently, many authors have argued that women pursued a medical career as a form of service and for altruistic reasons....
3.4 War and women in medicine Resource
- Until 1914, the number of women attending medical schools grew slowly (Figure 4). In Britain, even after the 1876 Enabling Act allowed medical examining boards to grant licences to women, universities...
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4.1 Introduction Resource
- In the nineteenth century, the asylum became – as never before – the accepted place for the care and treatment of insanity. Until that time, people suffering from mental disorders were mostly cared for...
4.2 Social factors in the growth of the asylum: industrialisation, urbanisation and migration Resource
- Many historians link the rise of the asylum with the huge social changes of the nineteenth century. Some link the rise to industrialisation and urbanisation, pointing to the fact that asylums grew up in...
4.3 Social factors in the growth of the asylum: social control, the family and the asylum Resource
- Both contemporary commentators and historians have argued that the pressures of capitalism resulted in families being not only less capable of supporting family members but also less tolerant of unruly...
4.4 Outside the asylum walls: limits to the primacy of the asylum as a solution Resource
- Although historians have written about the asylum as the only response to insanity, there was in fact a widely used alternative. Boarding-out, or ‘family care’ of the insane, offered a genuine alternative...
4.5 Section summary Resource
- This section has given some of the sense of how historians work – by developing explanations of historical events, which are in turn challenged by new research that re-examines these ideas. In the case...
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| | References and Acknowledgements
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