Making a Medical Living: Doctors and Patients in the English Market for Medicine, 1720–1911

by Anne Digby

• ISBN13: 9780521524513
• ISBN10: 0521524512
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-06-30
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• More Book Details

Summary

How did doctors make a living? Making a Medical Living explores the neglected socio-economic history of medical practice, beginning with the first voluntary hospital in 1720 and ending with national health insurance in 1911. It looks at public appointments in hospitals and dispensaries, office under public welfare systems, and at private practice. In this innovative study, Anne Digby makes use of new sources of information, looks at ordinary rather than élite doctors, and analyses provincial rather than metropolitan practice. From the mid-eighteenth century medicine became more commercialised; doctors travelled to see ordinary patients, developed specialisms, and were entrepreneurial in expanding institutional forms of health care. This entrepreneurial activity helped shape English medicine into a distinctive pattern of general and specialist practice, and of public and private health care.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	xi
List of tables	xiii
Acknowledgements	xv
Note on abbreviations	xvii
Glossary	xviii
Introduction	1	(8)
Part I The professional structure of practice	9	(96)
Medical practitioners	11	(28)
The context of practice	39	(30)
Medical encounters	69	(36)
Part II The economic dimensions of practice	105	(92)
The creation of a surgical general practice	107	(28)
The GP and the goal of prosperity	135	(35)
Physicians	170	(27)
Part III Patients and doctors	197	(100)
Medicalisation and affluent patients	199	(25)
Office, altruism and poor patients	224	(30)
Expanding practice with women and child patients	254	(43)
Part IV Synthesis	297	(2)
Reflections	299	(18)
Select bibliography	317	(21)
Index of medical names	338	(3)
General index	341