Making a Medical Living: Doctors and Patients in the English Market for Medicine, 1720-1911How 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 private practice and how this was supplemented by public appointments. In this innovative study, Anne Digby makes use of new archival sources of information to produce a compelling picture of ordinary rather than elite doctors, and of the dynamics of provincial rather than metropolitan practice. From the mid-eighteenth century doctors travelled to see ordinary patients, developed specialisms and expanded institutions. Despite limitations in treatment, doctors raised demand for their services as illuminating case studies of women, children, the poor and the affluent show. But doctors did not limit their own numbers, and were largely unsuccessful in restricting competition from other practitioners, with the significant exception of women. Consequently, many GPs struggled to make a living by seeing numerous patients at low fees. Doctors' entrepreneurial activity thus helped shape English medicine into a distinctive pattern of general and specialist practice, and of public and private health care. |
Contents
Medical practitioners | 11 |
The context of practice | 39 |
Medical encounters | 69 |
The economic dimensions of practice | 105 |
The creation of a surgical general practice | 107 |
The GP and the goal of prosperity | 135 |
Physicians | 170 |
Patients and doctors | 197 |
Office altruism and poor patients | 224 |
Expanding practice with women and child patients | 254 |
Synthesis | 297 |
Reflections | 299 |
317 | |
338 | |
341 | |
Medicalisation and affluent patients | 199 |
Other editions - View all
Making a Medical Living: Doctors and Patients in the English Market for ... Anne Digby Limited preview - 2002 |
Making a Medical Living: Doctors and Patients in the English Market for ... Anne Digby No preview available - 1994 |
Common terms and phrases
apothecaries appointments areas assistant Astley Cooper attendance Bath BMJ Advertiser British Cambridge charged clinical competition consultant country practices Cullen cure Darwin Diary disease Dispensary doctors earlier economic Edinburgh Edwardian Edwardian period eighteenth century élite England English example fees female Georgian guineas History of Medicine Hospital illness important increased indicated Infirmary institutions James Gregory John Journal Lancet later Lectures Leeds letter Lettsom London Medical Education Medical History medical incomes medical market medical officers medical practice medical practitioners Medical Profession medical students midwifery midwives mortality nineteenth century Norwich numbers Obstetric Oxford parish payment Percival Pott period physi physic physician Poor Law poor patients population Porter prac professional provincial quackery ratio regimen regular practitioners second edn shillings sickness Social History Society specialist St Bartholomew's Hospital suggested surgeon surgeon-apothecaries surgery surgical Table therapeutic titioners treatment Tunbridge Victorian visits vols Wellcome whilst William women wrote
Popular passages
Page xv - Fortunately, the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences at the University of North Carolina has embarked on a large study of many of these content and methodological problems.
References to this book
Medical Lives in the Age of Surgical Revolution M. Anne Crowther,Marguerite W. Dupree Limited preview - 2007 |
Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century: Age and Identity Anja Müller No preview available - 2006 |