Health & Medicine through Time

Attitudes to sickness and health have played a key role across different civilisations and throughout time. The emphasis placed by the ancient societies of Egypt and Greece on the human body are discussed under this theme and the impact those beliefs had on society as it developed. Changes in welfare and hygiene are explored as are attitudes to cleanliness and the eradication of disease. The radical changes to the understanding, experimentation and application of medicine from the nineteenth century to today are an important part of this theme and are explored here.

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  • Film: London’s Dreaded Visitation – Epidemic disease in Restoration London

    Article

    This lecture explored the epidemiology of disease in metropolitan London, exploring by reconstructions of local impact in the various parishes north, south east and west of the City from Bills of Mortality, burial registers and the Churchwardens’ accounts which often allow a day by day if not hour by hour...

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  • WWI and the flu pandemic

    Article

    In our continuing Aspects of War series Hugh Gault reveals that the flu pandemic, which began during the First World War, presented another danger that challenged people’s lives and relationships. Wounded in the neck on the first day of the battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, Arthur Conan Doyle’s son Kingsley...

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  • Podcast: The Historical Medicalization of Homosexuality & Transvestism

    Article

    In this podcast, Dr Tommy Dickinson of the University of Manchester, looks at the historical medicalization of homosexuality and transvestism.  1. Introduction: the historical medicalization of homosexuality and transvestism  HA Members can listen to the full podcast here Suggested Reading:  Tommy Dickinson (2015) "Curing Queers": MentalNurses and their Patients  1935-1974.  Peter Conrad &...

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  • The world in 1913: friendly societies

    Article

    Friendly societies were designed to help members to cope with the illness, death or unemployment of a household's breadwinner. Each month members, mostly men, paid into the society, often at a meeting in a pub and in return payments from the pooled funds were made to ill members and to...

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  • Four faces of nursing and the First World War

    Article

    With the centenary approaching, article after article will appear on battles, the men who fought, those who refused, those that died, those who returned and those that made the decisions. There will be articles on the home front and the women that stepped into the men's shoes often to be...

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  • NHS Reform Timeline

    Article

    As the recent Health and Social Care Act (2012) shows, the NHS has been subject to much change since its inception in 1948. Having recently celebrated its 64th birthday, the NHS is entering another period of significant change. To mark these changes, and to show them in their historical context,...

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  • Medieval Medicine Podcast

    Multipage Article

    In this HA Podcast Ian Dawson looks at medicine during the medieval period.

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  • Anorexia Nervosa in the nineteenth century

    Article

    First referred to by Richard Morton (1637-98) in his Phthisiologia under the denomination phthisis nervosa as long ago as 1689, anorexia nervosa was given its name in a note by Sir William Gull (1816-90) in 1874. Gull had earlier described a disorder he termed apepsia hysterica, involving extreme emaciation without...

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  • Child Health & School meals: Nottingham 1906-1945

    Article

    Following Jamie Oliver’s devastating television series on the inadequacy of school meals the present government has been quick to be seen to address the situation. In September 2005, Ruth Kelly, the then Education Secretary, announced a war on junk food in schools.1 This was nothing new, because the history of...

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  • The Origins of the Local Government Service

    Article

    The concept ‘local government’ dates only from the middle of the nineteenth century. ‘Local government service’ emerged later still. In 1903 Redlich and Hirst1 wrote of ‘municipal officers’, while in 1922 Robson2 preferred ‘the municipal civil service’. ‘Local government service’ perhaps derives its pedigree from its use in the final...

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  • Cholera and the Fight for Public Health Reform in Mid-Victorian England

    Article

    Of the many social changes that occurred during the Victorian age, public health reform is widely agreed to be one of the most significant. In the early Victorian era the vast majority of Britons drank water from murky ponds and rivers, carried to their dwellings in buckets; and their excrement...

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