Research Catalog

Making a medical living : doctors and patients in the English market for medicine, 1720-1911

Title: Making a medical living : doctors and patients in the English market for medicine, 1720-1911 / Anne Digby.
Author: Digby, Anne.
Publication: Cambridge [England] ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1994.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Use in library	R486 .D54 1994	Off-site

Details

Description

xix, 348 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

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 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.

Series Statement

Cambridge studies in population, economy, and society in past time ; 24

Uniform Title

Cambridge studies in population, economy, and society in past time ; 24.

Subject

Genre/Form

History

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (p. 317-337) and index.

Contents

Professional structure of practice -- Medical practioners -- Context of practice -- Medical encounters -- Economic dimensions of practice -- Creation of a surgical general practice -- GP and the goal of prosperity -- Physicians -- Patients and doctors -- Medicalisation and affluent patients -- Office, altruism and poor patients -- Expanding practice with women and child patients -- Synthesis -- Reflections.

ISBN

052134526X
9780521345262

LCCN

93034762

OCLC

ocm28966767
28966767
SCSB-2029935

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library