BOOK REVIEW Joseph M. Gabriel, Medical Monopoly: Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2014). In the 1980s, historians began to refer to the “medical marketplace” as a model for analyzing the experiences of health and illness. Adopting a normative understanding of the… Continue Reading
Latest in: Book Reviews
-
-
Book Review: Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19th and 20th Century Europe Edited by Daniel Morat (Berghahn Books, 2014) As a historian who studies the history of deafness, I am fascinated with the experiences and histories of sound and auditory perception. Sounds have become so ubiquitous to daily living that it seems only… Continue Reading
-
Institutionalizing the Insane in Nineteenth-Century England By Anna Shepherd Studies for the Society for the Social History of Medicine 20 Pickering & Chatto, 2014 HB 978 1 84893 431 3: £60/$99 eBook: £24 (incl. VAT) On a prime 150 acre site in Surrey at Woking, Brookwood Asylum opened its doors on June 17, 1867. Established… Continue Reading
-
Performing Medicine; Medical Culture and Identity in Provincial England, c.1760-1850 (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 2011), 254pp. I get excited when I receive a new book that so wonderfully engages with some of the major themes covered in my dissertation, and even better, a book that nicely contextualizes the background upon which I… Continue Reading
-
Parallel to my research on socio-educational institutions for the deaf, I’m hoping to tie together themes of technological progress, entrepreneurialism and consumerism with the broad and diverse medical community and marketplace—what we can aptly call medical pluralism. There’s been a lot of historical scholarship on the complex dynamics that wove together a diverse group of… Continue Reading
-
I just recommended this book for a student who was interested in comparing another Darwin biography with Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (1994). I then remembered writing a review of Browne’s book for a class on ‘Historiography in History and Philosophy of Science’ a few years ago and… Continue Reading
-
A short book review: Stephen Bocking, Ecologists and Environmental Politics: A History of Contemporary Ecology (Yale University Press, 1997) In this book, Stephen Bocking (Trent University) presents the history of ecology and its role in society by looking at the discipline’s respective emergence in Britain, United States, and Canada. Although at times Bocking’s writing style becomes… Continue Reading
From the Hands of Quacks 