-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Chris Hamlin, Michael Brown, Performing Medicine: Medical Culture and Identity in Provincial England, c.1760–1850, Social History of Medicine, Volume 25, Issue 3, August 2012, Pages 759–760, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hks047
- Share Icon Share
Extract
In Performing Medicine Michael Brown seeks to fill a surprising vacuum in English medical history: the social position and cultural status of the regional medical practitioner. He wishes to understand where such persons fitted in the array of ranks and occupations, and how they operated within given spheres and pressed sometimes to transform them. The ‘provincial England’ of the title is the city of York.
Brown's period is one of change from an old regime of gentlemanly medicine, something like Jewson's ‘bedside medicine’, still ascendant in the 1760s, to a distinctive and often defensive, professional identity in the 1840s. At the beginning of the period York's doctors were, or aspired to be, gentlemanly members of a society in which medicine was but one of many forms of specialist trade or learned professionalism. Notwithstanding the religious unorthodoxy of many of them, they seemed generally successful in doing so. A Doctors' Club, for male sociality and what would now be called ‘networking’, was not exclusively medical. In contrast, by the 1840s, York's medics saw themselves as belonging to a national profession and a universal ethical brotherhood beyond: their Medical Society, founded in 1832, would be concerned with the knowledge transmission which was both to justify their authority and be accessible only to the authorised, and with communal duties, which they understood themselves, as doctors, to have.