This FS aims to offer the broad appeal of the social history of medicine, which sees medicine as a response to problems of health and disease as experienced by most people. `Medicine, Empire and Improvement’ connects with topics of increasing interest such as racial difference, consumerism, colonialism, `medicalization’ (the increasing authority of medical ideas in society as a whole), environmentalism, and alternative medicine. No technical or specialist background is assumed.
The primary focus is on Britain, but the chosen themes look outward to incorporate Britain’s relationships, physical and mental, with its growing empire, with America, and with France. The authors of the texts have been chosen partly on the basis of their intimate involvement with religion, politics, literature, or popular culture. The emphasis is on medicine as a measure of the economic, social, and physical environment. Overall, the environmental emphasis is strong, but you will also be looking at medicine as an example of the rise of the middle class and in particular of the professions. Were the new voluntary hospitals dominated by their medical staffs, or by their lay governors? Does the eighteenth century deserve its reputation as the high point of quackery and the commercialization of medicine? Or should we think more in terms of divisions between popular and élite culture, or of increasing intellectual pluralism following the upheavals of the seventeenth century?
Two further prominent themes are war, which was increasingly acquiring a global dimension; and colonialism, including the pathogenic effects of empire. During this period, Britain and most major European powers established or extended medical provisions for their armed forces, this being one of the few areas in which the State was prepared to intervene to protect the health of its subjects. Many of the medical writers of the period were enterprising, outspoken, observant, and ideologically committed (or alternatively, unscrupulous) individuals who wandered the globe and played a major part in creating images of foreign environments for home consumption. They made major contributions to a debate on the effects of luxury which took on a new lease of life as imperial commerce expanded. They also helped to define ‘Britishness’ in terms of Britons’ physical and mental responses to the colonial experience.
Health, disease and medicine were, and are, matters of universal concern, creating a shared but changing vocabulary and set of ideas; this FS demonstrates how medical concepts were used in defining the health of the body politic in the context of Enlightenment society.
