Main description:

This edited volume originates in the 2011 conference of the International Network for the History of Hospitals, held in Lisbon and Evora, Portugal. It focuses on how institutions for the care and cure of the sick have organised their activities at every level, from the delegation of medical treatments between groups of practitioners, to the provision of food and supplies and the impact of convalescence on lengths of hospital stays. It draws on new European and North American research which highlights an area of medical history that has not yet had adequate, sustained attention, discussing the tensions between theory and practice and between patients and practitioners. Through detailed case studies and comparative analyses it explores the changing and evolving understanding of the function of hospitals, and their wider relationships with their communities.

Contents:

Contents: Christopher Bonfield: Therapeutic Regimes for Bodily Health in Medieval English Hospitals - Fritz Dross: Their Daily Bread: Managing Hospital Finances in Early Modern Germany - Sharon T. Strocchia: Caring for the 'Incurable' in Renaissance Pox Hospitals - Jon Arrizabalaga: Medical Theory and Surgical Practice: Coping with the French Disease in Early Renaissance Portugal and Spain - Laurinda Abreu: Training Health Professionals at the Hospital de Todos os Santos (Lisbon) 1500-1800 - Elisabeth Belmas: Patient Care at the Hotel Royal des Invalides, Paris, 1670-1791 - Anne Lokke: Conspicuous Consumption: The Royal Lying-in Hospital in Copenhagen in the late Eighteenth Century - John Chircop: Management and Therapeutic Regimes in Two Lunatic Asylums in Corfu and Malta, 1837-1870 - Andrea Tanner/Sue Hawkins: Myth, Marketing and Medicine: Life in British Children's Hospitals 1850-1914 - Stephen C. Kenny: Slavery, Southern Medicine and the American Slave Hospital Regime, 1830-1860 - David Theodore: 'The Fattest Possible Nurse': Architecture, Computers, and Post-war Nursing - Sally Sheard: Getting Better, Faster: Convalescence and Length of Stay in British and US Hospitals.