Hunger is an embodied experience which impacts the physical and mental state. This chapter explores the impact of starvation. The physical effects of starvation on the body are wasting, swelling (edema), susceptibility to disease, and eventually death. The mental effects of starvation include behavioral changes, food obsession, and irritability. All of these were observed by individuals in the ghetto who recorded this as diarists or in some cases physicians studying the impact of the lack of food on their patients. This also chapter explores food fantasy resulting from hunger and humor which arose in response to food deprivation.

This chapter explores the practice of dissection in the first and second centuries AD, based largely on the evidence of Galen but drawing a picture beyond his activities alone. Divided into sections according to the contexts of and motivations for dissection, it begins with private dissections for practice and research. It next turns to performative dissections, beginning with those for public display. These public dissections occurred at different scales, and this section considers their contents, their diverse practitioners, and the size and make-up of their various audiences, including a discussion of venues, such as auditoria, and their capacities. The chapter then turns to examples of dissection specifically for medical advertisement, including evidence for public surgery, and then to two instances of dissection in the context of formal competition, one attested textually, the other epigraphically. Finally, it zeroes in on the competitive motivations of Roman dissection and its use in the adjudication of medical and philosophical debates, as well as in the jockeying between rivals.

Chapter 2 traces the Act’s early, formative years. We explain how its meaning was negotiated as women arrived in doctors’ surgeries seeking services that they now believed to be lawful and how doctors worked to understand and apply the new law. We explore how, over time, different interpretations of the Act coexisted, fell out of use or became entrenched in professional codes, internal policy and procedure documents, official guidance and medical curricula. The chapter ends in 1974 with the publication of two important texts discussing the workings of the Abortion Act in these early years: the sensationalist media expose Babies for Burning and the highly influential and authoritative Lane Report.

Death investigation was a central aspect of forensic medicine. However, doctors struggled with uncertainty in defining and evaluating signs of death, at the same time as popular fears of premature burial abounded. Moreover, they faced considerable difficulties in distinguishing between homicides, suicides, and natural or accidental deaths and in determining the cause of death. Anxiety about insufficiently trained and incompetent practitioners who performed medicolegal duties that exceeded the limits of their knowledge and skills fueled demands for medicolegal reform. As medicolegal expertise played a more and more decisive role in criminal investigations and prosecutions, flawed forensic expertise became an increasingly salient problem that sparked ongoing debates about possible structural solutions.

Malingering, the practice of feigning medical conditions for specific purposes, became a pressing concern for many practitioners of legal medicine following the introduction of conscription during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. A burgeoning medicolegal literature on malingering revealed that some doctors went to great lengths to detect and expose malingerers by using deceit, coercion, painful procedures, and altered states of consciousness as diagnostic tools. Doctors justified the far-reaching tactics used in adversarial contests with suspected malingerers in the name of the public good. Acting on behalf of the state to expose them, doctors engaged in adversarial relationships with suspected malingerers. These encounters also provided an impetus for debates about medical ethics; however, ethical concerns about doctors’ methods of detecting malingering were rarely raised and debated until the end of the nineteenth century.

This chapter completes the description of the delivery system, focusing on three fundamental categories of providers: hospitals, doctors and nurses. For each of these three categories, recent data regarding the density of these providers with respect to the resident population are reported. These data are provided for the twenty-seven OECD countries analyzed in this book. A particular focus is reserved for the mechanism through which hospital facilities and physicians are remunerated.

This chapter analyzes the origins of midwifery as a profession, its governance, and the state’s management of birth.

Inscriptions collected in this chapter demonstrate that women were employed in a wide range of occupations: not only were they engaged in gendered professions, as hairdressers, wet nurses and midwives, but they were also involved in more general vocations, for instance as physicians, albeit less frequently than men. Women were involved in trade and a limited number of crafts (primarily clothing and luxury production), and in education, entertainment and prostitution. Most working women we meet in inscriptions were freedwomen who had been trained as slaves. Their brief epitaphs advertise their professions as part of their social identity. Apart from funerary inscriptions, amphora stamps and painted messages on potsherds record the names of female ship owners and traders exporting wine and olive oil, brick stamps demonstrate their engagement as managers and owners of brick production and lead water pipes their management of lead workshops, graffiti advertise their services as prostitutes and wooden tablets their particpation in business transactions. Most testimonies are from Rome and the cities of Italy.

This, and the following three chapters, deal solely with the first element – the establishment of a duty of care – in a variety of scenarios. English courts have long drawn a distinction between the existence of a duty of care in the context of loss caused by physical injury or property damage, on the one hand (the subject of analysis in this chapter); and where economic loss or psychiatric injury is caused, on the other. In the latter scenarios, special rules apply for the establishment of a duty of care, which are the subject of consideration in Chapters 4 and 5, respectively.

We now know that in Classical Athens there were as many as 200 occupations. This essay shows that not all occupations enjoyed an equal amount of status and prestige. Four occupations are studied: actors, especially those in the Associations of Dionysiac Artists, philosophers, doctors, and sculptors. These occupations required extensive training and acquired some features associated with modern professions.

Chapter 4 discusses the expansion of vaccination in the British Isles during the Napoleonic Wars. The rapid extension of the practice from 1800, involving hundreds of thousands of people, represented a mobilisation of opinion and action that paralleled the mobilisation of the nation for war. Medical men took up vaccination with alacrity, seeking to make their name and serve their communities. Members of the aristocracy and gentry, with women often in the lead, accepted it in their families and supported it in their spheres of influence. Clergymen promoted it from the pulpit. Reckless practice led to adverse outcomes that encouraged anxieties about inoculating cowpox and provided ammunition for an anti-vaccination movement in London in 1805–7. Instructed to conduct an enquiry, the College of Physicians fully endorsed vaccination in 1807. After receiving the report, Parliament broke new ground in health provision by funding a National Vaccine Establishment to distribute vaccine and have oversight of the practice.