Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Miscellaneous Frantmatter
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The medicalisation of East Kent
- 2 The medicalisation of central southern England
- 3 The availability and nature of medical assistance
- 4 Medical practices
- 5 The nature and availability of nursing care
- 6 Plague and smallpox
- Conclusion
- Appendix Medical indices for East Kent, West Sussex, Berkshire and Wiltshire
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - The availability and nature of medical assistance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Miscellaneous Frantmatter
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The medicalisation of East Kent
- 2 The medicalisation of central southern England
- 3 The availability and nature of medical assistance
- 4 Medical practices
- 5 The nature and availability of nursing care
- 6 Plague and smallpox
- Conclusion
- Appendix Medical indices for East Kent, West Sussex, Berkshire and Wiltshire
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
If society was becoming medicalised, it follows that a group within it was acting – either consciously or unconsciously – as an agent for social change. It is reasonable to speculate that increases of several hundred per cent in medical services between the first and the third quarters of the seventeenth century led to a greater call on the time of practitioners, and so for a greater need for them. Was the ambition to be a medical practitioner partly behind the change? The supply-side factor is best measured by discovering whether there were more physicians, surgeons and apothecaries in 1690 than there had been at the start of the century. If there were, then this would be evidence of an increase in the use of medicine being common to all the sick, not just the seriously ill. It would also be evidence of the medicalisation of the county being driven by the medical practitioners themselves: their selling the idea of medical strategies to the population at large. Hence the first question to be answered in explaining how society became medicalised is whether it resulted in dramatic increases in the numbers of practitioners available.
Practitioner numbers
There are a number of ways in which to determine practitioner numbers. All the known names and dates of practitioners can be checked and thereby an absolute minimum established; but this method would permit very little scope systematically to assess how many practitioners are omitted from the records.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Dying and the DoctorsThe Medical Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England, pp. 57 - 90Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009