Book dossier

Doctor of society

by Roy Sydney Porter

"How have we come to hold our present attitudes towards health, sickness and the medical profession? Roy Porter argues that the outlooks of the age of the Enlightenment were crucially important in the creation of modern thinking about disease, doctors and society. In order to probe the origins, interpretation and significance of such views, he focuses upon one prominent doctor active in England at the close of the eighteenth century, Thomas Beddoes, and examines his challenging, pugnacious, radical and often amusing views on a wide range of issues concerned with the place of illness and medicine in society. Beddoes is particularly interesting, since he was a leading medical scientist, an active political radical, a prolific author, and centre of an intellectual circle that included Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the young Humphry Davy." "Successive chapters examine Beddoes's views about the progress of medical science, the social and psychological causes of sickness in advanced commercial and industrial societies, amongst both the upper and the working classes, the prevalence of quackery, the ills of the medical profession and their reform, and the meaning of sickness for the individual. Beddoes posed the question of what kind of medicine would be needed for a future enlightened, urban society, and the place of the doctor within a democratic order. The failure of the French Revolution gave a pessimistic as well as a progressive cast to Beddoes's vision. Many debates within medicine today continue to echo the topics which Beddoes himself discussed in his ever-trenchant and provocative manner."--BOOK JACKET.