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So many gardening books tell you what to plant and where and when. But how often do they tell you to just sit and enjoy them? And when you do, you can find yourself thinking of things in a different way.With an exceptional academic career in natural history and medicine, writer Joanna Geyer-Kordesch found 'reflection, consolation and healing' in the soothing, healing powers of gardens after suffering from a major stroke. Sharing profound reflections on how gardening has helped her regenerate, Why Gardens Matter is as enlightening as it is inspirational. With contributions from Donald Smith, this is a powerful plea for us to reflect on our gardens and to acknowledge the life-affirming values of our green spaces.
A series of essays on the development of medicine in the century of the Enlightenment, illustrating the decline in the role of religion in medical thinking, and the increased use of reason.
This book explores how and when biology emerged as a science in Germany. Beginning with the debate about organism between Georg Ernst Stahl and Gottfried Leibniz at the start of the eighteenth century, John Zammito traces the development of a new research program, culminating in 1800, in the formulation of developmental morphology. He shows how over the course of the century, naturalists undertook to transform some domains of natural history into a distinct branch of natural philosophy, which attempted not only to describe but to explain the natural world and became, ultimately, the science of biology.
"Western modernity rests on the notion of individual will, of the autonomous subject able to chart a path toward self-determination. Yet today that notion seems neither plausible nor desirable, in part because of the ways that novels have long questioned it. The novel typically takes the will as a site of insufficiency or excess-from obsession to indecision, wild impulse to melancholic inertia. Jennifer Fleissner's ambitious book shows how the novel's attention to these maladies of the will has made it a form of ongoing interrogation, both invested and critical, of modernity's core premises from within. Fleissner ranges from the seventeenth century to the turn of the twentieth, showing how t...
Professional education forms a key element in the transmission of medical learning and skills, in occupational solidarity and in creating and recreating the very image of the practitioner. Yet the history of British medical education has hitherto been surprisingly neglected. Building upon papers contributed to two conferences on the history of medical education in the early 1990s, this volume presents new research and original synthesis on key aspects of medical instruction, theoretical and practical, from early medieval times into the present century. Academic and practical aspects are equally examined, and balanced attention is given to different sites of instruction, be it the university or the hospital. The crucial role of education in medical qualifications and professional licensing is also examined as is the part it has played in the regulation of the entry of women to the profession. Contributors are Juanita Burnby, W.F. Bynum, Laurence M. Geary, Faye Getz, Johanna Geyer-Kordesch, S.W.F. Holloway, Stephen Jacyna, Peter Murray Jones, Helen King, Susan C. Lawrence, Irvine Loudon, Margaret Pelling, Godelieve Van Heteren, and John Harley Warner.
From the 1890s to the 1930s, a growing number of Germans began to scrutinize and discipline their bodies in a utopian search for perfect health and beauty. Some became vegetarians, nudists, or bodybuilders, while others turned to alternative medicine or eugenics. In The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany, Michael Hau demonstrates why so many men and women were drawn to these life reform movements and examines their tremendous impact on German society and medicine. Hau argues that the obsession with personal health and fitness was often rooted in anxieties over professional and economic success, as well as fears that modern industrialized civilization was causing Germany and its people to degenerate. He also examines how different social groups gave different meanings to the same hygienic practices and aesthetic ideals. What results is a penetrating look at class formation in pre-Nazi Germany that will interest historians of Europe and medicine and scholars of culture and gender.
Medical Humanity and Inhumanity in the German-Speaking World is the first volume dedicated to exploring the interface of medicine, the human and the humane in the German-speaking lands. The volume tracks the designation and making through medicine of the human and inhuman, and the humane and inhumane, from the Middle Ages to the present day. Eight individual chapters undertake explorations into ways in which theories and practices of medicine in the German-speaking world have come to define the human, and highlight how such theories and practices have consolidated, or undermined, notions of humane behaviour. Cultural analysis is central to this investigation, foregrounding the reflection, re...
Urban presents the NEA in its historical context, turning a fair and clear eye on this powerful and controversial organization, and using this context to both criticize and commend. The culmination of a three decade long study, this unique volume presents an unusually thorough and much needed holistic view of the NEA.
This is a comprehensive work of reference which covers all aspects of medical history and reflects the complementary approaches to the discipline. 72 essays are written by internationally respected scholars from many different areas of expertise.