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This chapter focuses on the lives of individuals sometimes called ‘white witches’, men and women who formed part of a ragged and disorganized phenomenon which historians of early modern medicine now call the ‘medical market-place’, an array of practitioners ranging from university-trained physicians to villagers credited with some modest gift for healing. Topics discussed include clergy, lawyer, and doctor involvement in cases; popular medical practitioners and devins; life stories of the six most active practitioners who were tried for witchcraft; the healer Nicolas Noel le Bragard; and magical healing and conceptions of illness.

This chapter outlines recent developments in the fitness to practice hearings where complaints are made against doctors. It traces the introduction of the medical practitioner tribunal service as a separate arm of the general medical council. It outlines how the tribunal service works and discusses its performance over the last decade. As a result, it questions whether recent reforms made have secured the public interest.

Physicians' assertions regarding their role in civil defense both reflected and reinforced the cultural authority that medical practitioners held. In the 1950s and 1960s, physicians used this authority to reinforce their command over matters of sexuality. Because of the rising trends of teen pregnancy, and divorce, and pre-and extramarital sexual activities, physicians responded to this crisis, in a manner called sexual defense, by enforcing sexual morality in American citizens.

This chapter shows how the associations between the knowledge of useful matters of fact and commercial interests were very clear in the medical marketplace. Even patients with limited resources had an enormous range of practitioners from whom to choose. In addition to self-diagnosis and self-help, and the advice and assistance of family, friends, and neighbors, local cunning folk and midwives were widespread, helping with matters of fertility and marriage, conception and pregnancy, childbirth, baptism, motherhood and childrearing, and death and the dead. They were usually considered helpful to members of their communities and so were not, contrary to some accounts, as frequently accused of witchcraft as many historians have assumed. More visible in the historical record, and probably more visible to the early modern Dutch themselves, were the many medical practitioners who sold their services in villages, towns, and cities for money, sometimes moving from place to place to do so.

This chapter discusses the concept of the so-called negative asymmetry, the tendency to focus on worst-case scenarios. It identifies medical practitioners and computer information technicians as examples of groups that seemed especially tied to these perceptual inversions. This chapter analyzes the sense of daily action that is guided by visions of the worst and examines the similarities among communities that approach quality evaluation in this way. The analysis indicates that negative asymmetry may not be a product of any specific profession per se but rather is a way of seeing that emerges in social fields defined by very particular combinations of social relationships, resources, and patterns of action.

This chapter examines obstetric training in the U.S. as an initiatory rite of passage. It considers the process by which medical practitioners are socialized both into the core belief and value system of our society and into their roles as the maintainers and perpetuators of that system. It describes the process of psychological transformation through which fledgling medical students become full-fledged obstetricians and discusses cognitive transformation in medical training.

Public support for laws that allow medical practitioners to end life by active measures has risen in recent years, but the medical profession in the UK has been reluctant to endorse this development. The obvious benefits to a few people who experience extremes of suffering towards the end of life need to be balanced against the interests of those who might feel pressurised to opt for death in a society where euthanasia becomes an acceptable and well-known solution to the problems of old age. Additionally, the effect on practitioners (usually doctors) who are called on to administer lethal treatments requires consideration. This chapter reports surveys of the relatives and friends of people who have died, as well as surveys of medical practitioners, to provide empirical evidence that deepens understanding of how moral and ethical dilemmas play themselves out in practice.

This chapter addresses the presence of Jewish medical practitioners in German-speaking Europe. While their story is less well documented than that of their co-religionists in Southern Europe, Jewish doctors were also prevalent throughout German lands during the course of the Middle Ages. Like their medieval Spanish and Italian contemporaries, with whom they were in contact, Jewish doctors in Germany were trained in an apprenticeship system, studied Hebrew translations of classical medical texts, and built familial dynasties of physicians. Unfortunately, there is very little documentary evidence that attests to the personages or activities of medieval German Jewish physicians. Certain fragments pieced together from disparate sources, however, may provide a window onto the life of the medieval German Jewish doctor.

This chapter examines the exchanges and debates that occurred throughout the Atlantic, revealing how knowledge related to diseases and their cures was created and disseminated by a varied number of historical actors associated with the slave trade and its abolition. The chapter question the ways in which helped disseminating new knowledge and changing medical cultures in the Atlantic world and beyond.

This chapter discusses how attachment theory is used, or not, in professional practice and decision making. Attachment theory is now a standard subject on social work qualifying programmes and many employers provide training for their social workers in attachment theory, ensuring that most practitioners are familiar with the theory. As the discourse of attachment theory has influenced medical opinion and doctors have the power and privilege to diagnose children, a range of ‘attachment disorders’ has been created and these disorders are used to categorise children. Afforded with greater power and status, such diagnoses by medical practitioners feed into the attachment theory knowledge base of social workers, influencing and framing how social workers think about the children and families they work with. The chapter then considers Matthew Gibson's recent study, which took place in the child and family social work service in an English local authority.

This book traces the history of the place of African American patients and medical practitioners in the nation's medical landscape from slavery through the Civil War and Reconstruction up to the turn of the century. After emancipation, African American medical culture developed in a variety of significant ways. The book highlights the struggle of African Americans for their rights to health care, dignified treatment, quality medical training, and the opportunity to practice medicine.

This chapter draws on the author's experiences as a medical practitioner and researcher in Nepal to reflect on the idea of ‘confidentiality’ both from an interdisciplinary perspective and in the non-Western context of Nepal. His experiences have made the author suspicious towards the idea that there can be one universally applicable standard of confidentiality in health settings in a country like Nepal. The situations are complex, and the ethical ambiguities faced in real-life situations of practice and research make appropriation of any particular position difficult and fraught with uncertainty. This is worth taking into account when we think of issues of globalisation, and the attempts that particular institutions might make in trying to push one particular form of ethical stricture developed elsewhere.

This chapter details the contributions of Philadelphia's medical community during the War of Independence. Throughout the conflict, disease killed far more Americans than combat; and commanders depended on medical professionals, like physicians and surgeons, as well as informal practitioners, like nurses and laundresses and military disciplinarians who could enforce compliance with hygienic measures. Because Philadelphia was home to the nation's most celebrated hospital and most prominent medical faculty, Pennsylvania would exert an outsize influence on the development of American military medicine. In addition, the war had transformed Philadelphia's medical community by plunging them into hands-on medical practice, endowing them with the prestige associated with revolutionary service, developing their political alliances and acumen, and most importantly, by teaching them to think in terms of populations.

During the Cold War, medical practitioners in the United States situated themselves as the guardians of the sexual well-being of all American citizens. In this period, the rising rates of premarital intercourse, teen pregnancy, divorce, and homosexuality were threats that needed to be contained. This book examines how the American medical profession envisioned sexual health in the decades following World War II and explores their contribution to the Cold War definitions of sexual citizenship. Medical professionals argued that gender identity was integral to the performance of healthy heterosexuality and that healthy heterosexuality was essential to overall physical and mental well-being.

This chapter examines the various treatments used by doctors and domestic healers throughout the Western world during the eighteenth century, based on a theory of illness that had prevailed for 2,500 years. Expounded first by Hippocrates in the fifth century BCE and slightly modified by Galen in 130 CE, the theorists assumed that disease or any ill health was a result of a morbid state of bodily humors (blood, yellow and black bile, and phlegm). The doctor's role was to restore the balance of those humors by depleting the excess. Recovery meant that the morbid matter had been removed. The discovery of inoculation for smallpox and the use of quinine for malaria should have led to a questioning of those traditional theories. This chapter also discusses the progress made by eighteenth-century medicine; some of the strange medications used at the time; the place of the physician in the social hierarchy of medical practitioners; the publication of self-help books written by both doctors and laymen; and medications based on folklore, along with botanicals and black herbalism.

In the waning years of the nineteenth century, despite (or perhaps because of) the inroads of laboratory science, uncertainty still hung heavy over the future shape of the medical curriculum. Although currents of change now flowed freely through the medical schools and conditions of study were shifting in every country, agreement was far from universal on such primary questions as the place of science and the laboratory in medical study, how clinical medicine should best be taught, the best way to prepare for medical study, the order of studies, minimal requirements for practice, and the importance of postgraduate study. “Perturbations and violent readjustments,” an American professor told his audience in 1897, marked the life of every medical school in this “remarkable epoch in the history of medicine.” Similar to the era of change a century before, students were again confronted with bewildering choices. Old questions long thought settled rose in new form. Did the practical study of medicine belong in a university at all? Was bedside instruction still needed by every student in training, or was the superbly conducted clinical demonstration not as good or even better? Should students perform experiments themselves in laboratories so as to understand the real meaning of science and its promise for medicine, or was it a waste of valuable time for the vast majority? And what about the university—now the home of advanced science, original research work, and the scientific laboratory—was it to be the only site to learn the medicine of the future? What about the still numerous hospital and independent schools, the mainstay of teaching in Anglo- America in 1890—did they still have a place in the teaching of medicine? Amidst the often clamorous debates on these and other questions, the teaching enterprise was still shaped by strong national cultural differences. In the final years of the century, the Western world was experiencing a new sense of national identity and pride that ran through developments in science and medicine as well as politics. The strident nationalism and industrial-scientific strength of a united Germany, evident to physicians studying there, thoroughly frightened many in the rest of Europe.

This chapter comments on the controversy surrounding the scope of the right of medical practitioners to conscientiously object to participation in abortion provision. It addresses the question of how conscience exemptions for abortion practice ought to be framed within the context of permissive abortion regulation and what sorts of factors ought to inform the boundaries of conscience protection. I argue that the limits on the right to conscientious objection to abortion should be determined by a few key considerations, including the imperative that conscientious refusals do not undermine the purpose of abortion regulation and the values and ideals furthered by it; the degree to which the contested activity implicates the objector in giving abortion treatment, and the cost to individual objectors of shouldering the burden of their objections themselves.