The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine

by Mark Jackson (Editor)

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine celebrates the richness and variety of medical history around the world. In recent decades, the history of medicine has emerged as a rich and mature sub-discipline within history, but the strength of the field has not precluded vigorous debates about methods, themes, and sources. Bringing together over thirty international scholars, this handbook provides a constructive overview of the current state of these debates, and offers new directions for future scholarship.

There are three sections: the first explores the methodological challenges and historiographical debates generated by working in particular historical ages; the second explores the history of medicine in specific regions of the world and their medical traditions, and includes discussion of the `global history of medicine'; the final section analyses, from broad chronological and geographical perspectives, both established and emerging historical themes and methodological debates in the history of medicine.

Genres: History, Science, Medicine, Academic

696 pages, Hardcover

First published August 25, 2011

About the author

Mark Jackson is Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments and Health at the University of Exeter. After qualifying in immunology in 1982 and medicine in 1985, he pursued research on the social history of infanticide and the history of `feeble-mindedness’ at the Universities of Leeds and Manchester. More recently, he has been researching and writing on the history of allergies and stress in the modern world, from an international perspective. His major publications include New-Born Child Murder: Women, Illegitimacy and the Courts in Eighteenth-Century England (1996), The Borderland of Imbecility: Medicine, Society and the Fabrication of the Feeble Mind in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain (2000), Allergy: The History of a Modern Malady (2006), Asthma: The Biography (2009), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine (ed., 2011), The Age of Stress: Science and the Search for Stability (2013), The History of Medicine: A Beginners Guide (2014, shortlisted for the Dingle Prize), Stress in Post-War Britain, 1945-85 (ed., 2015), and The Routledge History of Disease (ed., 2016). He is currently writing a cultural history of the midlife crisis and health in middle age.

He has a strong interest in developing the undergraduate medical curriculum, creating opportunities for wider public engagement activities, and collaborating with health practitioners and policy-makers to enable health and well-being. He was Senior Academic Adviser (Medical Humanities) to the Wellcome Trust (2013-16), has served as Chair of the Wellcome Trust History of Medicine and Research Resources Funding Committees, (2003-13), and was a member of the History sub-panel for REF 2014. He is Chair of the WHO Europe Expert Advisory Group on the Cultural Contexts of Health and a member of the WHO European Advisory Committee on Health Research.