Medical Misadventure in an Age of Professionalisation, 1780–1890

Alannah Tomkins is Professor of History at Keele University

• List of Figures List of TablesAcknowledgements1. Introduction 2. Financial hardship: bankruptcy, insolvency, and medical charity3. Thwarted ambition and disappointing careers? Narratives of the Indian Medical Service4. Accident or on purpose? Neglect, incompetence, and unintentional killing5. Crimes Against the Body: Causing harm6. Mad Doctors: lunacy and the asylum7. Despairing doctors: professional stress and suicide8. Conclusion Select BibliographyIndex

‘Alannah Tomkins’s Medical Misadventure in an Age of Professionalisation, 1780-1890, does justice to the richness and complexity of nineteenth-century medical lives and through collective biography effectively resists the temptation to recapitulate the trials and tribulations of medical history’s ‘great men’. It is a crucial contribution to our knowledge of the affairs - quotidian and catastrophic alike - of the ‘regular’ medical practitioner in Victorian Britain, and considers the making and unmaking of professional boundaries in a turbulent era. […It] is a compelling and painstakingly researched book. Reading it will repay dividends to students and scholars of nineteenth-century medicine.’Agnes Arnold-Forster, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Vol. 74, No. 2 (April 2019)