• 1. Introduction Andrew Wear; 2. Healers in the medical market place: towards a social history of Graeco-Roman medicine Vivian Nutton; 3. Medicine and society in medieval Europe, 500–1500 Katharine Park; 4. The patient in England, c. 1660–c. 1800 Roy Porter; 5. Making sense of health and the environment in early modern England Andrew Wear; 6. Medicine in the age of Enlightenment Guenter B. Granshaw; 7. The rise of the modern hospital in Britain Lindsay Granshaw; 8. Medical practitioners 1750–1850 and the period of medical reform in Britain Irvine Loudon; 9. Public health, preventive medicine and professionalization: England and America in the nineteenth century Elizabeth Fee and Dorothy Porter; 10. Madness and its institutions Roy Porter; 11. From infectious to chronic diseases: changing patterns of sickness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Paul Weindling; 12. Providers, 'consumers', the state and the delivery of health care services in twentieth-century Britain Jane Lewis; 13. The implications of increased life expectancy for family and social life Arthur E. Imhof; Index.

"This book makes the recent work of medical historians available to a wider audience of nonspecialists who are interested in the historical roots of modern health care. The essays are comprehensive in their sweep, are informed in their assessments, and take full account of modern currents of scholarship. The work thus deserves a wide readership among health care professionals, who--if they do not know where current medical trends will lead them--will at least learn where they began and how they have developed." Gary B. Ferngren, New England Journal of Medicine