Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Murders and miracles: Lay attitudes towards medicine in classical antiquity
- 3 Puritan perceptions of illness in seventeenth century England
- 4 In sickness and in health: A seventeenth century family's experience
- 5 Participant or patient? Seventeenth century childbirth from the mother's point of view
- 6 Piety and the patient: Medicine and religion in eighteenth century Bristol
- 7 Cultural habits of illness: The Enlightened and the Pious in eighteenth century Germany
- 8 ‘The doctor scolds me’: The diaries and correspondence of patients in eighteenth century England
- 9 Prescribing the rules of health: Self-help and advice in the late eighteenth century
- 10 Laymen, doctors and medical knowledge in the eighteenth century: The evidence of the Gentleman's Magazine
- 11 The colonisation of traditional Arabic medicine
- Index
7 - Cultural habits of illness: The Enlightened and the Pious in eighteenth century Germany
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Murders and miracles: Lay attitudes towards medicine in classical antiquity
- 3 Puritan perceptions of illness in seventeenth century England
- 4 In sickness and in health: A seventeenth century family's experience
- 5 Participant or patient? Seventeenth century childbirth from the mother's point of view
- 6 Piety and the patient: Medicine and religion in eighteenth century Bristol
- 7 Cultural habits of illness: The Enlightened and the Pious in eighteenth century Germany
- 8 ‘The doctor scolds me’: The diaries and correspondence of patients in eighteenth century England
- 9 Prescribing the rules of health: Self-help and advice in the late eighteenth century
- 10 Laymen, doctors and medical knowledge in the eighteenth century: The evidence of the Gentleman's Magazine
- 11 The colonisation of traditional Arabic medicine
- Index
Summary
Doing justice to the patient's view is a precarious undertaking because it is a journey to uncharted regions. To help find our bearings, maps for analysis may be borrowed: those histories which have interpreted for us the work of physicians, their knowledge of diseases, or the medical profession's turning towards the hospital as a place wherein patients and their diseases are most efficiently scrutinized. But even if a patient is liable to accept with one part of his mind the medical version of what ails him, many another aspect of illness will turn to haunt the mind and the emotions, and precipitate an interpretation inconsistent with the more or less neat, and therefore also reassuring, pattern of medical analysis, with its diagnostic and prognostic functions.
In attempting a foray into such a land of variations, the only guideline will be the subjective view, the actions and thoughts of individuals as they are faced with suffering and bodily weakness. Subjective reactions are certainly conditioned by society and by personal values which temper what is done or left undone. The quirks of human nature are often most apparent in the face of unknown or dangerous situations. Whether one is stoic, frightened, resigned, disparaging or resolute can be conditioned, or it can be a response which breaks the mould. All it ultimately tells us about is how life was dealt with, but this, in itself, is an aid to interpretation.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Patients and PractitionersLay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-industrial Society, pp. 177 - 204Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986