The Common Lot

Twenty years ago, in a symposium organized to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Johns Hopkins Institute of the History of Medicine, Charles Webster called for a new social history of medicine. Urging his colleagues to heed the advice offered some four decades earlier by Henry Sigerist, Institute director from 1932 to 1947, he challenged historians of medicine to widen the scope of their studies to include all forms and contexts of medical provision and all dimensions of the patient's experience.1 By the time Webster issued his call he had already contributed to an impressive example of the new social history, a comprehensive examination of the broad spectrum of medical practice in sixteenth-century England coauthored with his former student Margaret Pelling.2 Since that critical moment, Pelling has established her own reputation as a leading figure in the new social history of medicine, as she has plunged more and more deeply and with increasingly penetrating insight into the complexities of medical practice, sickness, and disability in early modern England

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• Health, medicine, and mortality in the sixteenth century

  Charles Webster•Health, medicine, and mortality…•1979

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