Environment, Health, and Medicine in the Old Regime

Although we lack an adequate term to describe it (social history of is too narrow), there is no mistaking the rapid growth of a body of work that seeks to relate the history of medical thought, practice, and institutions, together with the history of health and disease, to some of the broader concerns of historical scholarship-political, economic, and cultural as well as social. The two books under review, one the work of a specialist on eighteenth-century economic history who came to his topic by way of the history of demographic thought, the other a collaborative effort by four medical historians, illustrate convergent approaches to the enterprise.l Both broadly concern medicine in the Old Regime; both also address, although in different ways, the classic question of the relationship between human history and the constraints of the environment

Environmental ethics · Political science · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Philosophy