Michael BROWN. Performing Medicine

Performing Medicine illuminates English medical culture in the transitional period from the mid-Georgian to the mid-Victorian ages by focusing on the provincial city of York. The transformations that occurred in nearly every realm of English life between 1760 and 1850 were clearly revolutionary, but surprisingly, the transition from an eighteenth-century medical world to that of the mid-nineteenth century is understudied and sometimes misunderstood. On the one hand, studies in English medical history have demarcated themselves as either belonging to the eighteenth century or the nineteenth. And aside from scholarship highlighting specializations that flourished from 1790 to 1820—e.g., military medicine, mental asylums, smallpox vaccination—few studies focus on the transformational turn of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, popular histories narrating centuries of medicine invariably emphasize a Georgian world of leeches and humors replaced by chloroforming and cholera-case-counting Victorians. These teleological narratives portray bumbling, bewigged eighteenth-century incompetents replaced by sterner, more systematic nineteenth-century professionals, who may not have yet washed their hands, but nonetheless were making good progress toward recognizably modern scientific medicine.

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