In sickness and in health: the British experience, 1650–1850

Until recently, as the authors point out, the history of medicine had doctors as its heroes. Today, when the concern of most researchers is with the social, professional, and institutional aspects of the history of medicine and more broadly with health and healers of all descriptions, modem scholarship has become "increasingly critical of, or even hostile towards, the profession". No one denies the gain from the new scholarship, or from developments such as the increasing collaboration between social historians, demographers, geographers, and epidemiologists, which has resulted in yesterday's speculation being replaced by today's rigorous analysis. Yet the greatest changes have been in method and approach rather than historical material. The main sources for the history of medicine are still in large part the records of healers (in the broadest sense) and institutions, the registers of parishes and the offices of civil registration, and literary, political, and religious sources of relevance to historians of medicine. Neither the old nor the new-style medical history has, in the words of the authors, "set much store on personal experience". Most historians are concerned with diseases and concepts of disease, practitioners (orthodox and unorthodox), and the health of populations rather than individuals. Roy and Dorothy Porter claim a quite different approach. They are concerned with people, not patients, with the experience of sickness, not diseases, with medicine as seen by the sufferer rather than the healer, and most of all with lay perceptions of health, birth, childhood, old age, and death. They deal, they say, in attitudes rather than actions. They emphasize the personal rather than the collective. Defying the pejorative connotations of the word, they are happy to claim that their work is "necessarily impressionistic". Many, ofcourse, have made use ofdiaries and personal documents to illustrate a thesis. But as far as I know no one has previously collected together such a vast selection of personal experiences and attitudes with the express purpose of using them and them alone to explore health, sickness, and medicine from the patient's point of view. With purity of purpose, the authors rejected all institutional sources such as hospital and poor law records, believing that experiences of sickness that are filtered through the minds of doctors or other poor law officers will inevitably be distorted. Instead, they have confined their research to first-hand documents, letters, diaries and the "table-talk of sufferers and comments ofthose surrounding them". It is as …