Doctor of society

by Roy Sydney Porter

"How have we come to hold our present attitudes towards health, sickness and the medical profession? Roy Porter argues that the outlooks of the age of the Enlightenment were crucially important in the creation of modern thinking about disease, doctors and society. In order to probe the origins, interpretation and significance of such views, he focuses upon one prominent doctor active in England at the close of the eighteenth century, Thomas Beddoes, and examines his challenging, pugnacious, radical and often amusing views on a wide range of issues concerned with the place of illness and medicine in society. Beddoes is particularly interesting, since he was a leading medical scientist, an active political radical, a prolific author, and centre of an intellectual circle that included Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the young Humphry Davy." "Successive chapters examine Beddoes's views about the progress of medical science, the social and psychological causes of sickness in advanced commercial