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The Rise of Professional Society lays out a stimulating and controversial framework for the study of British society, challenging accepted paradigms based on class analysis. Perkins argues that the non-capitalist \"professional class\" represents a new principle of social organization based on trained expertise and meritocracy, a \"forgotten middle class\" conveniently overlooked by classical social theorists. 'A true magnum opus. No social historian can afford not to read it.' – Asa Briggs 'Accessible to the general reader, indispensable to the scholar and a solid achievement of synthesis and clarity.' – The Observer

Focusing on the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Albert D. Pionke's book historicizes the relationship of ritual, class, and public status in Victorian England. His analysis of various discourses related to professionalization suggests that public ritual flourished during the period, especially among the burgeoning ranks of Victorian professions. As Pionke shows, magazines, court cases, law books, manuals, and works by authors that include William Makepeace Thackeray, Thomas Hughes, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning demonstrate the importance of ritual in numerous professional settings. Individual chapters reconstruct the ritual cultures of pre-professionalism provided to Oxbridge undergraduates; of oath-taking in a wide range of professional creation and promotion ceremonies; of the education, promotion, and public practice of Victorian barristers; and of Victorian Parliamentary elections. A final chapter considers the consequences of rituals that fail through the lens of the Eglinton tournament. The uneasy place of Victorian writers, who were both promoters of and competitors with more established professionals, is considered throughout. Pionke's book excavates Victorian professionals' vital ritual culture, at the same time that its engagement with literary representations of the professions reconstructs writers' unique place in the zero-sum contest for professional status.

The history of psychiatric institutions and the psychiatric profession is by now familiar: asylums multiplied in nineteenth-century England and psychiatry established itself as a medical specialty around the same time. We are, however, largely ignorant about madness at home in this key period: what were the family's attitudes toward its insane member, what were patient's lives like when they remained at home? Until now, most accounts have suggested that the family and community gradually abdicated responsibility for taking care of mentally ill members to the doctors who ran the asylums. However, this provocatively argued study, painting a fascinating picture of how families viewed and managed madness, suggests that the family actually played a critical role in caring for the insane and in the development of psychiatry itself. Akihito Suzuki's richly detailed social history includes several fascinating case histories, looks closely at little studied source material including press reports of formal legal declarations of insanity, or Commissions of Lunacy, and also provides an illuminating historical perspective on our own day and age, when the mentally ill are mainly treated in home and community.

The Romantic Era witnessed a series of conflicts concerning definitions of health and disease. In this book, Martin Wallen discusses those conflicts and the cultural values that drove them. The six chapters progress from the mainstream rejuvenation of the Socratic values by Wordsworth and Coleridge to the radical alternatives offered by the Scottish theorist, John Brown, and the speculative German philosopher, F. W. J. Schelling. Wallen shows how actual definitions of health and disease changed at the turn of the nineteenth century, and provides an analysis of the metaphorical uses to which romantic thinkers put these different definitions in their attempts to value or devalue competing concepts of individuality, poetic expression, and history. Key to the redefinition of these concepts was the use of the rhetoric of medicine to add value to those statements considered desirable and to undermine those targeted for elimination from public discourse. By juxtaposing the well-known critical works of Wordsworth and Coleridge with lesser-known works such as Schelling's Yearbooks of Medicine and Thomas Beddoes' medical treatises, Wallen illuminates the central role medicine played in redefining the human being's relationship to society and nature - part of the cultural revolution that began in the nineteenth century. Martin Wallen is Associate Professor in the English Department at Oklahoma State University, USA. Contents: Introduction; Lyrical health in Wordsworth and Coleridge; Coleridge's scrofulous dejection; The medical frame of character and the enforcement of normative health in Thomas Beddoes' 'Observations on the Character and Writings of John Brown, M.D.'; A secret excitement: Coleridge, John Brown, and the chance for a physical imagination; Schelling's medical singing school in the Yearbooks of Medicine as Science; The electromagnetic orgasm and history outside the city; Notes; Works cited; Index.

The book offers a fresh and distinctive account of the transformation of provincial English medicine from the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth centuries. Written by one of the leading scholars in the field it demonstrates how the roots of modern medicine can be located in the cultural, political and ideological upheavals of the age of reform.

This book presents a new examination of Victorian nurses which challenges commonly-held assumptions about their character and motivation. Nineteenth century nursing history has, until now, concentrated almost exclusively on nurse leaders, on the development of nursing as a profession and the politics surrounding registration. This emphasis on big themes, and reliance on the writings of nursing’s upper stratum, has resulted in nursing history being littered with stereotypes. This book is one of the first attempts to understand, in detail, the true nature of Victorian nursing at ground level. Uniquely, the study views nursing through an economic lens, as opposed to the more usual vocational focus. Nursing is placed in the wider context of women’s role in British society, and the changing prospects for female employment in the high Victorian period. Using St George’s Hospital, London as a case study, the book explores the evolution of nurse recruitment, training, conditions of employment and career development in the second half of the nineteenth century. Pioneering prosopographical techniques, which combined archival material with census data to create a database of named nurses, have enabled the generation – for the first time – of biographies of ordinary nurses. Sue Hawkins’ findings belie the picture of nursing as a profession dominated by middle class women. Nursing was a melting pot of social classes, with promotion and opportunity extended to all women on the basis of merit alone. This pioneering work will interest students and researchers in nursing history, the social and cultural history of Victorian England and women’s studies. Sue Hawkins is a researcher at Kingston University, UK. 'The book is produced to a high standard. Each chapter is followed by a fascinating one-page pen portrait of a nurse whose life story Dr Hawkins has reconstructed. The absorption of such accounts (or extracts from them) into the text would have further animated the argument, which is well supported by graphs and occasional illustrations.' - Anne Borsay, Medical History Journal 'Sue Hawkins has produced an important addition to nursing history, which demonstrates persuasively the benefits of engaging with the broader historical context.' - Anne Borsay, Medical History Journal \"Trained historians like Hawkins are bringing new perspectives, new questions, and new methods to bear on issues that the history of nursing is uniquely positioned to address.' - Patricia D’Antonio, Nursing History Review 'This book is, in the end, only about one group of women—those of St. George’s. They are a fascinating group, many of whom, with Hawkins’ new questions and techniques, come across as fully developed individuals with lives before, during, and after training. At this point, we do not know how reflective they and their experiences are of women who trained in other London hospitals, such as Guy’s or St. Bartholomew’s, or those who trained in smaller and different kinds of hospitals throughout England. However, we do now know the strengths of microhistory and the value of census data in allowing us to access the lives of women who chose to work as nurses.\" - Patricia D’Antonio, Nursing History Review Introduction. Constructing a New History of Nursing 1. ‘The search for self-esteem’ 2. ‘The majority are ladies, a great many domestics’ 3. Probationer Schemes: education or cheap labour? 4. ‘Treat Your Good Nurses Well’: a recipe for nurse retention 5. The Development of Nursing as a Career 6. A Quest for Independence

This book looks at medical professionalisation from a new perspective, one of failure rather than success. It questions the existing picture of broad and rising medical prosperity across the nineteenth century to consider the men who did not keep up with professionalising trends. It unpicks the life stories of men who could not make ends meet or who could not sustain a professional persona of disinterested expertise, either because they could not overcome public accusations of misconduct or because they struggled privately with stress. In doing so it uncovers the trials of the medical marketplace and the pressures of medical masculinity. All professionalising groups risked falling short of rising expectations, but for doctors these expectations were inflected in some occupationally specific ways.

In Victorian society the circulation of periodicals and newspapers is thought to have been larger and more influential than that of books. To investigate this premise, J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel commissioned eighteen bibliographic essays by some of the world's leaading scholars in the field of periodical research. The collection is a guide to the exploration of Victorian society including professions (law, medicine, architecture, the military, science); the arts (music, illustration, theatre, authorship and the book trade); occupations and commerce (transport, finance, trade, advertising, agriculture); popular culture (temperance, sport, comic periodicals); and both lower- and upper-class journals (workers' and university students). Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society, originally published in 1994, has become an indispensable reference work for all Victorian scholars. University of Toronto Press is pleased to make this important book available to all students and researchers in an affordable paperback edition.

This article offers a novel perspective on the evolving identities and relationships of human medicine and veterinary medicine in England during the decades that followed the 1791 foundation of the London Veterinary College. Contrary to the impressions conveyed by both medical and veterinary historians, it reveals that veterinary medicine, as initially defined, taught and studied at the college, was not a domain apart from human medicine but rather was continuous with it. It then shows how this social, cultural, and epistemological continuity fractured over the period 1815 to 1835. Under the impetus of a movement for medical reform, veterinarians began to advance an alternative vision of their field as an autonomous, independent domain. They developed their own societies and journals and a uniquely veterinary epistemology that was rooted in the experiences of veterinary practice. In this way, \"one medicine\" became \"two,\" and the professions began to assume their modern forms and relations.