Uncategorized Archives - British Society for the History of Medicine

Emil Kraepelin, the little known guru of British psychiatry

Lee Coppack — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 15:36:46 +0000

Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926) is one of the psychiatrists who have shaped world psychiatry. His views have had more lasting influence on psychiatry than Freud, yet he is little known by the public, explains Peter Carpenter. Kraepelin arguably is the most significant figure in the development of the ideas of British psychiatry. The impending centenary of […]

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Plague Houses and Pandemics – Some comparisons between 1665 and 2020

Lee Coppack — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 20:32:53 +0000

Charles ll issued an edict in 1665 that every parish should identify a shed, a tent or a house to accommodate those identified with the plague. Alison Wall looks at the role of such isolation in times of pandemic. Plague, pest or pestilence houses – the terms can be used interchangeably – were buildings set […]

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The Bulletin: A meaning making mechanism for British polio disabled people

Lee Coppack — Sun, 28 Jul 2024 20:32:58 +0000

Polio is highly culturally evocative – vaccines on sugar lumps, children in callipers and lifetimes in iron-lung respirators. The Bulletin, published by The British Polio Fellowship, provides an additional perspective. It gives an insight into how polio-disabled people understood and wished to represent themselves. Charlotte Stobart explains. In 1939, Patricia Carey, who contracted polio in […]

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Electricity and Pancakes

Lee Coppack — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 10:47:49 +0000

Adrian Thomas describes how the poet William Cowper used electricity to treat a friend who suffered a stroke. I had a significant birthday recently, and as a birthday treat, we decided to visit Olney in Buckinghamshire where the poet William Cowper (1731-1800) lived. In his day Cowper was arguably the most popular and influential poet […]

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An unflattering view of English medical education in the 1840s

Lee Coppack — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 11:05:23 +0000

In about 1841, Belgian doctor Constantin Pierre Crommelinck toured various psychiatric institutions in England, France, and Germany. His report reviewed not just various English asylums and also the training of English doctors. Peter Carpenter recounts his none too flattering findings. Constantin Pierre Crommelinck (1814-1884) was the son of a Belgium surgeon who trained as […]

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Bringing X-rays to the front

Lee Coppack — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 11:12:31 +0000

Edwin Aird describes how Marie Curie created radiological cars to take X-rays to the battlefront in Word War I. In 1914 at the beginning of the First World War, Paris was under threat of invasion from Germany. The situation was sufficiently alarming that the French Government moved to Bordeaux. And Marie Curie moved the precious […]

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Widowhood and Bereavement during and after the English Civil Wars

Lee Coppack — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 19:02:18 +0000

Recent estimates suggest that more than 3 per cent of the population of England and Wales died as a direct result of the Civil Wars of 1642–1651. Andrew Hopper describes his work on the widowhood and bereavement of the more than 180,000 women who had lost a male relative. Deaths in Britain and Ireland during […]

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Robert Drane – a leader of pharmaceutical education in Wales, antiquarian and naturalist

Lee Coppack — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 09:33:44 +0000

Having never visited Wales before, 22 year old Robert Drane moved to Cardiff on 8 February 1856, and the history of pharmacy – and pharmacy education – in Cardiff are very much tied up with him. Briony Hudson explains. A contemporary described Drane as “a young man with a charming manner, a striking appearance and […]

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Consulting the past to understand the future: a military surgery perspective

Lee Coppack — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 07:36:06 +0000

Evidence suggests that far from being quacks and uneducated butchers, early modern surgeons were capable and undertook effective procedures, according to Stephen Rutherford. In January 1699, the General Quarter Sessions at Doncaster heard the petition of James Moore of Letwell, West Riding of Yorkshire. James was nearly 80 and reported that while fighting for the […]

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Tracing Britain’s early hospital ships

Lee Coppack — Sat, 20 May 2023 11:50:12 +0000

Ships’ muster and pay book records provide valuable information about hospital ships in the Royal Navy starting in the 17th century, say Edward Wawrzynczak and Jane Wickenden. Hospital ships carrying surgeons and medical supplies became a regular feature of Royal Naval operations in times of conflict during the second half of the 17th century. The […]

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