Medical Misadventure in an Age of Professionalisation, 17801890 by Alannah Tomkins

Medical Misadventure in an Age of Professionalisation, 17801890 by Alannah Tomkins

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.

‘Alannah Tomkins’s Medical Misadventure in an Age of Professionalisation, 1780-1890, does justice to the richness and complexity of nineteenth-century medical lives and through collective biography effectively resists the temptation to recapitulate the trials and tribulations of medical history’s ‘great men’It is a crucial contribution to our knowledge of the affairs - quotidian and catastrophic alike - of the ‘regular’ medical practitioner in Victorian Britain, and considers the making and unmaking of professional boundaries in a turbulent era. […It] is a compelling and painstakingly researched book. Reading it will repay dividends to students and scholars of nineteenth-century medicine.’
Agnes Arnold-Forster, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Vol. 74, No. 2 (April 2019)

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Alannah Tomkins is Professor of History at Keele University

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781526116079
ISBN 10	1526116073
Title	Medical Misadventure in an Age of Professionalisation, 17801890
Author	Alannah Tomkins
Series	Social Histories Of Medicine
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Manchester University Press
Year published	2017-07-10
Number of pages	304
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.