Naval warfare changed out of all recognition from the late sixteenth century onwards through the rapid development of large square-rigged warships carrying heavy broadside gun batteries. A whole series of developments followed, with a long (if far from smooth) evolution in ships, equipment, strategy, and tactics continuing down to the last sailing navies of the early nineteenth century. It was clearly no accident that this naval revolution coincided with a great age of global European empires, which would have been impossible to create or maintain without effective naval power. Galleys and other oared craft became largely obsolete, except for some amphibious operations in the Mediterranean and for use in shallow waters around the innumerable Baltic islands. The crushing Dutch victory over a Spanish fleet at the battle of the Downs (1639) marked the first occasion when the full power of broadside gunnery became evident. Then the three Anglo-Dutch wars between the 1650s and 1670s saw a series of savage and bloody engagements between the fleets of two nations that were coming to be known as the Maritime Powers. The combination of imperial and trading ambitions, new financial arrangements, and relatively open societies enabled first the Dutch, and then the British, to develop naval power to new heights, in turn allowing them to punch well above their weight on the international stage. Under Louis XIV, France did mount a serious challenge to the Dutch and English, and for a time possessed the largest navy in the Western world. However, by the 1690s the French, and more gradually the Dutch, were finding the costs of maintaining this level of power at sea, as well as on land, to be too great.

Despite its expanding presence in codes of practice and ethical guidance for healthcare professionals, there is limited research into the precise components of compassion in clinical settings. This chapter continues the exploration of compassion in healthcare by noting occasional confusion surrounding the term ‘compassion’, and the distress that an absence of compassion can cause for patients, families, and staff. The chapter examines research that seeks to define compassionate healthcare and delineate its constituent elements. Patients experience compassionate care when healthcare providers are emotionally present, communicate effectively, enter into their experience, and display understanding and kindness. Listening and paying close attention are the most dominant features of compassionate care, along with following‐up and running tests, continuity, holistic care, and respecting preferences. Other factors include honesty and kindness, as well as specific behaviours such as smiling. These are simple ways to demonstrate the compassion that healthcare workers routinely feel but sometimes do not convey clearly, owing to challenging circumstances. The chapter concludes with considerations of cultural and ethnic factors, as well as the importance of engagement, mindful awareness, and emotional intelligence in generating and deepening compassionate practice.

To care for the 14,000 black infantrymen, a new hospital opened when the men arrived. Equipped with state-of-the-art material, it employed the best black doctors in the country, recruited by the Surgeon General’s office. It offered all the features of Deluxe Jim Crow, black excellence in a segregated setting. During the war, it offered the best care possible to men whose health was often shaky, and provided a safe haven for those seeking to escape a racially biased discipline.

The conclusion explores Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), focusing on the way its characters and, we, as readers, make sense of embodied actions on board the San Dominick. Being able to read the emplotment of bodies becomes the key to solving the mystery on the ship, and to making sense of the story itself. By doing so, Melville complicates the mind-centered ontological paradigm’s structuring of our reading practices, our “mind-centered reading practices,” that reduce all bodies to just so many textual objects recording lived experience. By privileging the expressive agency of the material body, Melville also presents a competing reading practice, a “body-centered reading practice,” that understands the body as an active agent making meaning out of lived experience. The conclusion contrasts Amasa Delano’s faulty “mind-centered reading practice” with Babo’s rebellious “body-centered reading practice.” Melville thus “minds the body” to demonstrate the way the material expressions of the lived experiences of racial embodiment can short-circuit the objectification of Black bodies in the nineteenth-century chattel slave economy. And by doing so, Melville also models for us, as twenty-first-century readers, new ways to interpret critically the resistant meaning-making possibilities of embodied experience in all of its expressive dynamism.

This chapter explores the medically-trained writer, Robert Montgomery Bird, and his fraught experience of the way the competing ontological paradigms that inflected Edgar Huntly also conditioned early nineteenth-century medical discourse. Bird uses his picaresque novel, Sheppard Lee (1836), to interrogate what was called “regular” medical discourse and its mind-centered ontology, and to imagine instead the ontological possibilities that result from the body-centered ontology of metempsychosis. For Bird, metempsychosis involves our consciousness migrating from one body to another, and being defined by its different embodiment. In representing the lived experience of both white and Black embodiment, Bird uses metempsychosis to interrogate “regular” medicine’s mind-centered ontological paradigm, even as he puts pressure on “irregular” medicine as well. As I argue, Bird understands conscious existence as ontological drift, as I call it, a far less clear, but far more capacious ontology than either regular or irregular medical discourses entertain. By “minding the body” in this way, Bird uses his novel’s interrogation of the mind-body relationship to imagine a less repressive, but not unproblematic, form of racialized conscious existence in the antebellum period.

While exploring how specialist medical publishers and regular practitioners worked together to publish and advertise medical works on sexual matters, Chapter 3, Publishing for Professional Advantage, shows that the boundaries between communicating knowledge, promoting expertise, and trading on medical eroticism were not just blurry in contexts of the pornography trade and irregular medical practice. They were also blurry in regular medicine. Works on reproduction and sexual health issued by medical publishers were often textually similar to those issued by pornographers and irregulars, worked up using similar techniques, advertised, and distributed to non-medical readers in similar ways, and, regular practitioners often argued, for similar purposes. The chapter explores how and why these overlaps aroused particular concern among groups that advocated radical reforms to the medical profession. Rather than seeking to discipline regular medical publishing, however, reformers initially took a different route: they launched campaigns aimed at stamping out irregular practitioners’ trade in sexual health manuals.

Chapter 1, Holywell Street Medicine, traces the pornography trade’s birth out of the collapse of revolutionary politics in the 1820s, and shows how early agents in the trade scavenged for content to fill lists of sexual material. This fostered a vibrant mid-century traffic in cheap reprints and reworkings of works on contraception, venereal disease, fertility, and midwifery alongside pornographic novels and prints, bawdy songbooks, and other sexual material, operating out of London’s Holywell Street and other thoroughfares near the Strand. While showing how these agents harnessed the expanding infrastructures of the press and the post to sell their wares works across the nation, this chapter demonstrates that they framed medical works through two different, but compatible, lenses. Following a long line of disreputable publishers, Holywell Street publishers framed medical works as titillating reading material. However, they also adapted earlier radical arguments for sex education and female sexual pleasure, marketing medical works as containers of practical information about the body that readers could apply to support safe, active, and pleasurable sex lives.

This introduction outlines how studying the book trade can help us better understand the circulation of medical knowledge about sex and reproduction during the Victorian period, and the development of busineses, institutions, and narratives that claimed authority over it. Weaving a historiographic overview with an overview of the book’s approach and argument, it turns readers’ attention to medical works’ status as more than texts, highlighting the fact that they are material objects that must be made, promoted, and distributed, and that these actions accrue meanings of their own. It then articulates the book’s focus on the activities of four differently identified groups of players – pornographers, radicals, regular practitioners, and irregular practitioners – who brought sexual knowledge into non-expert readers’ hands and, in various ways, became embroiled in debates about medical obscenity. The introduction then outlines how the book tracks these agents’ intersecting activities to open up an argument about how and why allegations of obscenity became a means of selling books, contesting authority, and consolidating emergent collective identities.

Chapter 5, Dull Instead of Light, examines regular practitioners’ increasing efforts to disambiguate “medicine” and “quackery” in the wake of the 1868 formulation of the Hicklin test of obscenity. The first section explores how medical groups experimented with using obscenity laws as alternatives to the Medical Act (1858) to regulate medical practice. These actions’ impact on the book trade is debatable, but regular practitioners’ tireless efforts to collapse quackery and obscenity influenced new legislation governing medical advertising. The rest of the chapter examines parallel efforts to professionalize medical publishing. In advocating for limitations on medical book advertising, the use of dry, technical language in medical writing, and other changes to medical print culture, regular practitioners further sought to disambiguate “medicine” from “quackery.” The lines between popular and professional medical works had previously been blurry. The changes examined in this chapter helped cleave a growing chasm between the kinds of sexual knowledge accessible to medical and non-medical audiences.

This section introduces the reader to Beckett’s personal encounters with illness, infirmity, and medicine; to his reading of medical books and books on psychology; and to his own psychological crisis and psychotherapy at the Institute of Medical Psychology in London. It provides an overview of previous work in the field and introduces the book’s seven chapters.

For both developed and developing countries in the world, the twenty-first century will be marked by great challenges for healthcare systems. The overwhelming reason will be aging societies that will face an increase in multimorbid, chronic diseases which will include neurological diseases. The probability of surviving acute illness and the medical opportunities to prolong life in chronic-progressive disease will improve in future. As a result the numbers of neurological patients with respiratory impairment caused by prolonged, chronic or chronic-progressive life-threatening disease will increase. Minimizing dependency on life-supporting technologies and care, stabilizing vital functions, optimizing quality of life and participation and alleviating suffering are paramount goals for these patients. The therapeutic approach therefore must integrate intensive care, neurorespiratory care, rehabilitation and palliative care. Furthermore, patient-centered and family-oriented care, which covers the whole lifespan and bridges the gap between inpatient and outpatient care, is needed.

The core idea in this chapter is that there was a substantial, transnational, effort to rethink medical ethics – how it was framed by, taught to, and practiced by health professionals such as physicians – after the Holocaust. Because of the intense involvement of medical professionals in the Holocaust, both in the extermination process and through medical experimentation, there was a widespread sense after 1945 that the medical profession needed to rethink its ethical foundations. The chapter in particular highlights postwar currents in east-central European ethical thought, which engaged its own indigenous tradition of medical ethics (“deontology” as it was called) in ways that sometimes went beyond the parallel but more familiar debates in western Europe and the USA. The Holocaust informed – but did not determine – the evolution of biomedical ethics throughout the postwar period. Such thinking was also, necessarily, shaped by other currents – economic, political, and scientific – such that it is hard to say that medicine has “learned the lessons of the Holocaust,” at least not completely.

The barefoot-doctor scheme in rural China during the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76 was a synonym for social medicine in the People’s Republic of China. This chapter examines how sociopolitical, disease, and economic factors contributed to the development of the barefoot-doctor program and shaped the unique path of social medicine in China. It analyzes how the government clarified and addressed the dilemma between ideological equity and structural inequity. Furthermore, it discusses how disease models both facilitated and challenged the barefoot-doctor program and impacted on social medicine, and investigates how the changing roles and function of barefoot doctors has impacted social medicine in the evolution of community medicine. The barefoot doctors echoed the themes of social medicine in developing and developed countries and left its inspirations and legacies. By revisiting the state’s role in the barefoot-doctor program, the chapter provides a new understanding of the global history of social medicine in the twentieth century and beyond.

Protestant attacks against papal corruption of the cult of saints and falsification of miracles led the Post-Tridentine Church to reform the processes of saint-making through an intensified collaboration with medical science. The alignment of faith and science at the nexus of the human body culminated in the eighteenth century under Benedict XIV Lambertini (r. 1740–58). Benedict published a monumental treatise, still influential today, that codified canonization proceedings on the basis of modern medical expertise, and he was a preeminent patron of scientific and medical institutions and practitioners for the advancement of medical knowledge and public health. The imperatives of the Counter-Reformation, canon law, experimental science and medicine, and the burgeoning Enlightenment coalesced, albeit uneasily, in his vision of a reformed Church, for which natural and saintly bodies became primary emblems in defense of the authority of the Catholic Church in a world increasingly resistant to it.

This chapter examines the relationship between medicine and the papacy in the Middle Ages. It considers the historiographical debate amongst historians regarding whether popes were primarily adversaries to or advocates of the study and evolution of medicine. Focusing on the Avignon popes and their courts, it suggests that these individuals and their spaces increasingly became cultural centres for the production, transmission, and consumption of medical ideas and practices throughout the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. With the rise of medicine as a profession – and the sociocultural value this process bestowed on its practice – a pope’s patronage of medical activities granted prestige both to his court and to his beneficiaries.

This chapter delves into the production of scientific knowledge and its practice within the expansive temporal and geographical scope of the Ottoman Empire. Organized chronologically into two main sections, the chapter portrays the foundational scientific institutions and conventions while also introducing the textual and material facets of scientific enterprises. Through this focused lens, the chapter traces the enduring and evolving elements of scientific pursuits and their sociopolitical implications from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries.