Patients, Power and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Bristol

In early modern England, housewives, clergymen, bloodletters, herb women, and patients told authoritative tales about the body. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, medicine had begun to drown out these voices. This book uses patients' perspectives to argue that changes in the relationship between rich and poor underlay this rise in medicine's authority. In a detailed examination of health, healing, and poor relief in eighteenth-century Bristol, the author shows how the experiences of the hospitalized urban poor laid the foundations for modern doctor-patient encounters. Within the hospital, charity patients were denied the power to interpret their own illnesses, as control of the institution shifted from lay patrons to surgeons. Outside the hospital, reforms of popular culture stigmatized ordinary people's ideas about their own bodies. Popular medicine became working-class medicine, associated with superstition and political unrest.

"...unique in its focus on the provision of health care to the poorer inhabitants of eighteenth-century Bristol and area...." Doreen A. Evenden, Canadian Journal of History, "This brief review cannot do justice to the way in which Fissell skillfully draws together several analytical threads. Her discussions of the waxing power of surgeons, the social role of the Infirmary, and the corporal disenfranchisement of the poor are based on meticulous research and reflect an enviable command of the secondary literature. This produces a colorful tapestry of interpretations and meanings that reveals how the older fabric of medical pluralism unraveled." Mary Lindemann, American Historical Review, "Beautifully written, accessible, engaging, Mary Fissell's book is no specialist monograph but a skilful application of current debates which can be pressed with enthusiasm on students and the general reader alike." Margaret Pelling, The Times Higher Education Review, "...a significant contribution to the growing body of literature on the Georgian medical marketplace....fills an important gap in our understanding of health care in provincial England. It should be required reading for social and medical historians interested in the eighteenth century." Guenter B. Risse, Albion, "...an intriguing book which neatly sets medical history topsy-turvy." Richard T. Vann, Journal of Interdisciplinary History