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Complaining against Medical Practice and Practitioners: The Patient View, 1830s-1900
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posted on 2015-11-03, 11:50 authored by Steven A. KingThe nature of the relationship between a doctor and his middling and aristocratic patients
in the nineteenth century is now well-established.
In a medical market where cure was often elusive the
role and aspiration of the doctor was as much socio-cultural as medical. Moneyed patients with
plenty of choice and the knowledge and desire to execute it demanded prompt personal and written
attention, easy financial terms and (notwithstanding a wider sense of the disappearance of the
patient narrative) an active role in what modern medical professionals would label a care package.
1Local Medical Societies helped to create a collective
identity amongst doctors and a wider movement to professionalisation after the early
nineteenth century gave energy to the identification
and confrontation of otherness (quacks, irregular practitioners, female practitioners), though
it was not until the later nineteenth century that the need for formal qualifications and the professional
oversight of doctoring activity reached a par with that exercised by
and over the apothecaries since 1815.
2
Against this backdrop, a false step or an inability to play the
holistic role of the doctor led either to a failure to get established or to socio-economic ruin. [First Paragraph]
History
Citation
King, S. A. , Complaining against Medical Practice and Practitioners: The Patient View, 1830s-1900, ed. Reinarz, J;Wynter, R, 'Complaints, Controversies and Grievances in Medicine: Historical and Social Science Perspectives', Routledge, 2014, pp. 112-148 (36)Author affiliation
/Organisation/COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCEVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)