The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine celebrates the richness and variety of medical history around the world. In recent decades, the history of medicine has emerged as a rich and mature sub-discipline within history, but the strength of the field has not precluded vigorous debates about methods, themes, and sources. Bringing together over thirty international scholars, this handbook provides a constructive overview of the current state of these debates, and offers new directions for future scholarship. There are three sections: the first explores the methodological challenges and historiographical debates generated by working in particular historical ages; the second explores the history of medicine in specific regions of the world and their medical traditions, and includes discussion of the global history of medicine; the final section analyses, from broad chronological and geographical perspectives, both established and emerging historical themes and methodological debates in the history of medicine.
1. Introduction ; PART ONE: PERIODS ; 2. Medicine and health in the Graeco-Roman world ; 3. Medieval medicine ; 4. Early modern medicine ; 5. Health and medicine in the Enlightenment ; 6. Medicine and modernity ; 7. Contemporary history of medicine and health ; PART TWO: PLACES AND TRADITIONS ; 8. Global and local histories of medicine: interpretative challenges and future possiblities ; 9. Chinese medicine ; 10. Medicine in Islam and Islamic medicine ; 11. Medicine in Western Europe ; 12. History of medicine in Eastern Europe, including Russia ; 13. North America ; 14. Latin America ; 15. History of medicine in Sub-Saharan Africa ; 16. Medicine and colonialism in South Asia since 1500 ; 17. History of medicine in Australia and New Zealand ; PART THREE: THEMES AND METHODS ; 18. Childhood and adolescence ; 19. Medicine and old age ; 20. Death ; 21. Historical demography and epidemiology: the meta-narrative challenge ; 22. Chronic illness and disease history ; 23. Public health ; 24. The political economy of health care in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ; 25. Health, work, and environment: a Hippocratic turn in medical history ; 26. History of science and medicine ; 27. Women, health, and medicine ; 28. Health and sexuality ; 29. Medicine and the mind ; 30. Medical ethics and the law ; 31. Medicine and species: one medicine, one history ; 32. Histories of heterodoxy ; 33. Oral testimony and the history of medicine ; 34. Medical films and television: alternative paths to the cultures of biomedicine