A Fulde Country Practice (Occasional Paper Series) (Centre for North-West Regional Studies, Resource Papers)

Interest in medical history has grown enormously in recent years. This book draws on sources from various parts of Lancashire to investigate the nature of ill-health among contemporaries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and their medical responses to illness. For many, the difference between complaints that were life-threatening and those that were not were unclear, and letters, diaries and other sources are used to illustrate that a concern with ill-health was always there in the contemporary mind. One way in which individuals reacted was to turn to medical professionals, and this volume uses the account book of Dr Loxham, from Poulton, to elaborate the role of doctors in treating illness. However, this is not a story of the triumph of doctors nor a backward Lancashire catching up with an advanced London and south east. Rather, the book shows that Lancashire had a vibrant medical landscape which combined a role for the quack and herbalist, self-medication, superstition and myth, prayer and simple resignation to suffering. It also argues that different parts of Lancashire had different attitudes towards medicine, highlighting the need for more regional studies if we are ever to get away from national generalisations.