Reading the Nineteenth-Century Medical Journal

This book explores medical and health periodicals of the nineteenth century: their contemporary significance, their readership, and how historians have approached them as objects of study.

From debates about women doctors in lesser-known titles such as the Medical Mirror, to the formation of professional medical communities within French and Portuguese periodicals, the contributors to this volume highlight the multi-faceted nature of these publications as well as their uses to the historian. Medical periodicals – far from being the preserve of doctors and nurses – were also read by the general public. Thus, the contributions collected here will be of interest not only to the historian of medicine, but also to those interested in nineteenth-century periodical culture more broadly.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Media History.

Sally Frampton is Humanities and Healthcare Fellow at the University of Oxford, UK. Her publications have focused on the history of surgery and the development of medical journalism in the nineteenth century, and include her monograph Belly-Rippers, Surgical Innovation and the Ovariotomy Controversy (Palgrave, 2018).

Jennifer Wallis is historian of medicine and psychiatry at Imperial College London, UK. Her publications include Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum: Doctors, Patients, and Practices (Palgrave, 2017) and the co-authored volume Anxious Times: Medicine & Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).