Stutter's Casebook

First paperback edition of this acclaimed transcription of a Victorian doctor's casebook.

For most of his career W.G. Stutter (1815-77) was a respected general medical practitioner in the village of Wickhambrook, a small Suffolk backwater. As a younger man, however, he spent some time as House Apothecary and House Surgeon to the Suffolk General Hospital in Bury St Edmunds. Though just a record of a junior doctor in a small provincial hospital, this casebook is actually a surprisingly rare document of its kind and as such is a wonderful recordof the medicine and medical profession of the period, in a place far removed from the great teaching hospitals. This is a time before X-rays, antibiotics, scanners and blood tests - in fact even the stethoscope was a relatively recent development.
Stutter's casebook throws considerable light on the state of medicine in the early Victorian age and shows that while many of the treatments meted out by the medical profession seem illogical or sometimeseven dangerous to modern eyes, they must have made perfect sense to the average doctor of the time.

Very informative and revealing. CEAS NEWSLETTER(A) super little book (which) will be superb for teaching purposes. Carefully edited and meticulously footnoted, academic historians (and certainly PhD students) can learn a lot. WELLCOME HISTORYHandsomely produced. an accessible, annotated source that will make a useful resource for readers seeking to study early Victorian pharmaceutical and medical practices. ARCHIVES(A) delightful book. (...) I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in medical history, and as required reading for the DHMSA. BRITISH SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE NEWSLETTERA book which will appeal and be of both specific and general use in the medical history reference stakes. This is no mean achievement. (...) Well-crafted, painstakingly researched and highly informative. SIAH NEWSLETTER