Contagionism Catches On: Medical Ideology in Britain, 1730-1800 [Hardcover]

This book shows how contagionism evolved in eighteenth century Britain and describes the consequences of this evolution. By the late eighteenth century, the British medical profession was divided between traditionalists, who attributed acute diseases to the interaction of internal imbalances with external factors such as weather, and reformers, who blamed contagious pathogens. The reformers, who were often outsiders, English Nonconformists or men born outside England, emerged from three coincidental transformations: transformation in medical ideas, in the nature and content of medical education, and in the sort of men who became physicians. Adopting contagionism led them to see acute diseases as separate entities, spurring a process that reoriented medical research, changed communities, established new medical institutions, and continues to the present day. 

1. Introduction

2. Fever Theory and British Contagionism in the Mid-Eighteenth Century

3. Contagionism after 1750: John Pringle and James Lind

4. Animate Disease after 1750: The Exanthemata Viva

5. Counting and Classifying Disease: Contagion, Enumeration and Cullens Nosology

6. John Haygarth and the Campaign for Contagion

7. Contagionism, Politics and the Public in Manchester

8. Institutionalizing Contagionism: The Manchester House of Recovery 

This book is a study of a revolution in pathology that occurred in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century. & Margaret DeLacys study is a valuable contribution to the existing literature. (Laurence Brockliss, Isis, Vol. 109 (4), December, 2018)