Prescribing the rules of health: Self-help and advice in the late eighteenth century

Abstract

The two classic divisions of European medical science are those of prevention and cure; and if we wish to look at the normally healthy individual in historical perspective we are speaking the language and regime of prevention. By far the larger part of individual health care is taken up by routine private maintenance, compared with which any curative intervention is an occasional public crisis. But the very nature of a multitude of low-level, dispersed acts has meant that the processes of prevention have not been as ‘visible’ to historians as the processes of cure. Investigation is further hampered by the fact that prevention has very rarely been of prime professional interest; preventive medicine was not even truly called ‘medicine’ as such. Medical historians have regarded therapeutics in general as ‘ an awkward piece of business’; and prevention in particular as a ‘murky bog of routinism’. Prevention, moreover, is and was barely newsworthy, being a passive or negative operation; in comparison, the combative techniques and reported statistics, the public and private cost of illness, are relatively accessible to the historian. Demographers and structuralist medical historians have taken disease beyond the supposedly inflated claims of curative medicine – ‘the emphasis on disease has great possibilities for it gets outside the narrow field of clinical medicine as practised by doctors’. The full range of preventive or survival techniques, however, has not so far caught the attention either of demographers or of historians.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 59 citations exist upstream.